| Audio Emporium
Newsletter New Catalog
Posted! Just click on the cover of the new catalog on our home page to download it. Warning- you’d better do it fast because as the American dollar is getting clobbered world wide, price increases are being introduced from almost everybody! Most of these prices are nearly extinct! Paradigm DSP Subs Have Arrived! Black, Cherry or Rose Paradigm has revised its PS and PW series and rolled them into one, new improved series- the DSP. These are not the small, cute little guys our industry is pushing heavily. These are high performance subs at reasonable prices. This design brief requires a sizeable enclosure. So what?! You don’t use these boys in a room where you’re trying to hide the fact you’ve got a home theater! DSP stands for Digital Signal Processing. These subs sound linear at low, as well as higher volumes. Most subs disappear at low volumes. You’ll find the DSP models are EQ’d to blend well at low volume too. The DSP line features two front firing ports. Using two ports minimizes port “chuffing” and having them front fire means you can place the subs near the back wall or in a cabinet (though we’re not pleased with big subs going in cabinets!). The grills are now removable. The DSPs are Paradigm’s first subs where the crossover is bypassable! This is a nice advantage if you have flexibility in your receiver and choose to dial in your sound there. You’re not stuck with another crossover in the road. The DSPs use new, very high current Class D power amps. They run cool and are very dynamic- having enormous headroom where they can triple their rated power on peaks! Woofer cones are made of CAP (carbon, aramid fiber), a nice blend Paradigm has come up with to give tauter performance than paper or polypropylene. The CAP drivers are lighter and stiffer than any plastic mixture which produces more solid sound. Let me make special mention of DSP-3400. This bad boy has a brand new, 14” CAST sub in a large, but not ridiculously sized enclosure. It’s only $900 at introduction. With the American dollar getting its tail kicked, this guy will probably be over a grand before you know it. Check it out- because it really is big time power at a fair price. What most people are buying for a grand(ish)? They’re buying Cute-cube designs with cones that are easily over driven! Models: DSP-3100 $500: 10” Cast Woof, 200w Class D amp, 16 1/4h, 12 1/4w, 16 3/4d DSP-3200 $700: 12” Cast Woof, 300w Class D amp, 18 1/4h, 14w, 19 1/2d DSP-3400 $900: 14” Case Woof, 300w Class D amp, 22 1/4h, 15 3/4w, 21d B&W 805s $2500pr: A Classic Gets Better! Perhaps the most saturated product category in the hifi market is the “ultimate mini monitor.” It seems everybody who attempts to make any kind of speaker has “an ultimate mini” for $2-10k pr.” One magazine recently gushed over some minis for $22k pr. The drivers in those speakers cost about $500. How do we know? Cuz you can buy them off the shelf from a distributor! Of course each company brags that their drivers are “custom” which means they dot an i or cross a t off the generic Skanspeak (or whatever) design.
B&W has improved the 805 to the 805s. The 805s looks very similar
to the eye, but is significantly improved. 91% of the parts have changed. The Kevlar
Mid/Woof is new. The Nautilus tweeter is new. The cabinet and crossover are new. The
result is a nice evolution from the famed 805 that we’ve had for about ten years. The
drivers, the cabinets, the bracing and Nautilus technology are all made by B&W in
their own facilities in It would be folly to say that any one speaker is “the best.” Yet when you’re looking at serious competition in this range, the B&Ws are surely on anyone’s short list of top finalists. The characteristics that have made 805 so successful are presenting a large, vivid image, while presenting an open top end without being aggressive. 805s and its B&W Matrix (internal honeycomb cabinet bracing structure) brethren also enjoy a “boxless” sound. To build a speaker where you don’t “hear” the enclosure’s intrusion is quite a challenge.
You don’t have to take our word for it. We’ll defer to Abbey
Road Studios in Speaker Geekdom Over the past year I’ve done a lot of research on speakers we DON’T sell. After all, if you don’t know what the other guys are doing, how do you know how yours compare? For openers, there are a lot of good high end mini monitors out there. However, the market is dominated by people buying Skanspeak drivers and screwing them into a box- with their own crossover “designs.” These drivers are easily available from driver houses like Madisound. YOU can buy some drivers, a crossover and screw them into some box. The boxes can be modest or extravagant. The claims vary from incredible to perfect. The driver houses will sell you everything. If you spend a few minutes on Madisound’s site you can recognize most of the drivers used in today’s high end minis. But they won’t sound as good as B&W 805s. Speaker designers are like the rest of us, they think their “children” can do no wrong. What I hear from most of the Skanspeak based designs are speakers that are clean and detailed. Their image is more specific than it is spacious. With some companies you can hear the cabinets ringing away. With others, they’re pretty solid, and pretty hungry. In short, the Skanspeak family is always good, but to my taste they sound more hifi than musical. I found the single (Fullrange or coax) speaker world reallllly out there! There are more guys than you can shake an SPL meter at that proclaim they’ve created the perfect speaker, based around a Lowther or similar FULLRANGE design. If the Skanspeak guys are proud, the Fullrange guys are evangelical! The theory is logical- there is no crossover in the road. The drivers are efficient. Literally all of them (and I’ve auditioned a bunch) are crisp and sharp. The detail on acoustic guitars for bluegrass is impressive. Butttt, these fullrange designs have little warmth. One designer after another swears his speaker goes down to 50 Hz solid. I don’t hear it. Further, you figure, it isn’t that big a deal- toss on a sub. It can help some on the bottom but doesn’t erase the sharp edge of the sound. I never got a sub to mate well with the fullrange speakers I worked with. At the end of the chase, I found I just couldn’t warm up to the Fullrange options. While I’m not very good, I play a Baldwin M grand piano every day. The lower register of the piano is just flat out wrong on these fullrange speakers I’ve heard. I know these “designers” have charts and graphs in abundance to prove their points. They’re vociferous in their claims of accuracy and “truth.” Go with the B&W 805s. They’ve got parts better than you can buy. They’ve got engineering from 15 PHDs as opposed to a couple of hobbyists putzing with a computer program & buying parts from various vendors. |