Proson Twin 716 Spinorama measurements (CTA-2034)

[kemmler3D]

otherwise why so many? :

When the brand isn't real, creating a new one only requires making a new silkscreen to print the logos with. And since the speakers were no good, you probably needed new brands constantly so people didn't catch on...

This speaker here is pretty remarkable. "The woofer is falling off before it crosses to the tweeter. Should we redo the crossover?" "Nah..."

 

[Ageve]

Here's an in-room measurement at 4m distance (with ERB smoothing) vs the estimated in-room response:

It still surprises me how accurate the estimated in-room response is. It's a close match from 700 Hz and up, but there is a difference between 2-3 kHz, maybe because of the measuring distance? Still quite close though.

 

[Maiky76]

Just how automated is the production of posts like these?

Not that much actually!
I copy and paste a frame with the structure, set the Matlab algorithm (number of biquads, normalization frequency etc.) and run it about 5-10 times depending on the complexity and the results, then populate the frame with the graphs. All-in about 30 min. That's the point for automated optimization.
I am not performing any listening obviously so not much to be said. With the curves I generate, thanks to the OP, everyone is free and enable to make their own opinion.

@Ageve any chance you try the EQs? I am curious because the regression between the LW and the Score EQ are very close but the PIRs are rather different.

 

[Wolf11Man]

Even such cheap speaker don't need to sound that bad. They simply had no one who knew anything about speaker construction. From the pictures we can see they only did cheap optical copys of much better speakers and some awkwardly driver combinations only completely clueless people could make.
What a waste of material.
There are quite some free, private developer, who do super cheap constructions for a hobby, sometimes even as a kind of contest. You can build a decend 2-way speaker from less than 20€ surplus material with a very surprising sound quality. Downside, these surplus drivers and parts are usually not available for long.
Of course, these guy's know a lot about construction, theory and have years of experience. They do expensive things, that are free to copy, as well.
Most good speaker builder started with cheap material and tried to make them sound better than the price allowed. It may be even more rewarding than sticking some expensive high end stuff in a box and make a mediocre speaker from it. Something I see too often.

So shame on these Swedish, hopefully long gone, brands. Sometimes I see compareable speaker in discount stores, WATSON and ELTA come to my mind. MAGNAT sometimes does such felt covered, piezo horn and huge woofer equipped curiosities too, offered in grocery stores between cornflakes and toilet paper. There should be a law to prohibit this useless waste of resources. Some people in the industry are only satisfied when the colorful packaging was been more expensive than the product inside. What a wonderful world we live in...

 

[Ageve]

@Ageve any chance you try the EQs? I am curious because the regression between the LW and the Score EQ are very close but the PIRs are rather different.

Yep, it improved the in-room response and made it sound better. Still not good though.

I’ll post a measurement when I get home from work.

 

[Juhazi]

Than you Agave for additional info. This kind ot WWT towers have been quite popular during 1980-90s. The ovious problems with double woofers in a 2-way have been known and .2.5 topology is a good help, but because of added complexity not very popular in low-price category. As well most buyers of these don't know about that either...

Another typical problem with these is BR port resonances and noise. 700-800Hz is typicals, just like Proson 716.

CTA graphs are nice, but home-brewed data might not be relevant enough. Readers of ASR are accustomed to those made with Klippel NFS, which are reliable and relevant.

 

[kemmler3D]

Even such cheap speaker don't need to sound that bad. They simply had no one who knew anything about speaker construction. From the pictures we can see they only did cheap optical copys of much better speakers and some awkwardly driver combinations only completely clueless people could make.
What a waste of material.
There are quite some free, private developer, who do super cheap constructions for a hobby, sometimes even as a kind of contest. You can build a decend 2-way speaker from less than 20€ surplus material with a very surprising sound quality. Downside, these surplus drivers and parts are usually not available for long.
Of course, these guy's know a lot about construction, theory and have years of experience. They do expensive things, that are free to copy, as well.
Most good speaker builder started with cheap material and tried to make them sound better than the price allowed. It may be even more rewarding than sticking some expensive high end stuff in a box and make a mediocre speaker from it. Something I see too often.

So shame on these Swedish, hopefully long gone, brands. Sometimes I see compareable speaker in discount stores, WATSON and ELTA come to my mind. MAGNAT sometimes does such felt covered, piezo horn and huge woofer equipped curiosities too, offered in grocery stores between cornflakes and toilet paper. There should be a law to prohibit this useless waste of resources. Some people in the industry are only satisfied when the colorful packaging was been more expensive than the product inside. What a wonderful world we live in...

Good points here... I think the main lesson to take away from this is you can't just throw a random crossover on two random drivers and hope to come away with anything listenable.

 

[Mnyb]

Even such cheap speaker don't need to sound that bad. They simply had no one who knew anything about speaker construction. From the pictures we can see they only did cheap optical copys of much better speakers and some awkwardly driver combinations only completely clueless people could make.
What a waste of material.
There are quite some free, private developer, who do super cheap constructions for a hobby, sometimes even as a kind of contest. You can build a decend 2-way speaker from less than 20€ surplus material with a very surprising sound quality. Downside, these surplus drivers and parts are usually not available for long.
Of course, these guy's know a lot about construction, theory and have years of experience. They do expensive things, that are free to copy, as well.
Most good speaker builder started with cheap material and tried to make them sound better than the price allowed. It may be even more rewarding than sticking some expensive high end stuff in a box and make a mediocre speaker from it. Something I see too often.

So shame on these Swedish, hopefully long gone, brands. Sometimes I see compareable speaker in discount stores, WATSON and ELTA come to my mind. MAGNAT sometimes does such felt covered, piezo horn and huge woofer equipped curiosities too, offered in grocery stores between cornflakes and toilet paper. There should be a law to prohibit this useless waste of resources. Some people in the industry are only satisfied when the colorful packaging was been more expensive than the product inside. What a wonderful world we live in...

The speakers are mostly big that's the whole point i think some of these brands was included in all in one stereos and packages from defunct brands . Example Fisher could include Bricklin speakers in Sweden ( the Fisher brand name was sold to some to me unknow entity and made terrible products in the 80's-90's ) .

For some reason there was a clientele in Sweden in the late 80's and 90's that wanted floor standing speakers with big drivers , but did not want to pay for it
Suppose the same all in one stereo could be sold elsewhere in the world with a much more reasonable small 2 way to save money .

Big low quality speakers are mostly thin chipboard an air , so back then it probably made economic sense to provide local speakers to electronics made elsewhere .

 

[Matt_Holland]

Yep, it improved the in-room response and made it sound better. Still not good though.

I’ll post a measurement when I get home from work.

The boost required to fill the large dip probably increases distortion quite a bit, no? And because the dip is due to cancellation, does the boost even correct it?

All in all a horror show and probably designed without measuring.

 

[Ageve]

Than you Agave for additional info. This kind ot WWT towers have been quite popular during 1980-90s. The ovious problems with double woofers in a 2-way have been known and .2.5 topology is a good help, but because of added complexity not very popular in low-price category. As well most buyers of these don't know about that either...

Another typical problem with these is BR port resonances and noise. 700-800Hz is typicals, just like Proson 716.

CTA graphs are nice, but home-brewed data might not be relevant enough. Readers of ASR are accustomed to those made with Klippel NFS, which are reliable and relevant.

Yep, Klippel measurements are obviously superior. Quasi-anechoic spins should be considered as useful info until there’s better data available.

Here’s a test spin I did on my Revel M16, with comparisons:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...el-m16-spinorama-measurements-cta-2034.58370/

..,and some awkwardly driver combinations only completely clueless people could make.

This is one of the ”best” examples:

 

[Thomas_A]

Than you Agave for additional info. This kind ot WWT towers have been quite popular during 1980-90s. The ovious problems with double woofers in a 2-way have been known and .2.5 topology is a good help, but because of added complexity not very popular in low-price category. As well most buyers of these don't know about that either...

Another typical problem with these is BR port resonances and noise. 700-800Hz is typicals, just like Proson 716.

CTA graphs are nice, but home-brewed data might not be relevant enough. Readers of ASR are accustomed to those made with Klippel NFS, which are reliable and relevant.

I would say that differences can be seen between different Klippel measurements as well. Not only exact microphone positions and measurement distance affects but also microphone differences and loudspeaker tolerances. Based on Ageves previous comparisons I would say these are among the better home-brew mesuserments on ASR.

 

[Multicore]

Not that much actually!
I copy and paste a frame with the structure, set the Matlab algorithm (number of biquads, normalization frequency etc.) and run it about 5-10 times depending on the complexity and the results, then populate the frame with the graphs. All-in about 30 min. That's the point for automated optimization.
I am not performing any listening obviously so not much to be said. With the curves I generate, thanks to the OP, everyone is free and enable to make their own opinion.

Oh. Wow.

What's your motivation to do it for this terrible obsolete obscure speaker that nobody is likely to consider buying?

 

[Drengur]

It was made in Falkenberg, Sweden, in the early 2000s. The factory also produced JWS and Genexxa-speakers. You've probably never heard of any of them, but they were all inexpensive and had a poor reputation. People who worked at the factory told stories about drivers having such poor quality, that they had to discard half of them.

Never heard of them? Not only have I heard of them. I was a distributor for JWS back in the day! We have to remember that the competition back then wasn't exactly value oriented. The bigger brands were also producing bad-speakers but sold them for much more. Love to see this. It would be very interesting to see measurements of the later Dynavoice products, as well as the "hated" relaunch of QLN.

 

[thewas]

Yep, it improved the in-room response and made it sound better. Still not good though.

Everything else would have also rather surprised me as like Toole says equalising to some predefined target doesn't mean anything if directivity isn't good.

 

[DanielT]

When the brand isn't real, creating a new one only requires making a new silkscreen to print the logos with. And since the speakers were no good, you probably needed new brands constantly so people didn't catch on...

This speaker here is pretty remarkable. "The woofer is falling off before it crosses to the tweeter. Should we redo the crossover?" "Nah..."

You have a point there. I wonder if there will be as many names for the 2.0 of:

White Van Speaker Scam 2.0 - The New Scam You Need to Know About 2024

An old classic, White Van Scam, but now a different product. A projector. There definitely seems to be something fishy going on with:

audiosciencereview.com

 

[Ageve]

@Maiky76 Here's a new in-room measurement with EQ Score (I wrote LW by mistake, and I'm too lazy to change it ):

Estimated in-room (without EQ) vs EQ Score at 4m:

When listening exactly at the mic position in this photo (~15 cm above tweeter axis), it actually sounds much better with EQ.

If you move out of this position, the sound gets worse. You can walk in and out of an acceptable sound behind the sofa. What a weird speaker...

 

[dasdoing]

Can measuring a speaker like this at 1m on the tweeter axis result in wrong results? The 2 woofers should combine vertically in the middle, but not at 1m on the tweeter axis. The farther you go away, the closer you come (relatively) to this combined axis, and the less cancelation you get.

 

[Ageve]

Can measuring a speaker like this at 1m on the tweeter axis result in wrong results?

It can. That’s why I compared the response at 1m and 2m before doing the spin. See this post:

Proson Twin 716 Spinorama measurements (CTA-2034)

These are some of their brands: JWS Proson Genexxa Sonab System One Dynavoice You mean the fake Sonab's sold in the 1990s? It was unclear who owned the Sonab and even Carlsson brand name. That's because Stig Carlsson never submitted a formal trademark/brand name registration for his brand...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Even at 4m distance (ordinary in-room measurement), there’s a huge dip, and it changes when moving up and down.

With the EQ applied (based on the spin data), it sounds much better at 4m, but only if you remain seated right in front of, or slightly above tweeter axis.

When moving outside of this ”ideal” position, the muffled sound returns.

I think part of the problem is that both woofers have a huge resonance in the crossover region.


edit: This is probably the last measurement.

I reversed polarity of the bottom woofer, just to see if anything would change > 1 kHz. Both mic and speaker were left in the same positions.

 

[NHL99]

Tried them with Dirac (Swedish technology), such as from the serious Primare (another Swedish player) brand?

 

[Tell]

Yep. Hard to forget when you live in Sweden though. These are just a few of the speakers they have released over the years:

(It's really just scratching the surface)

View attachment 412632

Ooh I had the fifth one from the right on upper row, a Dynavoice that I can't remember what the model name was. Mine was black though.
I really liked those actually, but it was quite a few years ago now and I was quite young so I can't actually remember what they sounded like. They played loud at least! Would love to see some measurements on those of you ever get the chance

Though I bet the Prosons was a bit more well known, maybe not in a good way of course, but nice too see the measurements of them