The maker claims sensitivity is 96.5 dB/W, while Stereophile measured a much more believable 90.6. That isn't low, but its significantly less than 96.5.
They say this is a 3-way speaker. I thought it was a 2-way.
The off-axis response below 2 kHz does drop off in a big way. I am used to speakers that don't do that, if I heard beaming like that, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like it.
Is the crossover point near 2 kHz? There was an ugly looking resonance near that point.
The cabinet appears to have large resonances.
For $2100, I'd avoid those speakers.
The written review was classic smoke & mirrors, where the reviewer spoke more about himself than the speakers he was reviewing. Fortunately, he didn't mention those pricey crossover options.
You can tell form the impedance curve that the crossover is around 1100 Hz.
If you must use cheap woofers of paper with a corrugated surround then the designer has done a better job than you might imagine.
This speaker has much more in common with instrument speakers than Hi-Fi speakers.
The sensitivity is on the high side, but much lower than spec. Now don't confuse efficiency and sensitivity. Sensitivity is on axis. Given the beaming and narrow dispersion this speaker is on the low end of average when it comes to efficiency. You must always look at the polar response in conjunction with sensitivity, to know how much of the amp power will be delivered to the room.
This is not surprising as the speaker has a pretty decent bass response as far as extension goes. As I have said before there is an inverse relationship with bass extension and sensitivity/efficiency. So it should be no surprise that this speaker is not stellar in the efficiency stakes.
You can tell from the measurements that this speaker is relatively high Q to get the last ounce of bass extension. I would bet that this with the cabinet resonances make this speaker a bit of a boomer.
Now to the crossover. Woofers of this type have far from smooth response at the upper end of the range. The designer has started to roll off the woofer at 200 to 300 Hz I would guess. This will deal with the BSC and ameliorate the worst effects of cone breakup and surround reflections typical of this type of woofer.
The tweeters which I'm pretty sure are SB 29R DCN types roll off at 1750 Hz, they are low Q and have a low FS. So their roll off at 1750 Hz with the electrical crossover at around 1100 Hz gets the job done. However the combined responses give a slightly depressed response. So the speaker will not be overly forward in fact in some aspects retiring.
However the waterfall response and other graphs, show considerable discontinuity in the crossover region as you would expect matching large cones with tweeters. I would expect this speaker to have only average to poor speech clarity.
At 2 KHz we see a small residual break up mode peak from the woofers. This will give it the instrument speaker quality. It will add sizzle to the lead guitar, snares and top hats, but I would doubt it is ideal for solo and massed violins, flutes and trumpets let alone vocalists especially sopranos.
Over all I suspect this is a speaker you might be pleased with if you diet is confined to rock and pop music, although you might find it too boomy and in some registers too retiring.
Not a speaker I would seek out by a long shot, but I can see some who might.
In the end I have to wonder why this designer has this obsession for mating crude cheap large woofers with a short high end tweeter arrays, when there are far better options.
