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What budget speakers you like to see reviewed?

pk500

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Three powered models, each $200 or less per pair:

Micca PB42X, $110 (I own these)

Edifier R1280T, $100 (Tested these along with above Micca's and preferred Micca's by a smidge)

Fluance Ai40, $200 (Get rave reviews for $200 powered speaker, but some complain about very audible hiss or buzz when not using)

Not everybody has the budget to afford a house down payment on audio gear, so it would be nice to see reviews of these highly rated budget options. Amir always has done a good job at reviewing the entire spectrum of audio gear. Long may it continue!
 
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Wes

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...
It makes no sense from a cost reward ratio to spend $100,000.00 to test $200.00 speakers as a goal.

Let’s get the testing for sake of experience with the low cost speakers out of the way and then get a good cross section at all price points.

I agree with the last sentence re priority.

But, the 1st stmt. disregards sunk costs

Besides, it makes no sense for a bunch of graduate students to spend a week of near-PhD time to create a theoretical model of transient heat exchange for a wine bottle they attempted to warm up in a hot springs...
 

JW001

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Elac Uni-Fi UB5

There aren't many other 3-way coaxial bookshelf speakers that routinely go on sale for $300-350 a pair. It would be interesting to see what you get in a 3-way coax you can buy from Best Buy at that price point.
Same here. I have these speakers in my stereo setup for music only (UB5, SVS SB1000, Yamaha A-S801). Bought the pair at $350 last year. Listen mainly to classical and jazz from ripped CDs, SACDs, DVDAs and Blurays, and recently also from Amazon HD.
 

M00ndancer

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Fluid Audio F5
 

msmucr

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New Tannoy Gold actives.
Pretty affordable two-way nearfields, class A/B amps and of course coaxial drivers. Front ported, which can make them friendly for desktop users.

Can be pretty interesting, as you won't find so many active coaxials at this price range. Also curious about some objective measurements for that technology, comparisons of their directional characteristics with conventional two-way small speakers.
Also curious, it's being so affordable (for Tannoy) due to transition of the brand under Music Tribe (Behringer). Honestly their recent non-coax Reveals were quite meh for me (IMO much worse than original budget monitors from '90s with the same name), but those Golds are supposed to be step above.

Michal
 

q3cpma

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* Behringer Media 40USB
They're just so cheap they could serve as very good "computer speakers" for the average joe. And I'm pretty curious about Behringer products in general, since they can be very well made (QC, on the other hand...).

* Tannoy Reveal 402/502
Incredibly cheap, quite popular, seriously good looking and what appears to be a gentle elliptical waveguidage. I've never seen any serious measurements of it, sadly.

* M-Audio BX5 D3
Cheap and with a LSR lookalike waveguide, they could be good. Don't know anything about them.

* Presonus Eris E5/8 XT
The whole package is attractive and the new waveguide looks almost stolen from Neumann's KH120A/KH80DSP.

* Tannoy Gold 5/7/8
Already mentionned, but that's one of the cheapest coaxials on sale. They look good, have some serious amp power and an interesting horn/coaxial design. But I haven't even seen a subjective review of these in the wild.

* Fluid Audio FX50
On the subject of cheap coaxials, this one is very promising. The vendor given on-axis graph is very neat and a DSP crossover at that price point is very rare. I've heard tales of hiss about it, sadly. Still a very interesting model.

* Fluid Audio F5
Very cheap for something that could potentially be good. I'm also a fan of paper/cardboard woofers in general.

* Behringer Nekkst K5/8
As the latest design from Behringer (and the only one that's not a complete ripoff) it could be very interesting. Looks quite good, too.

* Behringer B2031A Truth
The review from noaudiohile got me very interested in that power-for-peanuts speaker, and I'm personnally a big fan of Genelec's 1032's look. They're supposed to have a very good directivity, as measured by Geddes, too; as expected of a Genelec clone with a large baffle.

* Genelec 8020D/8030C
The cheapest and amongst the newest Genelec models. Not something that could be considered cheap, though. Their directivity control is otherwordly and they benefit from very good class D amps from Genelec (I think they may be designed in-house).
 
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Koeitje

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Three powered models, each $200 or less per pair:

Micca RB42X, $110 (I own these)

Edifier R1280T, $100 (Tested these along with above Micca's and preferred Micca's by a smidge)

Fluance Ai40, $200 (Get rave reviews for $200 powered speaker, but some complain about very audible hiss or buzz when not using)

Not everybody has the budget to afford a house down payment on audio gear, so it would be nice to see reviews of these highly rated budget options. Amir always has done a good job at reviewing the entire spectrum of audio gear. Long may it continue!
I used Edifier R1850BT and thought they were pretty garbage, lots of distortion in the low end. I'm guessing the R1280T won't be better. Its a waste of time to test these uber budget speakers that are just made to hit a certain price point. I'm more interested in the range above that where there is a lot more room for sensible design choices and not just being cheap.
 

Billy Budapest

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I still think the Chane 1.5 would be a worthwhile review—given how rabid Chane’s fans are—and if you are only buying one, it would be $175.
 
OP
amirm

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Just bought the Yamaha HS5 from guitar center. Bought a single one. :)

On Klipsch, went to see them in person. Boy, these things look more like dollhouse speakers than real. :) They couldn't make them more small than they did???

Their price was higher than Amazon and they would not price match. So I am inclined to buy from Amazon. Which should I get between 51M and 41M? Latter is half the price so better matched to my budget. :)
 

Thomas_A

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A cheaper but a bit at a bit less performance to the 12 inch IKEA Eneby is the 8 inch version at $49. Either one would be interesting to see measured.
 

Putter

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Another vote for the Sony SSCS5 and Pioneer SP-BS22-LR.

Yet another vote for the Sony. They're one of the few 3 way bookshelves, the other being the NHT C3 which has already received praise in this forum, but would be good to review when you get to higher price ranges. I'd be particularly interested in the crossover, where based on driver size would seem to indicate a very high transition in frequency from the tweeter to the supertweeter and how this affects their dispersion.

My suspicion is that could probably benefit from the crossover mods as the Pioneer BS22 did with Dennis Murphy's mods.
 

Tks

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The forums purely for gamers have a lot of talk about sound, soundcards, motherboard codecs and PC-specific speakers. They should get access to this kind of info even if they aren't card-carrying audiophiles. Plenty of similar talk and upgraditis over there.

Like @edechamps said, you never know.

In his book Toole crosstested Consumer Reports recommendations against his DBT data and found that their recommendations had a negative correlation with sound quality. ASR's making data available that no one's given out freely before. Might even make the lowest end manufacturers more transparent.

Plus, $200 can be $10k for some, either students or the retired, or those looking in from outside of the top income-bracket countries.

Actually, gamers and PC enthusiasts are virtually all objectivists (by our usage of the term), everything is benchmarked to shit with respect to gaming performance. Graphics and computing power upgrades are plain and structured and basically a science that anyone can digest and make decisions on, if you have the budget (not much bullshit customers in this realm are swayed on, simply because they always wait for benchmarks). So like any hobby that gains structure, it only naturally begins to extend outward in cofactors that were seemingly less considered (like peripherals such as mice doing away with laser sensors, and going back to optical, and also taking ergonomics into consideration far more.. keyboards are their own industry now as a sort of fledgling luxury industry, that's how much attention things outside the GPU and CPU have been getting). Audio is the last frontier basically where no real data exists digestible for PC enthusiasts.

They would love this.

EDIT: I forget to mention why it matters. Immersion is becoming a big thing(especially for VR), and audio is taken far more seriously in competitive games than it was in the past. If amir needs to do some side work consulting, he would be great for audio to some of these development studios.
 

bigx5murf

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When I was still PC gaming, every forums had huge thread wars, where the majority of arguments are based on subjective and anecdotal evidence. AMD vs Intel, AMD/ATI vs Nvidia arguments threads are full of it.
 
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