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Swan Hivi X3 Review (Active Monitors)

Rate this speaker:

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 88 53.7%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 67 40.9%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther

    Votes: 7 4.3%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 2 1.2%

  • Total voters
    164

Universal Cereal Bus

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It says the 'The Chaoyang Court served Jianling with actions.' Jianling being the manufacturer of the copy. Okay no details of what actions were served but they got some sort of result.
In legalese, "action" means "lawsuit" and "serve" means "notify" (think what a process server does).
 

Mart68

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In legalese, "action" means "lawsuit" and "serve" means "notify" (think what a process server does).
That may be correct, but it turns out that the Court did award in JLR's favour:


''Nonetheless, a finding of unfair competition was sufficient for the Court to order that Jiangling (and LandWind joint venture partner, Beijing Dachang Lufeng Motors Limited) immediately stop all acts of unfair competition, including, manufacturing, displaying, offering for sale and selling the LandWind, and awarded damages totalling RMB 1.5 million (approximately USD$223,065) to compensate JLR for its economic losses.''
 

Hipster Doofus

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If anyone want to chip in on buying Amir some furniture I am collecting money to buy him some D-Bunk beds.


send only hundred dollar bills to me
 

Tangband

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This is a review, detail review and listening tests of the Swan Hivi X3 active monitor. It was kindly sent to me by a member and costs US $249 for a pair.
View attachment 215758
As you see, this looks like a baby Genelec speaker down to the "Iso stand" and cast metal case. The former doesn't have a guide though so you can tell from the picture, you can wind up with it tilted left or right. I like the power switch on the side and volume control. Back panel also provides some tweaking of the response but it is limited to just 1 dB:

View attachment 215759

The port doesn't have clearance to go straight in so it almost immediate twists to the right and down into the enclosure. Overall the build is very solid making you easily confuse it with a top monitor brand.

Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.

Likewise listening tests comply with the latest research into proper evaluation of speakers calling for mono, instead of stereo listening:.

Reference axis is approximately the center of the tweeter.

Swan Hivi X3 Measurements
Let's start with our usual dashboard:
View attachment 215760

Well, this is kind of disappointing. We have a lot of disturbance in the usual port region of 800 to 1.5 kHz. Then we have three distinct resonances lifting lower treble region with the latter being quite broad. This will make the speaker sound bright. A look at the near-field measurement of the radiating surfaces shows some of the problems:

View attachment 215761

I don't think I have seen a port/enclosure with so many resonances. Maybe the inside is empty. On top of that we have a woofer resonance and lack of baffle step compensation. Not pretty.

General directivity is good which then causes off-axis to be as bad as on-axis:

View attachment 215763

Making our predicted-in-room response rough and tilted up:
View attachment 215764

Despite the built-in waveguide for the tweeter, response proportionally gets narrower with frequency (beaming):
View attachment 215765

View attachment 215766

Vertical axis though is above average due to use of small drivers with close acoustic centers:
View attachment 215767

I had high hopes that distortion would be kept in check but I could here severe distortion during measurement sweep:
View attachment 215768


View attachment 215769

There is some kind of limiter in there though allowing me to even sweep at 96 dBSPL which is nice.

Waterfall display shows resonances with strong ringing in time domain:
View attachment 215770

Swan Hivi X3 Listening Tests and Equalization
This is a tough speaker to love. Out of the box it is bright and you have to keep messing with the volume to keep distortion at bay. I tried filtering it but overall, I am not sure I made much progress other than making it less bright:
View attachment 215771

I like EQ attempts to be quick and simple by eye and this definitely not one of those cases. The highs can still be piercing even though I tried to bring resonances down. A fancier EQ may help more but it was beyond the scope and patience I had.

Mind though, there were moments of good sound at low volume but there far more annoying ones to my ear.

Conclusions
A speaker this small presents may challenges to the designer. I think it requires superb engineering to master all of that and that simply is not there. Is it good enough for a "3 inch woofer and 0.8 inch tweeter?" I don't know. What I do know that its capability is below what I consider good enough. So I would step up to next larger size and get a much better monitor.

I can't recommend the Swan Hivi X3 even though I see a reasonable attempt to create something unique and above junk plastic computer speakers.

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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome. Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The original Genelecs seems to have very low cabinet resonances , compared to this speaker . Genelec have a special shaped bass tube and damping material inside their speakers - attention to detail is probably crucial for making a really good loudspeaker .
 
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