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New and Old HiFi - Old Happy Man
andrewfi:
If you have £3000 for a pair of new speakers then you would be foolish to spend it on a system built around Chinese clone and Onkyo components. Onkyo is fine budget kit. You don't pair a £300 amp with £3000 speakers.
andrewfi:
I decided to bite the bullet and buy some new speakers.
I am now awaiting the delivery of a pair of B&O Beolab 8000 active speakers. Like the Beocentre 9000 they are secondhand. Costing me £185 just to have then shipped over to me. They weight around 40Kilos, hence the cost of delivery.
As active speakers, each speaker has two amplifiers built-in, one amp powers the bass units and the other handles just the tweeter. I heard these things years ago and loved them, never imagined I'd have a set in my living room. These were over £3000 new.
The 9000 is sounding great even now through the Sony speakers so I am looking forward to an end to end B&O setup.
I decided against the Penta speakers, largely because I love the iconic look of the 8000s. The imaging from the 8000s is something I really like. One is not listening to speakers, they become invisible in the listening. In the same way that my old favourites JR150s did before they were burgled from my apartment many years ago. Like the JRs these are made from aluminium, very heavily damped and designed to create a very broad soundstage almost independent of positioning.
These slender beauties stand around 1.4 meters high and, should I choose can be fed directly with the output from my DAC to give the best quality input. Set up with a direct feed from the DAC they will be getting a better quality source than anything possible when they were designed.
LoyalMan:
Are you setting up A/V or Hi-Fi?!? How could these speakers sound clear and sharp?
They will shake!
andrewfi:
--- Quote from: LoyalMan on November 18, 2019, 01:28:14 PM ---Are you setting up A/V or Hi-Fi?!? How could these speakers sound clear and sharp?
They will shake!
--- End quote ---
They do not shake. They are well designed, well-engineered, and well made. They are as well made as one would expect of a pair of speakers retailing at a price well in excess of $4000 when sold 13 years ago would sound. And, as I noted, I have heard them. I used to sell this stuff - but not B&O equipment. As it happens they are somewhat overmatched against the Beocentre I recently purchased, but not against the DAC that I am also using.
Not that I'd expect you to know much about this stuff, but these speakers have a tiny volume, just over 5 litres. Each unit weighs 20 kilos, that's a huge weight for such small enclosures. The system is designed to have a very low centre of gravity. While the conical end of the speakers looks very slender that 'point' measures a couple of centimeters across and is manufactured to be very stiff. If you ever come across a pair of these speakers try tapping one of them. You'll hear a low thud. They are very dense and very well damped. Extruded aluminium is very stiff - ideal for loudspeakers. My previous high-end speakers were also made of aluminium, unlike these, they used sheet metal fashioned as a pressure vessel to obtain similar, but inferior, properties at a much lower cost.
The high damping factor comes because aluminium has half the mass of steel. At the same weight, a sheet of aluminium is twice as stiff as steel and thus much less resonant. That's why they sound very dead when tapped with a knuckle. Tapping a speaker is an old, but very useful, way to assess the basic construction quality and thus the likely sound quality of a loudspeaker. The more 'dead' a speaker cabinet the better it will sound when comparing like for like in all other aspects.
At the price I am paying, I am buying a bargain. There's no way to expect similarly priced units (around £800/$1000) to sound anything like as good as these units. It is worth noting that while there have been huge advances in the design and performance of sources and even amplification, output performance has not improved anything like as much over the past 20 or so years.
LoyalMan:
Andrewfi,
Do you think whether a standard stereo 4 x EL34 tube amp can push a ATC SCM 11 bookshelf stereo speakers pair?
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