The more I measure speakers in my new backyard, the more I realize how lucky I was to have started measuring speakers indoors in my old place with high ceilings.
It was so easy! Outdoors I have to deal with rain, the cold, the wind, a crazy high NYC noise floor. I tried to measure this speaker three times until I finally got usable data. It was super windy and a tree branch almost fell on my head. But I did it, for science.
No sound impressions in this post other than to say the speaker sounds real nice, I'll leave that for after my review. Obviously this a speaker Amir already reviewed, and I'd seen that data, so I couldn't go into its sound completely unbiased by measurements.
The spin:
Mostly great stuff. Scary looking tweeter resonance if you have very high hearing, but I can still hear 19Hz and haven't found it to bother me. The lower mids are slightly scooped relative to other frequencies. The worst thing is the narrow directivity mismatch in the ERDI.
Some notes:
However, recall that review was made before Klippel addressed the faulty ERDI calculation. This is one of those cases where it clearly does matter to do it the right way. Recomputing Amir's spin from his provided data, we get:
Now overlapping my measurements (solid) and amir's (dotted):
And the correlation is excellent! Though the bass is a little different as always.
Here are the horizontal ER components:
Note that off-axis bass above is simulated by vituixcad based on the on-axis bass splice, so the data there is not too reliable.
Here's the full horizontal data from 0-90, sans bass splice:
Normalized:
Horizontal Polar normalized:
Not Normalized:
Here are the vertical ER components, the Ceiling and Floor bounce:
You can clearly see where the blip in the ERDI comes from. But better that thes issues be very narrow than widespread, so I'd still classify this as significantly better than most non-coaxials.
The vertical listening window is solid, but it'sdefinitely better to be above the tweeter axis than below it (good, as that's probably more realistic in most setups, especially if you have low stands).
The 'squiggles' in the midbass are artefacts of turning the speaker on its side.
Vertical polar normalized:
Not-normalized:
Lastly, the Woofer and port measurements:
The port noise isn't too loud thankfully.
P.S.
If you want to see how extremely janky my current measurement rig is, this is what I was working with:
Yes, it was about as precarious as it looks. Yes, I'm trying to figure out something better =] But you can see why I have no interest in trying to measure tower speakers
In case youre wondering why I didn't move the boxes/stand all the way to the edge of the table, it's because the table is too flimsy and it would have definitely all have toppled over. The battery pack I'm using is essentially a counterweight for the whole thing. I need a more sturdy table lol, but this one came with the yard.
Luckily this was enough clearance to keep reflections from being too probelmatic, although there admittedly is some messiness in the verticals because of it.
Anyway, I hope this is inspiration to anyone who thinks they can't take measurements because it'd be too janky. Janky can work!
It was so easy! Outdoors I have to deal with rain, the cold, the wind, a crazy high NYC noise floor. I tried to measure this speaker three times until I finally got usable data. It was super windy and a tree branch almost fell on my head. But I did it, for science.
No sound impressions in this post other than to say the speaker sounds real nice, I'll leave that for after my review. Obviously this a speaker Amir already reviewed, and I'd seen that data, so I couldn't go into its sound completely unbiased by measurements.
The spin:
Mostly great stuff. Scary looking tweeter resonance if you have very high hearing, but I can still hear 19Hz and haven't found it to bother me. The lower mids are slightly scooped relative to other frequencies. The worst thing is the narrow directivity mismatch in the ERDI.
Some notes:
- I measured the speaker from higher than I have in the past, and I did something unusual for this spin: the horizontal data is gated at 10 ms, but the vertical data is gated at the 6.5ms I've used in the pass. So there's more resolution than usual.
- As always, I measure from 1m rather than the 2m of the standard, but as we'll see, this doesn't make a very big difference for bookshelf speakers.
- I've decided to include the Horizontal component of the ERDI right in the spin (the yellow dotted curve), in order to have an at-a-glance view of soundstage performance. Let me know if you think this makes the spin too busy, but I think it's the most useful single-curve metric for soundstage performance. It also lets you surmise in this case that the jaggedness in the ERDI is purely from the vertical component.
However, recall that review was made before Klippel addressed the faulty ERDI calculation. This is one of those cases where it clearly does matter to do it the right way. Recomputing Amir's spin from his provided data, we get:
Now overlapping my measurements (solid) and amir's (dotted):
And the correlation is excellent! Though the bass is a little different as always.
Here are the horizontal ER components:
Note that off-axis bass above is simulated by vituixcad based on the on-axis bass splice, so the data there is not too reliable.
Here's the full horizontal data from 0-90, sans bass splice:
Normalized:
Horizontal Polar normalized:
Not Normalized:
Here are the vertical ER components, the Ceiling and Floor bounce:
You can clearly see where the blip in the ERDI comes from. But better that thes issues be very narrow than widespread, so I'd still classify this as significantly better than most non-coaxials.
The vertical listening window is solid, but it'sdefinitely better to be above the tweeter axis than below it (good, as that's probably more realistic in most setups, especially if you have low stands).
The 'squiggles' in the midbass are artefacts of turning the speaker on its side.
Vertical polar normalized:
Not-normalized:
Lastly, the Woofer and port measurements:
The port noise isn't too loud thankfully.
P.S.
If you want to see how extremely janky my current measurement rig is, this is what I was working with:
Yes, it was about as precarious as it looks. Yes, I'm trying to figure out something better =] But you can see why I have no interest in trying to measure tower speakers
In case youre wondering why I didn't move the boxes/stand all the way to the edge of the table, it's because the table is too flimsy and it would have definitely all have toppled over. The battery pack I'm using is essentially a counterweight for the whole thing. I need a more sturdy table lol, but this one came with the yard.
Luckily this was enough clearance to keep reflections from being too probelmatic, although there admittedly is some messiness in the verticals because of it.
Anyway, I hope this is inspiration to anyone who thinks they can't take measurements because it'd be too janky. Janky can work!
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