This is a review and detailed measurements of the GoldenEar BRX "reference" bookshelf speaker. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $1,598 a pair.
BRX looks pretty fancy but doesn't weigh a lot:
It is an unusual design in passive compact speakers by having dual passive radiators, one on each side:
I worry about how compromised the cabinet is with all those large holes. BTW, the back is smooth. The textured look is from my lighting.
There is a grill which you may want to use as otherwise the bottom "chin" looks pretty ugly to me.
Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.
Measurements are compliant with latest speaker research into what can predict the speaker preference and is standardized in CEA/CTA-2034 ANSI specifications. Likewise listening tests are performed per research that shows mono listening is much more revealing of differences between speakers than stereo or multichannel.
Reference axis was the center of AMT driver (aligned by eye). It is getting colder with the measurement room temp at 15 degrees C.
GoldenEar BRX Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker is and how it can be used in a room. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws:
This is a kind of graph that makes you go "hmmm." For starters, the bass and upper midrange is quite uneven. I imagine this is due to the turning of the dual passive radiator on the bottom side. We then have a region of disturbance from 600 to 1000 Hz. The things get smoother but there is some resonance around 4000 Hz. Near-field response gives us some clues as to what may be going:
Seems like the midrange issue has dual causes: the woofer has bump there so seems like baffle compensation is not sufficient. At the same time the passive radiator is peaking. This will cause a directivity error due to its higher frequency and side firing radiator. There is a more pronounced resonance around 4 kHz which at first seems too low level. But it is competing with severe off-axis response of the tweeter so likely sends out some unwanted noise to the sides. Keep in mind though that these (near-field) measurements are approximate.
Back to our spin graph, the early window reflection is quite messy because the on-axis wasn't that clean to begin with:
Here is the simulated response in a room:
I hate it when the bass response of a speaker is this uneven because the room adds to it so there is no direct path to equalization.
Directivity is variable due to beaming of the tweeter (being too large for the wavelengths it is producing):
This makes the sound room sensitive and potentially difficult to EQ or even assess.
Vertical is what we expect from a 2-way design with even more beaming due to larger size of the AMT tweeter vertically:
Distortion at low volume is good but gets out of line across the full audio band:
It is one thing for a small speaker like this to get distorted in bass. But one hopes that it doesn't spread to the rest of the spectrum as audibility thresholds become far more acute.
Impedance dips very low to 3.3 ohm:
For fans of timing analysis, here is the CSD/Waterfall and Impulse response:
GoldenEar BRX Listening Tests and Equalization
I got off to a rocky start with this speaker. It left me with a very variable impression. One moment it would sound good, next moment not. So I pulled out the EQ to correct the response errors. I used both the on-axis response strategy and PIR. Neither were effective across more than one track in controlled blind testing. I would think I had an improvement, go to the next track and perform blind AB test and would like no EQ better. Very frustrating.
I took a different strategy of playing a bass heavy track and then listening to the radiator and woofer by themselves (I blocked the tweeter with my hand). The radiator was definitely falling apart with sub-bass at any above medium playback level. Trying to fix that, I dialed in simple but sharp high-pass filter:
You would think you lose bass this way and you do a tiny but the overall impression was one of reduction in brightness!!! How is that possible? Again, I cupped my hand over the tweeter and listened to the woofer alone. With the filter in place you just hear warm bass. Turn the EQ off and it develops a sharper overhand which is likely due to severe harmonic distortion (higher order ones). With the filter in place, I lost any ability to play sub-bass but overall outcome was universally good.
But how good? I swapped out the BRC for Revel M105 which costs a bit less. This is its spinorama:
Ah, what a transformation. Tonality, detail and larger spatial image was all fantastic. It even had more tactile bass than BRX (no EQ was used in the comparison).
Conclusions
$1,600 is a lot of money to charge for small bookshelf speakers. You best deliver great performance. Alas, I am not seeing that in the BRX. Not that it is terrible but that clearly enough engineering was not put in there to create great tonality. It presents a very complex soundfield that likely is difficult to EQ (manual or automatic) to boot. Is it terrible? No, not by any stretch. The deviations are small but collectively left me aggravated.
I can't recommend the GoldenEar BRX. It doesn't deliver a better experience than budget speakers well below its price.
----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
BRX looks pretty fancy but doesn't weigh a lot:
It is an unusual design in passive compact speakers by having dual passive radiators, one on each side:
I worry about how compromised the cabinet is with all those large holes. BTW, the back is smooth. The textured look is from my lighting.
There is a grill which you may want to use as otherwise the bottom "chin" looks pretty ugly to me.
Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.
Measurements are compliant with latest speaker research into what can predict the speaker preference and is standardized in CEA/CTA-2034 ANSI specifications. Likewise listening tests are performed per research that shows mono listening is much more revealing of differences between speakers than stereo or multichannel.
Reference axis was the center of AMT driver (aligned by eye). It is getting colder with the measurement room temp at 15 degrees C.
GoldenEar BRX Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker is and how it can be used in a room. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws:
This is a kind of graph that makes you go "hmmm." For starters, the bass and upper midrange is quite uneven. I imagine this is due to the turning of the dual passive radiator on the bottom side. We then have a region of disturbance from 600 to 1000 Hz. The things get smoother but there is some resonance around 4000 Hz. Near-field response gives us some clues as to what may be going:
Seems like the midrange issue has dual causes: the woofer has bump there so seems like baffle compensation is not sufficient. At the same time the passive radiator is peaking. This will cause a directivity error due to its higher frequency and side firing radiator. There is a more pronounced resonance around 4 kHz which at first seems too low level. But it is competing with severe off-axis response of the tweeter so likely sends out some unwanted noise to the sides. Keep in mind though that these (near-field) measurements are approximate.
Back to our spin graph, the early window reflection is quite messy because the on-axis wasn't that clean to begin with:
Here is the simulated response in a room:
I hate it when the bass response of a speaker is this uneven because the room adds to it so there is no direct path to equalization.
Directivity is variable due to beaming of the tweeter (being too large for the wavelengths it is producing):
This makes the sound room sensitive and potentially difficult to EQ or even assess.
Vertical is what we expect from a 2-way design with even more beaming due to larger size of the AMT tweeter vertically:
Distortion at low volume is good but gets out of line across the full audio band:
It is one thing for a small speaker like this to get distorted in bass. But one hopes that it doesn't spread to the rest of the spectrum as audibility thresholds become far more acute.
Impedance dips very low to 3.3 ohm:
For fans of timing analysis, here is the CSD/Waterfall and Impulse response:
GoldenEar BRX Listening Tests and Equalization
I got off to a rocky start with this speaker. It left me with a very variable impression. One moment it would sound good, next moment not. So I pulled out the EQ to correct the response errors. I used both the on-axis response strategy and PIR. Neither were effective across more than one track in controlled blind testing. I would think I had an improvement, go to the next track and perform blind AB test and would like no EQ better. Very frustrating.
I took a different strategy of playing a bass heavy track and then listening to the radiator and woofer by themselves (I blocked the tweeter with my hand). The radiator was definitely falling apart with sub-bass at any above medium playback level. Trying to fix that, I dialed in simple but sharp high-pass filter:
You would think you lose bass this way and you do a tiny but the overall impression was one of reduction in brightness!!! How is that possible? Again, I cupped my hand over the tweeter and listened to the woofer alone. With the filter in place you just hear warm bass. Turn the EQ off and it develops a sharper overhand which is likely due to severe harmonic distortion (higher order ones). With the filter in place, I lost any ability to play sub-bass but overall outcome was universally good.
But how good? I swapped out the BRC for Revel M105 which costs a bit less. This is its spinorama:
Ah, what a transformation. Tonality, detail and larger spatial image was all fantastic. It even had more tactile bass than BRX (no EQ was used in the comparison).
Conclusions
$1,600 is a lot of money to charge for small bookshelf speakers. You best deliver great performance. Alas, I am not seeing that in the BRX. Not that it is terrible but that clearly enough engineering was not put in there to create great tonality. It presents a very complex soundfield that likely is difficult to EQ (manual or automatic) to boot. Is it terrible? No, not by any stretch. The deviations are small but collectively left me aggravated.
I can't recommend the GoldenEar BRX. It doesn't deliver a better experience than budget speakers well below its price.
----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
Attachments
Last edited: