I had a period of no half decent hifi so I'll start with my modern journey back in to hifi.
My first modern speakers were dali spektor (2s I think) which were a nice listen at the time, they had their weaknesses coloured boxy sound when pushed due to the thin walls. I tried quad S2s after that which had much thicker walls and less colouration, good speakers, a little laid back but due to my square room the bass was too heavy and bunging the ports didn't sound right.
I think I had kralk audio TDB 2s after that which have been the most fun speakers I've listened to so far (although that may change...)
I tried wharfedale reva 2s which were far too fluffy and vague with bass and laid back in presentation, lots of missing detail.
I bought the monacor katana m1 kits and made open baffles, not bad but power hungry to sound well... Full range driver is clearly not full range so remodelled in basta, created a first order band pass on the full range driver and added dayton audio amt mini-8s crossed around 5.7k...
I had to make a lot of adjustments by ear and ended up with a third order on the tweeter.
I also added a notch filter to correct a peak. They're good but need more room than I can give them. I still have these.
I then tried some avi biggatrons, they needed refurbishing and I ended up putting new tweeters in them. They were pretty disappointing, maybe just a sound I don't like.
Then I had some kralk TDB 6s which were great but too big for my space and they would quickly overwhelm it although it's well acoustically treated.
I've learned that when it comes to boxes sealed and small drivers work best in my room so I bought some kralk BC30 MK2's with PAW stands. They have been described in reviews as being like the ls3/5a only much clearer. They have a very flat response and are ideal for me to use for monitoring purposes when I need to. I love them, they're not all boom and fizz or coloured but they're the best speakers I've owned, accurate, articulate and clean.
My square room acoustics give me crazy bass issues that bass lovers can only dream of but in an effort to get less room interaction I designed and made a pair of open baffle subs using bianco 15ob350 15'' drivers and wings.. Modelled in basta and again, some hours of tweeking to get right. They're amazingly clean sounding and because my room picks up the bottom end so much they go low. You don't notice them in most music but they go heavy when it's there in the music.
That brings us up to now. Recently I bought the ex demo cube 3s and they're now back with the upgraded tweeters.
If you've seen my picture in the 'view from your listening chair' thread you'll know I have 90% of a motorbike in pieces in front of my system and the speakers are pushed back against the wall so not ideal!
I will be doing some reviewing and hopefully detailed write up on the cube 3s but for now I have managed to pull them out a little bit and they're sounding good.
This will be good incentive to get the bike out the way
I didn't really want to remodel my subs to integrate them with the cubes as the crossovers are in cases glued together suspiciously like an NVA case.
The cubes go deeper than kralks so I needed to drop the subs sensitivity a few dB and to save going into the crossover cases I modelled them in basta again without the wings which gave me a few dB drop in sensitivity and a slightly steeper drop-off from 50hz and below so pretty ideal for now.
Here's a pic I took before the cubes were sent back for the tweeter upgrade
