setup1 wrote:marty_e wrote:....I can't seem to coax them to open up in their current baffle design. Vocals are veiled and highs roll off...
I don't know the Hawthorne but in my years of playing around with audio one thing I always look for in any equipment specially speakers is the quality of midrange. It has to be there to begin with, driver unmounted.
Here's a tip I learned from the late Walt Bender of Audiomart and Scott Stilwell (exporters of vintage equipment to Japan) when hunting for vintage speakers; bring a pocket FM radio with a pair of alligator clips on one end and a mini-phone connector on the other to plug into the earphone jack. Tune to any station with vocals to evaluate the potential of a nondescript vintage speaker using human voice as reference. First time I heard a WE15 horn with a WE555 driver, it was being driven by 1/4W pocket FM radio. IIRC, the specs for this combo was 100hz-5khz BUT It sounded almost full range and was quite LOUD!
With tweeters and compression drivers - listen to articulation of speech or vocals, if all you hear is sibilance, tizz and sizzle, it is no good.
JE, my speaker reference will always be the LS3/5a's. I've long held a personal bias towards British mini monitors and their attendant flaws. While I acknowledge that i will not get the pinpoint imaging from an OB, what I'm looking for is the transparency and lucidity of the human voice, indeed. Horns and piano sound great as is. It's really the how I percieve the artist to be singing through a sheet of paper that I'm trying to address - either via a tweeter or some XO tweaks. i don't know really which way...