neutral sounding entry level desktop speakers

[491326]

i'm not going to buy, but I was curious about something. for me, a lot of audio gear in the lower tiers tend to be v or u shaped. does that happen in speakers too? if I wanted to buy an entry level desktop speaker setup with a relatively neutral sound sig, what should I get?

 

[Me x3]

JBL LSR305

 

[ProtegeManiac]

i'm not going to buy, but I was curious about something. for me, a lot of audio gear in the lower tiers tend to be v or u shaped. does that happen in speakers too?

Depends. If by entry level you mean a boombox, then yes, it'll be "V-shaped" (technically not a V...).

What you're most likely to get is an "M" shape. Boosted upper bass but rolls off earlier, even at nearfield distance plus some peak in the treble, because you can't just override physics without a lot of engineering and cost involved. It's relatively easy to make a decent headphone that has a wide and tall bass plateau that doesn't roll off too early since it's right there by your ear canals (ie response varies depending on distance from the drivers, which is how what would normally be a midrange-tweeter for a speaker can be the basis of a design for planar headphones), but when it comes to a speaker that has to produce bass at that distance, you run into a lot more of the issues of balancing driver size. Too small and bass response drops sharply the farther you are (save for room modes that might do the opposite), too large and the upper range response rolls off earlier, necessitating a more complex 3-way design that just requires you to sit farther away to minimize path length variances (sit too close and the bass can sound like it's set too low spatially).

And then in the same manner that fullrange drivers can tend to have a treble peak (most dynamic headphones; yes, even the HD650, just not too tall at a low enough freq to be audibly sharp) or lower treble peak (HD600), using more than one driver gets complicated due to the crossover design, which results in a peak (hence the cursive M response (ie not actually a "V") due to an overlap or not being able to cut the tweeter high enough, or in some cases, a dip in the response where the tweeter and midwoofer are supposed to meet.

If this is for a desktop system you'd be better off with an active monitor. They tend to have better low bass extension than passive speakers with the same size midwoofer (since passive speaker buyers, as per marketing, would probably just get a 2-way tower with more aggressive but still not bumbling port tuning, or a 3-way tower, if they wanted more bass) and they have relative gain control for the amp channels driving the tweeters. If they're too bright you just reduce the gain on the tweeters' amp channels.

if I wanted to buy an entry level desktop speaker setup with a relatively neutral sound sig, what should I get?

KRK Rokit 6 or JBL LSR305 (the JBL sounds a lot brighter out of the box but get the aiming or height installation right, then just reduce the tweeter amps' gain).

Alternately if you want Master-Slave designs made primarily for home users and not music producers, there's the HiVi M200MkIII.

 

[491326]

@ProtegeManiac thank you!

 

[PaganDL]

Hi Pithyginger63,

Agree with PortegeManic, who always give good advice.

Honestly, go active speakers or monitors as they're called in the pro world, also look into the sub category nearfield speakers.
As was stated, they tend to have the most control over the sound be it by external controls, software or just in design, eg what technology &/or design is implemented to make it work better as they all play a part.

However, the most important thing to remember whether it's speakers or headphones is QUALITY SOURCE MATTERS, always, if your source isn't good then it's going to be bad, no matter how good your equipment.

 

[RRod]

Check out noaudiophile, who has many speakers with EQ corrections to get you some bang for the buck.