GR Research Speaker Upgrade Review (Sierra-2EX V2)

[DanielT]

Good that you Amir show what you really get if you buy Danny's so-called upgrade kit.

In the important 1-8 kHz range the AsciLab F6B is so much cleaner than both Versions of the Ascend Sierrra.
Even at 91 dB!!!
Even at 96 dB!!!




View attachment 529555


View attachment 529556

The distortion itself is what it is with the RAAL ribbon tweeter vs SB's dome tweeter (very low). You can't design that away. It's built in.

After you have degraded the sound quality with Danny’s „upgrade“,
maybe the hydroblaster from KEF let you win back the lost quality!
LMAO:

It's really funny, thank you @jackocleebrown for making that video , AND according to Skylab Audio, they were the ones who were fooled and fell for the joke, watch from 14:45:

Spoiler: here:

 

[Mark609]

I feel sorry for Dave as I get the feeling this BS got him pretty upset, and rightfully so, but.....

I wrote at his site that after the sale any mods are out of his hands. If the mod ruins the speaker, so be it. Have an inventory of replacement parts handy and add to your profit margins, hah!

It's like selling a Chevy Malibu '65 back in the day and not expecting folks to tinker with the motor or transmission. Folks are gonna do what they want to do.

 

[aagstn]

Wow, $500 to make your speaker worse and need even more EQ and room correction to fix the fix. Bravo GR Research.

 

[DatSpeakerTho]

I feel sorry for Dave as I get the feeling this BS got him pretty upset, and rightfully so, but.....

I wrote at his site that after the sale any mods are out of his hands. If the mod ruins the speaker, so be it. Have an inventory of replacement parts handy and add to your profit margins, hah!

It's like selling a Chevy Malibu '65 back in the day and not expecting folks to tinker with the motor or transmission. Folks are gonna do what they want to do.

Are you the guy on the Ascend forums that kept trying to downplay this issue as just "drama"?

 

[gvl]

If it ain’t broken keep fixing it until it is.

 

[Chaos01]

With that klippel Data someone please could integrate them to vituixCad and rebuild His second v2 xover to see If it Made it worse too?
I think he offered in his Video to give away all Data about the v2 xover parts-values/data, right?

Danny needs to Work with a klippel, that would be a real step Up for His speakers and Upgrades than any harp device what so ever... But wrong hope and Voodoo is selling better than science :/

 

[Fidji]

And yet - Danny is probably selling more speaker mods than Ascilab or Ascend sell speakers. And you will find people truly believing, that he did improve the speaker - now is more “emotional”, “sweet and airy” “musical”, followed by mandatory “but you need to find a matching cable, that it performs to its max potential” ….

This hobby is beyond saving. Burn it down and start from the scratch.

 

[DatSpeakerTho]

And yet - Danny is probably selling more speaker mods than Ascilab or Ascend sell speakers. And you will find people truly believing, that he did improve the speaker - now is more “emotional”, “sweet and airy” “musical”, followed by mandatory “but you need to find a matching cable, that it performs to its max potential” ….

This hobby is beyond saving. Burn it down and start from the scratch.

I highly doubt dannys sales are anywhere near ascilab or ascends. I think Danny said hes sold 3000 xls kits, but its a 20 year old design. I bet ascilab has already sold that many.

 

[kemmler3D]

And yet - Danny is probably selling more speaker mods than Ascilab or Ascend sell speakers. And you will find people truly believing, that he did improve the speaker - now is more “emotional”, “sweet and airy” “musical”, followed by mandatory “but you need to find a matching cable, that it performs to its max potential” ….

This hobby is beyond saving. Burn it down and start from the scratch.

I'd be surprised if he had a very big business doing this. You can't sell too many of anything that requires the customer to solder it. If he had a big shop he would fairly likely be getting the crossovers assembled at a factory.

 

[Billy Budapest]

Self-assigned

OK. Usually people send a speaker in to him to modify and he develops a modification, or refuses it.

 

[mziegler]

Somewhat lost in all this is that both Ascend and RAAL have warned that the crossover change can damage a very expensive tweeter.

 

[GM3]

I feel sorry for Dave as I get the feeling this BS got him pretty upset, and rightfully so, but.....

I wrote at his site that after the sale any mods are out of his hands. If the mod ruins the speaker, so be it. Have an inventory of replacement parts handy and add to your profit margins, hah!

It's like selling a Chevy Malibu '65 back in the day and not expecting folks to tinker with the motor or transmission. Folks are gonna do what they want to do.

The problem isn't what people do with his products after the fact. The issue was that Danny / GR Research are spreading falsehoods, disinformation, and slandering Ascend and its products in the process. It's a charlatan spreading bullshit and attempting to scam people by selling a subpar product/upgrade, while slandering & insulting the original product and company.

 

[Ropeburn]

One thing I must say. His detestable methods and attitude aside, I wouldn't mind having his job/business. Without the bullshit of course, but seems nice being the tinkerer in a shed. I'm sure he's enjoying himself!

 

[Billy Budapest]

Yes, the fact that it is worse than the original and USD 510 more expensive, and that you have to do the soldering by your own doesn’t makes it a bad speaker at all. Objectively the downgrade is not by a huge margin and the quality all in all seems to be decent. So I have not voted.

I also think that Danny makes some bad stuff and also some quite good stuff!
Because of his power cable voodoo he is not liked by this community.
But some of his modifications (and some of his originals) are very nice speakers.

Yes, he had a cheaper speaker he designed for AV123 about 20 years ago, the X-LS, that was quite good. He now sells the same model for over $1,000. For $250, the speaker was good—but not for over $1,000. I actually won the speaker in a giveaway at the Steve Hoffman website 20 years ago and subsequently gave it to my brother.

 

[Billy Budapest]

Who would spend $300 to upgrade a $90 Sony speaker?

I'm loss. Of course anyone can do anything they want with their money. . . but that also means, I can laugh at any one of these fools.

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This one of Danny’s upgrades actually makes sense—repurposing the supertweeter as a regular tweeter, and then the original tweeter as a “fill driver” to boost frequencies at the crossover region between the woofer and tweeter. Creative solution.

 

[GM3]

I'd be surprised if he had a very big business doing this. You can't sell too many of anything that requires the customer to solder it. If he had a big shop he would fairly likely be getting the crossovers assembled at a factory.

Yeah in the other thread it was mentioned that Danny doesn't even build or measure his upgrade kits. If that's true, his cost for a 'product' is very low, allowing him to offer a lot of garbage at very low cost. His crossover 'upgrades' aren't even 'products' because they're not even built... If you purchase a crossover upgrade from Ascend, you get an assembled crossover, which has been tested, built, very likely comes with a warranty, etc. If true that Danny doesn't even bother to build and test his 'upgrades', then all you're buying is overpriced snake oil components, which like in this case are very likely to give you a worse result than the parts you're replacing...

So basically, his cost to for a crossover 'upgrade' = time to do a youtube video, time to update his website, do basic set of measurements for original speaker with vintage/legacy measuring equipment and allegedly entering a few values in software to print out some graphs. Much cheaper than what a serious company would have to go through to release a genuine quality product.

And like I was saying, his 'upgrades' aren't even a real product, just prints out a crossover schematic and throws it into a box along with some wire, caps & resistors...

 

[Maxim-ICOM]

Audiomatica, gating or smoothing are not the problems here.

Absolutely agree.


All this threads on ASR about Danny looks like battle between designers with own views on the design, except that Danny's way to do the business is not very ethical and based on abjection of any other designer and that helps him to flow the money into his stream. It is not a battle Klippel vs Clio, it is Danny vs others.

I see that Danny shows a problem (woofer ant tweeter phase) what standard Klippel measurements do not show.

It does not mean that Klippel insufficient, but I see the way the information presented is a kind of "average temperature in hospital".
I understand that data presentation is based on 2034, but averaging lead to insufficient information to compare speakers.

"ANSI/CEA-2034-A": The listening window is a spatial average of the nine amplitude responses in the ±10º vertical and ±30º horizontal angular range. This presentation just makes curve smoother and masks the problems speaker may have.
"predicted in-room" - about same - calculations form averages on "some" estimated room. Useless information and far from real rooms. Overdamped room will give you almost same as gated measuremnts (close to anechoic) and empty room will gain over speaker response few dB. Indeed, real rooms are different and gain is not linear. But why we need room info while we measure and compare speakers?

Clio is very nice tool for speaker designer to do deep speaker research if he understands what he is doing.
There is nothing what Clio cannot do what Klippel NFS can for speaker measutrements.
Would be great if guys who do not have Clio will leave comments starting "I never used Clio but I know..."

My view on topic: "before" and "after" both are non-optimal designs. Good 2-way should not have more then 3 capacitors, 2 coils and 3 resistors.
Both designs go -20db at +20degree vertical at crossing frequency, you may see if from off-axis traces from attached ZIP files.

 

[heflys20]

I'd be surprised if he had a very big business doing this. You can't sell too many of anything that requires the customer to solder it. If he had a big shop he would fairly likely be getting the crossovers assembled at a factory.

Probably doesn't sell a lot, but he does seem to have a bit of a cult following and could possibly
influence opinion of Ascend speakers...Regardless, this is the funniest thing I've seen in a minute. $500 to make a speaker worse...This scam would make Victor Lustig blush...

After you have degraded the sound quality with Danny’s „upgrade“,
maybe the hydroblaster from KEF let you win back the lost quality!
LMAO:

That's why I'm starting to love KEF. Not only good, science based product, but taking the time to mock the bullshit...

 

[AaronJ]

He will almost certainly claim some combination of faulty measurements or faulty installation of the kit. Danny’s fan base treat him as if he’s doing some sort of philanthropy, when the truth is probably that no reputable speaker manufacturer would ever consider hiring him as a consultant.

 

[DatSpeakerTho]

Good 2-way should not have more then 3 capacitors, 2 coils and 3 resistors.
Both designs go -20db at +20degree vertical at crossing frequency, you may see if from off-axis traces from attached ZIP files.

Good two ways often have much more than that, component count doesn't matter, the final filter tasks results do. Plenty of two ways reviewed here with high part count and excellent performance. I guess Ascilab is just making bad two ways