Speaker Advice for Bitzie System (Take II)

I'm not a fan of putting speakers into wooden boxes. It's typically just a waste of sound transparency in my opinion unless some serious thought has gone into the characteristics of the enclosure. For nearfield listening, I feel the disadvantages of the traditional timber box design far outweigh the benefits. I would evaluate the sound of any speaker based on a direct comparison with the AKG K1000. I expect a good speaker to be a genuine upgrade to what the K1000 provides. I think LS3/5a and others seriously suck in comparison. The stereo field may be larger but the frequency accuracy is dreadful in comparison IMO. The LS3/5a V2 costs over £1000 too. WTF?! For a box speaker with conventional drivers that offers very little original thinking... All four pairs of my specialist Mark Audio drivers cost about £850 collectively, with £200 to spare for enclosure/baffle materials if the total cost were to equate to the approx £1040 spend for the LS3/5a V2. Hell, I could put one pair of my £240 Alpair 12P in big thick cardboard boxes and I bet they'd blow the LS3/5a out of the water if you compared the sound obtainable.

So if you're willing to shell out many hundreds of pounds for active box speakers like the Genelecs, might be worth saving your money for a few more months instead and allocating about £1200 to the Proprius then just use cheap generic cables and entry-level approx £80 pair of Mark Audio drivers to get you started. Just the way I look at it though.

I use Focal CMS40 for my pc audio/gaming. They are very well reviewed if that means anything. I find them pretty good - nice even tonality & transparency and I preferred them to several others I listened to, incl Adam (A7x from memory). I bought them from a some pro audio shop where they had about 10 pairs of speakers on a switch box thingy. They have HF & LF filters which can help tailor the sound to your liking. A bit flat soundstaging wise, but they are plonked on a desk either side of a pc monitor so maybe not surprising. Quite expensive tho' I didn't realise when I first started looking at pro monitors that they are typically priced as singles.


Edited by DaveG - 01 Nov 2016 at 7:43am

I agree with drewans opening paragraph and the remainder appears logical though Ill infomed to comment from any experience.

Whilst I believe a lot of speakers may not be that well engineered or designed if open baffle designs were the best generic design I am sure someone somewhere would have made a mint from them by now.

That isn't to suggest they cannot work and there are a few I am aware of who do use open drivers on HF units for example and or in specific location but probably not as a general rule.

I suspect that we're ash does have a very valid point is that many speakers are probably not well designed in the first place. And good engineering can overcome inherent issues in design.