Mel Patrick
January 23, 2008

Rating: 8/10

I purchased two of these to use as far field studio monitors, with a secondary use as PA speakers. I tested them with a Tapco J800 and a Behringer A500 Reference amp and did a real time audio test for frequency response. What follows are my findings and observations.

To start with these are bass reflex cabs. The bottom of the cab is a full width bass port. Inside the cab is a wood baffle, some sound deadening material, a horn tweeter, 6.5\" sealed midrange and 15\" open frame woofer. If you\'re thinking the bass will pound out of these, it does somewhat, but no where near what a real subwoofer will do.

The bottom of the cab has a tripod adapter and you\'d want to lay it on it\'s side to put the tripod on. They are BIG and heavy (25Kg/55lbs). There are plastic recessed handles on each side of the cab. They seem quite well attached and considering the weight, that\'s a good thing.

Connection to the cabs is a standard 1/4\" TR jack. There are actually two of them, wired in parallel so you can wire in additional cabs if the need arises.

Construction. The cabs are covered in fuzzy carpet and inside you\'ll find a lot of MDF wood, braces and gussets for holding the thing together. These are not finger jointed cabs, but resemble something you might toss together at home over the weekend. I had a few loose gusset blocks floating around in my cabs when I got them. I suspect because they are so heavy that no one is too gentle with them. All the major structural parts were intact. There are rubber feet on the bottom of the cabs. Metal grills with a sloppily glued on logo round out the cabs.

And now the sound. Out of the box, they are quite sharp in the midrange and treble. Too sharp in my opinion. You really want to run these with a 31 band EQ to adjust for the speaker response. The results from my RTA follows:

50Hz, these start to drop off pretty fast. But then they are only rated to 50Hz so that\'s to be expected. Where you see a +db that means the speaker is louder in that range. A +- means it\'s that far off of \"flat\" or 0db. And last a - means the speaker needs to be boosted in that area to get it to a flat response.

50 - 125Hz +3db
200 - 400Hz +-1db
500 - 2500Hz +3db
3000 - 12500Hz +-1db
16000 - 20000Hz -3db

It didn\'t matter if I analyzed it with the Tapco or A500. The results were pretty much the same within a DB or so. As you can see, the \"loud\" response of these is that 500-2500 range and that\'s where you need to adjust to take it down by about 3db. The bass is also quite responsive in the low range.

The cross overs are simple passive ones but seem to do the job.

Performance. This is usually the most subjective area of any review. Mainly because we all have different criteria. However at low volume the cabs work but they really want some volume before they start to perform. I drove both cabs with no EQ from both amps (not at the same time). From about 1/3 to 2/3\'s of the amps volume, these speakers are sharp (scads of treble). However when I put in the EQ to \"flatten\" their response, they immediately sounded 10 times better. There is no way I would simply plug these in and run them without an EQ, too much midrange.

Driving the cabs with 200 watts (and EQ\'d), these are loud. If you\'re 10 feet away from them, I doubt you can scream loud enough to be heard. The dispersion seems to be quite wide horizontally, but not a lot vertically. Remove the EQ and the bass is kind of muddy, and the treble is downright painful.

So how do they stack up against the competition? To start with there aren\'t a lot of three way systems to compare with out there. Wharfdale has one, but you\'ll find it not only looks like the S1530, the description is identical too. So let\'s just put it this way. In this price range, there is nothing to compare against that I found. All of the other companies want about double (or more) for something similar. Of course for that you\'ll get a brand name and no doubt a cabinet that is constructed much better. But whether you get twice the sound for twice the money is up to your ears.

I really didn\'t expect much from these, but out of the box, they proved to be a pleasant surprise. Once EQ\'d for a flat response, I found they really perform well. If there is a down side, it\'s they are big and heavy and the cabinets could have been constructed a lot better.