noaudiophile.com

Turn2

I found this site through a link to a pretty frank (and likely highly accurate) review of the ballyhooed Dayton MK402's. It seems like the writer and writing would fit in well here. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the originators are known here, since they were asked to review some CSS kits. If so, please feel free to step forward and accept my congratulations. That's some entertaining stuff over there. An excerpt:

"New passive bookshelf speaker from the guys over at Parts Express. The word on the street is that they have a real crossover and are a shot at quality HiFi. Expectations are through the roof from the makers of the not great, but incredibly popular B652, and the interesting sideshow experiment B652-AIR. Let's see what Team Dayton has come up with as it's budget desktop champion....

Dayton is not doing their best here. We are looking at +-5dB over the claimed response range of 60Hz-20kHz. You may be able to salvage these speakers with basic tone controls by turning up the bass a hair, and cutting the treble a bunch.

If they were going to use a first order on the tweeter the cap and resistor are both too small, so instead of flat after the crossover point the whole response of the tweeter is a climbing nasty response. A second order on the tweeter crossed lower would flatten out the response, but would put more strain on the crappy little dome tweeter. The woofer crossover looks like it's too high as well.

It is my belief that Dayton misplaced their priorities on this speaker. You don't spend your production costs on cutting fancy designs into the face of speaker boxes when you can't even put in the correct components inside of that box."

http://noaudiophile.com/index.php

jr@mac

Very entertaining reviews. I like how he offers DSP fixes - very accessible as many of the speakers he reviews are destined to be used on desktops. Perhaps a tutorial from him on how to implement it will work.

In his review of the little Elac, he prefaced by stating (and I am paraphrasing) "Can Andruw Jones walk on water?" Cracked me up like nothing else.

I will send him an invite to the forum, good call. 

jr@mac

http://noaudiophile.com/Zu/

He had a lot more patience with the Zu crap than I did. He also has a better sense of humor on them.

6thplanet

Since I work for Bose now I had to read the 901 review, he pretty much nails it dead on. He is wrong about the port configuration. The ports on the back are the only ones it has. The ones on each end with the “aero” devise are shared by the four drivers around it. The one little hole in the middle is the “port” for the front driver. If you remove the grill on the front it looks like there are ports there too, but it’s not. It’s actually where those aero pieces are plastic welded onto the enclosure. 

Kornbread

He mentioned Stereophile in his review of the Zu.  One thing I did like about Stereophile was they always followed a review with measurements, and those measurements were kept basically the same throughout the years.  This allowed the reader to take the reviewer's impression, along with their interpretation of the data, to 'sort of' make their own review of the product.  Also, IMO, using those measurements over the years was revealing of how certain reviewers had a preference for a certain sound, which could also be taken into consideration when reading their review.  IIRC, TAS never measured, and I always questioned their validity.  Stereo Review measured and said everything that measures the same, sounds the same.  I was always somewhere in-between, and Stereophile landed in the middle.     

S7910

Thanks for the link to his site. I've read through the Dayton review and I really like his evaluation style.

The woofer in the Dayton review looks for all the world like the smaller brother to the POS driver I threw away when rebuilding a JVC subwoofer because it was supposedly blown.