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KEF LS50 Wireless - DAR's Product of the Year 2016
- Thread starter watchnerd
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Those don't look much different than the old Stax Lamda's I owned. Stax always properly referred to them as ear speakers rather than headphones. They look much less dorky if the gal were to have them on of course.
Hopefully Dynaudio have learned a bit more on how to do this sort of thing - heard Xeos at the last audio show, and they were truly awful - loud kitchen radio standard.
Yes, at nearly 3 times the price so they should be. Dynaudio don't seem to do lower priced, value for money models well, is there a pattern here?
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Stax still look dorky
Well those Sigma's were the worst looking Stax models.
Headphones are often considered something completely different from speakers - in fact, there is a continuum: you should be able to take headphones, and sit them on a stand, and they will do a nice loudspeaker; conversely, take speakers, shove them next to your ears like some of those joke pics you see around, and they work as headphones. There is no magical difference there - what I do when subjectively evaluating is close to that - I listen to the speaker as if it were one side of a headphone. If it's doing a bad job of that, then, no wonder it sounds lousy in the room ...
Money or Weight?
Well, in the wireless comp, the relatively high priced Xeo failed for me; and in the active monitor world the Dynaudio model costing 4 or 5 times the money compared to the Behringer I bought, was pretty hopeless on the demo tracks.
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watchnerd
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Glad you like your Behringers. Subjective tastes are different.
But personal taste aside, Dynaudio active monitors have been used in professional studios for more than a decade. The older BM series is widely considered a classic and the new to 2016 LYD series are gathering positive reviews.
Behringer doesn't have that professional track record and is mostly targeted at hobbyists (and priced for that market).
FWIW, I don't like the Xeos, either.
It's highly likely I was just unlucky, in what I came across. The Dynaudio monitor model(s) I heard were, firstly, too polite, the treble had been smoothed off, probably to reduce fatigue in the studio - and the bass/mid section couldn't handle any pressure, the driver started going spastic, and making the wrong noises - if the driver couldn't take the SPLs the amplifier should have been more carefully designed.
No, it's more than liking them - the product needs to do the job correctly, which is to reproduce what is being fed to them. Recording professionals don't want listening fatigue, and probably always listen at mild volumes - hence these are highly suitable; I wanted the best value for money product that reproduced relatively accurately, and were capable of going to their maximum design volume with full competence ... different priorities.
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watchnerd
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FWIW, here is the off-axis response of the passive LS50. I would expect the DSP version to do even better, given it has a better crossover, a bit of a bass EQ lift, and some rudimentary room EQ presets:
(Yeah, the graph is only from 500 Hz on up, but we all know it will be very room dependent below that)
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