Speakers that surprised you [message #73949] |
Tue, 25 September 2012 20:38 |
Damon73
Messages: 45 Registered: February 2012
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Baron |
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Have you ever been surprised by the quality of another person's speakers? The other day my friend was bragging about how great his Bose 301 speakers sounded, and I was very skeptical. They actually sounded pretty good though. My overall opinion of Bose wasn't changed, but I can see why some people like some of their products.
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Re: Speakers that surprised you [message #74488 is a reply to message #73949] |
Fri, 16 November 2012 18:46 |
24KPython
Messages: 16 Registered: October 2012 Location: San Diego, CA
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Chancellor |
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While Bose products are ingeniusly engineered, they're neither audiophile nor pro sound quality, but are designed for a different experience, based on Dr. Bose's subjective feeling that recordings are too harsh and need to be softened. Bose speakers therefore can't be used as a studio monitor, because they deliberately introduce acoustic distortion in the form of diffuse reflections. Personally, as an audiophile and studio engineer -- who is interested in hearing what's actually on the recording -- I find the "Bose sound" terribly distorted, and I find the noise-reduction headphones so ridiculous as to be unlistenable.
That said... * To answer the original question *
Some speakers that really surprised me:
SoundPax Flat NXT Speakers, which are like a small plastic loudspeaker motor attached to a piece of flat cardboard.
Obviously designed only for unusual consumer applications, the big surprise was that they worked at all! But an even bigger surprise was after playing around with different constructions, I found that if you could ignore a few glaring inadequacies, they could actually sound pretty good! I removed the cardboard and attached a large piece of foam core, since it resonates so readily, and found them to actually be very pleasant to listen to, with a surprising amount of detail, given what a silly type of speaker I was listening to. I thought it was really neat that you could actually stick them to the back of a foam-core-mounted poster and have a decent sounding "mystery sound system".
Read this review on AudioNirvana to read someone else's experience.
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