I had actually been working on a long writeup the past few days, but I feel like it's too verbose, so I'm just going to post up pictures and some quips.
Long story short, I've come to like the bipolar sound for my 2-channel living room setup, because it makes for a deep, wide stage without having to have a ton of speakers and wires. It'll never rival an actual cinema or any of you guys' 11/13/gazillion channel setups, but it works in my home with a decent WAF.
I've got 3 pairs of bipolar speakers now- Cambridge Soundworks Towers, Definitive BP30's and Paradigm Eclipse BP/a's. All of these are mid to late 1990's vintage. This is a comparison (physical and subjective) only of the DefTech and Paradigm speakers.
As far as looks go, well you have 2001 Monolith vs slightly smaller 2001 Monolith. Take your pick.
Oak end caps were available for each of these models, but when you're hunting down 25 year old speakers, you get what you get. And in both instances, I got black.
But as we know, even Early Man could appreciate a good bipolar speaker:
The Paradigm's ("BPA's" from now on) stand over 50" tall and weigh 95 pounds apiece. The BP30's are 46" tall and listed at 80 pounds each, but really feel lighter. I can dead lift the BP30's but not the BPA's. One nice thing is that they have a very narrow presence and there are no visible drivers for grandkids to poke in. They really don't notice these speakers.
DefTech originated in the early 1990's with the original BP10's and BP20's. The BP30's are one of their 2nd-gen products which used in-house drivers instead of off the shelf Vifa drivers of the first-generation. The Paradigm BP speakers were a short-lived venture to compete with DefTech. There was an original Eclipse BP with black woofers (shared with their Reference Studio 100's) and then the BPA's with 8" yellow woofers. I can't find any other Paradigm speakers with yellow 8"s, so they must have been designed specifically for this speaker. Sorry Pogre, but no condoms were abused in the manufacture of this speaker.
Driver arrays: both speakers are 2-ways. BPA's have an 8" woofer and 1" tweeter on front and back, while the BP30's have two 6.5" woofers and a 1" tweeter in MTM config on both sides.
A couple things to note... First, the BPA tweeter is a whopping 47" above floor level while the BP30's is a more expected 35". In practice, the BPA's tweeter elevation did not affect how I heard them. Even doing some stand-up/sit-down listening it seemed irrelevant to my ears. Second, I replaced the BPAs' front tweeters. The stock Vifa domes that Paradigm used were overly sibilant and unpleasant. These are the 3rd set of vintage speakers I've owned with aluminum Vifa's, and I've had the same negative opinion of all of them. The replacements are Peerless D27TG-35-06 soft domes.
They fit the factory tweeter plates (Peerless and ScanSpeak have some kind of lineage from Vifa), but I had to snip the waveguides to keep the tweeters from being pushed in:
No matter there since the soft domes were meant to disperse freely anyway. On the rears, I left the stock tweeters:
A little bit better closeup of the BP30 driver arrangement. The tweeters are slightly offset to the left on both speakers, which pegs my OCD meter. At least I can't see them since I leave the socks pulled up.
Well, I'm all out of pictures, so we get to the "how do they sound?" part!
I listened to some music on CD's and then watched some shows and a couple of movies. I played with positioning and angling some, but my placement options are limited so I kept the speakers more or less near where they would be used in real life. My receiver (Marantz NR1200) has a speaker selector button on the remote so I could make very quick changes and not have to
get my fat ass off the couch move from my listening position.
Imaging and soundstage were practically identical, as far as I could tell. The thing about bipolar speakers is that the reflected and reverberated sound will make studio recordings sound live, so that kind of depth of stage something you'd have to want. In my case the living room will be 99% streaming and 1% music so it's not a big deal. While I do
like the way music sounds, it's just so
different from what I'd hear from monopole speakers or headphones. The BPA's tweeter being above ear level didn't seem to matter.
Efficiency: BP30's are noticeably more efficient. Switching the speaker selector from A to B then A+B and back, made it quite clear.
Treble: This was kinda inconclusive. The stock BPA tweeters were plainly offensive to my ears, but the replacements I chose, while pleasant sounding, might be a bit too dark. In a movie I watched that had several scenes with heavy rain, there was a big difference in pitch between the BPA's and BP30's. Not being sure which was "right" or "wrong" I went upstairs and listened to the same scene on the T&A's and it was somewhere in between, but overall closer in pitch to the BP30's. So the BPA's with Peerless tweeters have more pleasant highs with music, but aren't as dynamic for video. While the BP30's are brighter than my reference, they are not offensively so, lacking the annoying SSSSiZZZZle of the Vifa tweeters.
Midrange: Here's where Paradigm did their homework. When I bought the Cambridge bipolar towers (3-way), I noticed they had a bloated lower midrange, no doubt an effect of dual mids operating at the same frequency band. The BPA's do not suffer from this at all. They play as flat and clear in the midrange spectrum as any good hifi speaker should. Maybe that's a trait of those yellow woofers that they designed for this speaker.
I'm gonna copy my thought on the BP30's midrange word for word from my full-form writeup:
And then the BP30's... If I had designed these speakers, I'd have made them a 2.5-way, and hi-pass the lower woofers at around 150Hz. Their lower midrange output is quite potent. Not necessarily overbearing, but stronger than I feel it should be (and why not? How many other speakers are using 4 midrange drivers?). On music it's easy to prefer the BPA's because they seem tonally flatter. I am going to have to bring the Cambridge Towers back downstairs and compare, because I remember them having a strong lower midrange as well. In terms of higher midrange (up to the tweeter crossover anyway) the BP30's were fine. On some music tracks I rewound (how do you rewind a CD?) and listened to certain passages on both speakers where it could be easy to miss background details. No details were lost with the BP30's, I heard everything, but the strength of the lower mids made my ears not put the same emphasis on minutiae. I guess the best way to phrase it would be "I heard that on the BP30's, but if I didn't already know it was there I wouldn't have been listening for it." Hope that makes some kind of sense. Now, in movies, where everything's happening fast, and your eyes coordinate with your ears, this midrange emphasis can actually immerse you deeper. But male voices still will be more prominent than female.
Bass: BP30's win. Big time. They're more efficient, have more cone area, have better extension. The BPA's have nice clean articulate bass, but the BP30's best it, and can slam when they need to. I was very impressed that DefTech wrung that kind of bass from such a smaller cabinet!
In three words:
BPA's: "polite and articulate"
BP30's: "lively and fun"
I'm going to move the Paradigm's upstairs and have them complement my T&A's. I'll switch to them for games and the odd times I stream video from my PC. The BP30's will remain in the living room, where I find them better suited.
Thanks if you made it this far. Thanks for nothing if you didn't.
Keep in mind, this is the short version of what I had written up. Whew!
