Wharfedale EVO 4.1 Review (Speaker)

[MZKM]

Preference Rating
SCORE: 4.8
SCORE w/ sub: 6.8

Sensitivity: 86.3dB (300Hz-3kHz ; spec: 87dB)
Frequency response: +/- 3.7dB 64Hz-20kHz ; +/- 3.6dB 80Hz-20kHz

​

 

[Walter]

Looks like EVO 4.1 is a kind of forced decision due to single tweeter for whole EVO 4 line. Most of other EVO 4 speakers use 2" dome midrange and higher crossover for tweeter.
This speaker is bad compromise as it uses small and heavy woofer (to have decent bass) with this AMT. Proper crossing it around 4K would make lower distortion but most probably induce big suckout in mid-highs, so design team leaned towards "showroom sound".

Yeah, I've been expectantly awaiting the review of another Wharfedale stand mount speaker Amir previously teased, hoping it was either the Diamond 12.2 or the EVO 4.2, both of which are on my list of possibilities for my next system--or even the 12.0 in case I decide to stick with a pure desktop approach. I never anticipated it would be this one, as it really seemed to be the odd duck in their lineup. But maybe that is what made it appealing to test.

 

[abdo123]

Where is the port?

 

[amirm]

Where is the port?

It is not a port but passive radiator firing down into the base.

 

[abdo123]

Oh, ok, thanks! Sometimes it's hard to tell with the tweeter response.

Edit to add: Upon looking a little closer, I can see that removing the binding straps cleans up the near-field responses by removing the contamination coming from the nearby driver (the woofer response bleeding into the tweeter response and the tweeter response bleeding into the woofer response). But you still have the lack of baffle step compensation on the woofer and some possible irregularities on the tweeter response due to the nearfield measurement. When removing the binding straps, you don't need to do nearfield responses to see the woofer and tweeter responses. Just a normal frequency response on axis for each would be revealing of driver responses and would tell us some about the crossover slopes.

Why would you want him to generate the spinorama again? We already have it.

There won’t be any new information revealed if he just measured one driver.

 

[valerianf]

This bookshelf speaker has a beautiful design with a very well designed passive radiator.
Please Whaferdale, get rid of the AMT tweeter and replace it with a performant dome tweeter.
The marketing department people have never been audio experts!

 

[DSJR]

Ribbon tweets are fashionable 'HiFi' in some circles and I believe the sibling Quad speaker alternatives use something not too dissimilar as tweeters.

 

[bigjacko]

I feel the 4 kHz peak can be addressed by crossover, so maybe the parts do not have tight tolerance on this speaker. Other than that and high distortion, high directivity past 6 kHz but not completly out of control, this speaker is reletively good engineered. No major distortion or resonance problem apart from low end and 2 kHz peak from tweeter, no port noise due to passive radiator, somewhat controled and smooth directivity. Not sure if they did any engineering for the passive radiator since it operate in somewhere like a slot, but even they did anything we probably can't know that they did anything. Interesting speaker in the end to see the peformance and evaluate it.

 

[Koeitje]

I was surprised to see such an odd frequency response considering the other Wharedale measured looked really good. That was a far cheaper model. Pretty sad about that, was hoping that Wharfedale could be one of those brands you can recommend pretty much blindly.

 

[MZKM]

I was surprised to see such an odd frequency response considering the other Wharedale measured looked really good. That was a far cheap model. Pretty sad about that, was hoping that Wharfedale could be one of those brands you can recommend pretty much blindly.

Maybe they should stick to some tweeters.

Now the question is how does the 3-way 4.2 model play, as well as their flagship Elysian models:

 

[maty]

Wharfedale Evo 4.4

Wharfedale Evo 4.4

www.audiocircle.com

[ Thanks to bunkbail, a link:

Wharfedale Evo 4.4 crossover

YouTube

]

Optimized

 

[BigSweeny]

Another good review, thanks Amir.

I voted headless panther. Nothing really to recommend here (except looks?) over a Revel M105 or Elac DBR62 which are both around the same price range and don't appear to have half as many issues.

 

[ralph]

Looks like the Wharfedale Diamond 12.x series though cheaper is better designed and a better deal. I'm not too surprised having seen some other measurement before this one. Thanks @amirm for measuring speakers from both series.

 

[Lambda]

One of this products that is "ok" if you don't listen to loud. don't need bass and don't care about the upper mid peak.
But looking at the price and the competitions its hard to justify this short comings.

Its defiantly not terribly bad.

 

[drozdowsky]

Thanks Amir for review, you for sure saved me some money for shipping/return, I will make sure to donate

 

[noel_fs]

could have been really solid if it wasnt for that little mountain

 

[q3cpma]

Am I the only one who find those yellow AMT ugly? And they're rarely good or well integrated in passive designs (Adam, HEDD and Eve are decent), unlike "true" ribbons like in the Philharmonic BMR or Mesavonic that are arguably very good (except laser like vertical frequency, but that's inherent to ribbons)

 

[ralph]

Am I the only one who find those yellow AMT ugly? And they're rarely good or well integrated in passive designs (Adam, HEDD and Eve are decent), unlike "true" ribbons like in the Philharmonic BMR or Mesavonic that are arguably very good (except laser like vertical frequency, but that's inherent to ribbons)

I like their look. The Elac Velas are also using yellow AMTs - I was listening to the Vela VS 407 and found them to be good. They are not cheap, manufactured in Germany, including the AMTs.

 

[aleksandar]

Registered here just to say that i am owner of a said pair of speakers and enjoying then very much. They sound great in a small treated room 4m x 2,5m. All i did was slight eq around 400-500hz 2db down and 6-18khz 3db up. Eq was done by hearing. Fiio K5 Pro as dac and Cambridge Audio axa35 integrated

 

[ralph]

Maybe they should stick to some tweeters.

Now the question is how does the 3-way 4.2 model play, as well as their flagship Elysian models:

Looking at the measurements at https://wharfedale-deutschland.de/w...fedale-Elysian-4-Audio-2020-04_lowres_pdf.pdf not great.