Martin Logan B10 Speaker Review

[AnalogSteph]

While I'm reading this thread:

Yes, but the measured sensitivity of 87 dB, although 5 dB lower than rated, is still 3 dB higher than many other speakers of similar size have (~84 dB).

It is well and truly a 4 ohm speaker, mind you. Per watt, that would be closer to 84 dB, much like you would expect for the size. (Keep in mind that the woofer is a tad larger than your average 5.25", too.)

 

[Axo1989]

Even though we think directivity errors are not correctable, research into room EQ shows that it is worthwhile trying to correct them. That would call for line A to be correct, needing to fill in the region between 1 and 3 kHz. This resulted in yellow filter #4. I tested this by itself and it nicely increased instrument separation (much like I hear in headphones with the same problem) with better fidelity overall.

While I really like the effect of the yellow filter on lower treble, I thought speaker sounded a bit bright. Now putting in the shelving filter did the job bringing in the highs in balance.

I spent the next half hour tuning the last two filters and where I got them was optimal across large number of reference tracks.

Despite the plurality of filters, the overall effect is subtle but bested the stock tuning which now sounded a bit dull. Performance was very enjoyable across every reference track I throw at the B10.

That discussion and those EQ experiments (equalising to the two different trend-line approximations) were particularly interesting. And rewarding apparently.

 

[Theriverlethe]

I just picked up some F1 towers on sale at Best Buy to replace my SVS Primes that I've had a lot of difficulty integrating into a small living room. So far I'm very impressed, at least with measured performance compared to the Primes. I haven't had a chance to do a lot of listening yet, but they seem to be holding up well. I only had to make one narrow band cut at 125Hz to compensate for wall proximity and a wider, deeper cut around 8Khz to compensate for the hot tweeters. SVS Primes exhibited all kinds of irregularities, with a dip in the 100-200Hz range, a rise in the 400Hz-700Hz range, and of course the hot tweeters. These were also much easier to integrate with my subs. Martin Logan wasn't kidding about listening tests in real rooms.

Edit: Actually, the 125Hz cut was totally unnecessary. I had YPAO results copied to manual PEQ with no boost in that region, but there must have been some kind of phase filter going on. This time, YPAO tried to boost 125Hz by 6.0dB, but that was also unnecessary.