Amphions, Harbeths, Seas Metal Cones, Active Systems

Could you guys who are calling out all sorts of speakers being brought up on this thread please reccomend a mid range priced speaker that you consider good?

Now all i know of what not to buy apparently

 

I don't know if they are still liked there, but, back in the day when I was drooling over such things, Amphions was a hype train on Gearslutz. When approached without the right protective clothing, a hype train quickly induces the certainty that this is what I have to buy. But I changed trains (and then decided that my hearing no longer merited a hifi wish list), and actually never even got to hear them. Nice to see them revisited.

 

Hella overpriced doesn’t mean not legitimately decent. The Amphions school stuff with much higher build costs; they’re just not worth buying unless you think they’re the best thing ever. Parts cost != sound quality.

Shows use elevator music for a reason. Most of these speakers are awful would fall apart to Slayer.

 

Amphions - overpriced? Well, you're paying the hi-end tax on top of Finnish salaries. I've listened to their biggest d'appolito studio monitors and they were okay, but nothing ground breaking. Pretty sure they use the same tweets as Genelec and the mild waveguide implementation is similar as well. Some people can't stand Gennie treble, my take is that it might have something to do with breakup. It never was a problem for me.

Technically Amphion claim that there's magic in passive radiators and they run their tweets pretty low at times. Must be why they can struggle at higher SPL's. PR's have the same filtering mech behind them as port tubes, they just use membrane mass instead of piece of air for resonator tuning. PR's shine for tuning where a port would be impractical, but it's not best of sealed and ported enclosures. It's still a 2nd order filter with associated issues. Also PR's have intrinsic THD due to suspension linearity or lack thereof. And they're more expensive than PVC piping.

 

I owned the One15's for 3 months in 2016, with the matching class D amp.
I've quite liked them at first because they were very coherent sounding, which is not surprising due to the waveguide, 1.6khz xover point and using very similar materials for both drivers (titanium tweeter and aluminum driver) and not as bright as some other speakers with metal drivers I've heard (but they're still on the bright side for me). No port noise was also a plus, because of the passive radiators.

At first I've thought: "very fast sounding, coherent, no boomy bass"...and hearing the ATC SCM20 changed that opinion, my judgement now is:
Worse transient response than some well designed speakers with bass reflex loading (not even taking closed boxes into account), because passive radiators have a 36db roll off (!), the notion of fast bass fooled me, but that's because it's a 5 inch driver and drivers of that size don't do bass...it sounds fast because of the lack of weight and the lack of noise from a reflex port, not due to a good transient response.
They're bright, but not "Grado clusterfuck bright", it's the kind of speaker that measures like a straight line, without peaks or dips, but with brightness added because of the use of metal based drivers.
I've sold them because:
- I needed to recover money.
- I started to dislike the sound, after honeymoon period, it started to fatigue me after 30 mins of listening (I usually listen between 70-85db, rarely I listen at 90db, so I'm kinda a low volume listener).
- I even bought a (second hand) Xindak "Class A" warmbutt amp to sweeten the thing, but it turned them into a boomy mess, I ended up selling the Amphions with matching Class D amp and Xindak amp to a local studio.

Having learned my lesson (better said: knowing my preferences better), I'm saving to comission a pair of custom monitors that meet my requirements (polypropene or paper woofer & soft dome tweeter, closed box, external analog active crossover and external class A/B amps, no Class D or DSP crap)

 

@purr1n not muh fault amphion and others think sticking two 5" to 8" off the shelf woofers in a box with a veiled but still metal tweeter makes a fullrange tower

9suns, you might like KH310. Meets your driver, class AB, sealed requirements. You won't get the red lights with your listening levels. SCM 20 is the least British ATC. Bigger ATCs = more British bass = more cancerous

Yeah they're not actually good dude. I think people reading this should be aware that "decent" = "not bad enough to give to Joe Walsh on a coke bender to chainsaw" != exceptional in any way other than a sort of uniform mediocrity

 

amphion are just as good as kh310, i personally think they are less veiled

calling amphion mediocre and then praising kh310 is nonsense. everyone in this thread who HAD both prefered the amphion.
https://www.gearslutz.com/board/high-end/1006109-amphion-one18-two18-vs-neumann-kh310.html

clearly, you havent spent enough time on amphion to have a serious opinion

the amount of pro who have compare both amphion one18 vs kh310 in the same room is a testament that both kh310 and Amphion are at the very least at the same level, most comparison of both will give advantage to Amphion.

 

Lol just as good. Fuk outta here with that bs. Kh310 have a shitload more detail due to the sealed box, active crossover not muffling transients even more, and dedicated midrange dome. You just hate bass and love recessed mids and mediocre metal tweeters vs decent soft domes.

You don’t have to eat the entire bag of Fritos to know what Fritos taste like and evaluate their nutritional worth compared to an apple. Same with meh speakers

Nobody gives a shit what some people like. Some people like Fritos. Some people like Harbeths...

 

dude, its not that serious. I personally doubt that if you had both in the room, youd hate the amphion. kh310 are good, amphion are good and harbeth are also good.

I hate bass? i sold my shl5+ to go with bigger speaker cause my genelec 1037 bass is what I want and no 8 inch can do what a 12 inch do in the bass

 

This thread has taught me that, since apparently all speakers suck, I no longer need to expend any more energy trying to improve my setup in that area. Since I consider my current setup to be mediocre, apparently I am already way ahead of the game, so... more music it is. Perfect.

 

Welcome to Emo-Fi

 

Lol citing Gearslutz impressions. Head-fi of pro audio.

Good to know. The Amphions definitely have a sort of "smoothing" compared to the Genelecs I've heard, which use a Seas tweeter. Know of any active speakers that use the Seas metal drivers or is it a diy project only? I know Barefoot uses metal drivers but I'm not sure if they're Seas

Edit: Unity Audio apparently does. I'll try to check it out sometime.

 

maybe I should open another thread about active systems, but I intent to go this way with my new project.

I was thinking about a Behringer DCX2496, whats your opinion on the best active xo around?

 

If money were no object I'd go with a MiniDSP DDRC-88D with multiple Gumbies. Or if Dirac not needed/wanted, the nanoDIGI 2x8 B.

If you didn't mind being reliant on a computer you could do the DSP in software and use one of those Lynx cards to feed multiple DACs.

Obv this is specific to a digital source system.

 

I was looking into similar active monitors awhile ago and came across these that use SEAS variants: APS Trinity or Aeon, Dutch & Dutch 8c, Grimm Audio LS1, Unity Audio Boulder MkII.

 

The DCX2496 is good and cheap, it's easy to program on the fly without a computer, and there are plenty of mods out there. I've had meh experience with the build quality/reliability though, and static/popping noise problems are common and difficult to diagnose.

I've tried DBX processors and they are a step up sonically (if you want me to qualify that... uh, it's like going from Dragonfly to Modi 2).
edit: compared to feeding analog signals into both; I never got a chance to compare feeding digital vs analog with the Behringer, at least not in any controlled scenario where I would have been able to make reasonable judgement calls