$4000 Revel VS $350 Wharfedale | The Results Might Surprise You!

hey everybody welcome back to gr research where today we're gonna dive right in we're gonna we're gonna dive right into a little speaker comparison another tale of two speakers so to speak we have to my right over here the revell performa to my left the wharfdale diamond 9.1 very similar in a lot of ways these two speakers not so similar in other ways for instance the price of these speakers four thousand dollars a pair here to my right by the reveal the wharf deal i think 350 dollars a pair so big difference in price points so let's see what you get for your money let's look at the cabinet first the revell cabinet is three-quarter inch mdf and i say that kind of loosely it looks like mdf it's it's dark material looks like maybe a chinese mdf which looks very different from the mdf that we make here in the us which is a much lighter color and is denser but it looks really nice got one brace running through it here and there's a black inlay across the top that's really pretty and it looks like it may have some veneer with a really high gloss over it i mean the gloss is it's sprayed on thick it looks gorgeous the wharfdale is 5 8 inch mdf and it is kind of the type of mdf you can almost just dig your finger into it has been folded if you see the shape of it here it's got a curved shape and what they've done is they've gone in and groove cut it on the inside and then just bent it and glued it together and then they put a laminate around the outside of it which looks really good if this is just a lamina at least the the grooves that they cut through it on the inside has been filled with some type of material looks to me like rock hard water putty i don't know if you can see it in the video there but they did fill all the material unlike sonos faber models that we've had in here where they've cut slits in and folded it and just left it then at least it's thickened up a little bit and it doesn't appear to be real resonant but a nice little box so drivers let's look at the tweeters on these models the tweeter on the reveal is got a quite a quite a good-sized ceramic motor on it it's probably got a bucking magnet on here in a shielding cup which makes it really really heavy i want to say it's probably an aluminum dome with a light beryllium coating on it more than likely they do call it a beryllium tweeter but i say that loosely not too many drivers are all beryllium i don't know you guys can look that up and figure that out for yourselves the wharf dale obviously is a soft dome tweeter small neodymium magnet on the back well made measured pretty well and inexpensive in the way that it's made so yeah two different ways of going about it kind of a little bit different sound from the harder dome materials to the softer dome i kind of lean towards the softer dome materials myself woofers six inch woofer pretty good throw on this thing nice suspension aluminum cone i'm guessing nicely done caspering nothing super special there but nicely done i'm not a big fan of the metal type cones but uh the wharf dale um lighter weight smaller five inch diameter driver looks like some type of a carbon fiber it's shielded also so it's got a bucking magnet on it with a shielding cup uh nicely done um parts quality wise you get what you expect for 350 dollars the parts that are in here it is an air core inductor on the tweeter circuit um two electrolytic caps one sand cast resistor one little iron core inductor on the woofer so to eight dollars worth of parts maybe um stepping up to the reveal remember we're going from a 350 dollar speaker to a 4 000 speaker what'd you get well you got all air core inductors and they're all what looks like maybe 16 gauge air core inductors so good start caps are poly caps that's good uh brand caps and little sand cast resistors they fell a little short there um crossover since i've seen the bennek caps on there more than likely the whole thing's made in china binneco thinks the taiwanese company but they do all they're simply there in china i'm guessing 12 to 18 dollars worth of parts here so for your extra money you got 10 or 12 dollars worth more in parts maybe um not not a lot difference there but it is better quality and it's as good or better than the mass-produced stuff that i see coming through here quite often let's look at the measurements let's see how these things measure let's start with let's start with the little wharfdale speaker if we look at the on-axis response we see that it's fairly smooth probably within plus or minus two and a half db but it's voiced a little lower on the tweeter and the tweeter in is down there's a little hump there in the tweeter's response so a little lumpy but overall pretty smooth if you look at the horizontal off axis response we see it drops off really smoothly in the horizontal off axis and if we look at the vertical off axis we see very little change in the vertical off axis which one of the reasons for that is if you see this this cut area here on the tweeter that's to get this woofer mounted right up close to it you can see here the way this thing mounts up there it gets them right up there on each other actually i have to spin this thing around this way there we go and then it gets them right right up on there so we've got close center to center spacing now there's an advantage when you go to a close center to center spacing so that means as you move the microphone or your ear up or down you're not changing the time delay between the two drivers very much so it's staying in phase over a wide range in other words the sound doesn't change as much and it has more of an even room response so kudos to warfdell on that one and then spectral decay super clean clean spectral decay a little bit going on down low but overall pretty good for your money you got good drivers you got some good engineering but they they cheaped out on the parts a little bit um binding posts on the back there is two sets of binding posts on the back they've got some of these little clips there that hold them um link them together and the nuts on the back and the terminals that you connect to were all steel so there's a little bit of ferromagnetic parts in there these they cheaped out a little bit there how about the revel what did you get for all this extra thousands of dollars well let's look at the measured response of the reveal if you see just the on-axis frequency response i moved around with the height a little bit to try and get as good as i could and it's probably still within plus or minus two but the top end is a little soft on it the tweeters voice down a little bit and as i move the microphone down right at tweeter axis look at the crossover response you can see the tweeter level's a little low and the response out of this tweet is a little bit lumpy but it seems to some okay the horizontal off axis looks pretty good looks smooth vertical off axis also looks pretty good you can see a little bit of a dipped area uh right at the crossover point that starts as you start getting a little bit higher up the scale but overall they're staying in phase over a pretty good range spectral decay on it also looks really clean the impedance on it is a little bit of a mismatch um it's a little higher at the end there at the at the tweeter but overall not too bad not too bad so both of them measure pretty well um this one is um let's see that one is a four ohm speaker at least down at the at the woofer end it stays around four and a half ohms or something like that it looked like um the wharfdale is definitely a forum speaker it's 3.9 ohm load so keep in mind whenever you're powering either of these that you're going to have to have something that's going to be happy with those low impedance loads so if you're ganging up a bunch of these on a home theater receiver it's probably not going to like it so all that being said looking at it what to do to these things so i went to work on the revel i knocked the cat the resistor off of there and the tweeter circuit because the tweeter level was down and so i replaced this 8 ohm resistor with a 6 and here's what happened if you look at the new measurement you'll see it looks very much the same but i brought the tweeter level up just a little bit and balanced it out that's all there is to it if you look at the rest of the measurements look at the horizontal off axis you'll see it's a little bit better horizontally because the tweeter isn't down so much in output vertical off axis still looks the same um the impedance at the tweeter end came down a little bit because we went down on the resistor value so it's a little bit more balanced now than it was and the spectral decay again looks really clean it looks good it's a good spectral decay so what do i recommend for upgrading this thing well i recommend the the inductors are okay they're air core inductors i'm sure they're probably made in china and everything but they're okay what needs to be replaced is the cheap benic poly caps and these um sand cast resistor so knocking those four parts off the board replacing them with sonic caps replacing the six ohm resistor with the mills and replacing the resistor in the woofer circuit with a link resistor that's going to give you a lot more clarity a lot better detail we're going to get rid of this wiring this is just pvc jacketed wire we're going to get some good high quality wire in there we're going to drop the binding post which the binding posts on this were not too bad look at the binding posts at least there were no feral magnetic parts in this one it was all probably all brass but not bad so a set of tube connectors is going to make a nice improvement in clarity there not as big of an improvement as it's going to make over here on this side where we've got parts that are steel that's going to be a very significant improvement so new new caps resistors two connectors new wiring total is dollars and if throwing a sheet of no rose to tighten up a little this box resonance a little bit we're at 258 258 for the upgrade on that so not bad you're already into it for four grand 258 you're going to bring the tweeter level up to balanced you're going to get a lot more clarity a lot better detail um the imaging and stuff is going to improve because your spatial cues are going to be not so smeared by the capacitors so nice little improvement is it worth 258 dollars to go through and deck these things out probably so i mean you've got that much in them they're pretty nice speaker that's you think hey that's not much more might be a worthy upgrade what about the speaker that's only 350 dollars what about this little wharf deal um and i took some measurements of these drivers with no network on it i'll throw that up now the they were not that bad uh the woofer was pretty smooth it's got got a few little wrinkles there but overall not bad here's what i did with this i i just started over designing a new network because it doesn't take me that long to design a network for this thing and now it's better than plus or minus one db i mean this thing is smooth nice crossover range had to put a little notch filter on the tweeter to bring that little peaked area down but overall this thing is balanced spectral decay is super clean so good there horizontal off axis drops off pretty pretty well there's a little bit of a humped area there around 000 but in the off axis only but not much now look at the vertical off axis this is super impressive i just don't see this that often and i gotta i got to talk about it there's four measurements that i took in the vertical off x's one at the tweeter this is at one meter and then four inches up per measurement hardly changed i mean the time arrival of the drivers staying in phase over that wider range it's still perfect it's still it's fantastic so this is going to give a really really good even room response so really good at this point and uh the impedance it's still 3.9 ohms at the and it dipped a little more at the tweeter end the the notch filter i had to put in there dropped it a little bit more but it's up there high in frequency i don't think that's going to be a problem what do the upgrade cost so now we're talking all new parts but we're only talking one son of cap that's in the tweeter circuit there's one little notch filter in the tweeter circuit and then these two parts that's all that's there and then we have one inductor on the woofer with one cap and a resistor there parts total plus the two connectors and new wiring two hundred and nine dollars it came the totals came to exactly the same throwing a sheet of no res you're at uh 258 bucks so it's the exact same cost for this upgrade as it is for this upgrade now would you spend 258 bucks on a 350 dollar speaker hmm you're almost spinning within you know less than 90 dollars of the cost of the whole speaker but let's look at what you get when you're done because a lot of people say well why would i waste my time upgrading a cheap speaker like that i'd just buy a better speaker to begin with did you get a better speaker to begin with i would take this one with the upgrades over the stock revel any day and with the upgrades if we do all the upgrades to both of these these may be close these may be really really close some people may prefer the sound of the ravel it definitely has a bigger woofer it's got a little more throw there probably has a little better bass response digs a little lower this one's definitely going to need a sub with it but if you added a sub to both of them you may not real really miss the fact that this has a smaller woofer and doesn't have as much excursion so it's could be a little give and take there are going to be people who like the sound of this soft dome tweeter and this type of material over the metal cones they will be people who like the sound of this one upgraded over the sound of the rebel upgraded there's going to be some people who may like the sound of the revell or the sound of the wharf dell but i'm going to say these are going to be very level playing field speakers once you go through and you remove all the bottlenecks like you see here we get this stuff out of the signal path and all the little cheap parts and upgrade to much higher quality parts these babies are going to really sing so you're under 600 bucks here 4 300 bucks here somewhere in that neighborhood maybe for upgrades to both of them fully finished and ready to play hmm which is the better value i'm going to leave that up to you guys and i'm going to leave it up to all you guys who own these that i know are going to order all these kits and you guys can tell me what you think afterward that's it for this episode i hope you guys liked it we got more speaker stuff to come i'm just plowing through this stuff as fast as i can we'll see you guys in the next episode

Channel: GR-Research

Views: 271,545

Rating: 4.8652496 out of 5

Keywords: Tuesday Tech Talk, audiophile, hifi, loudspeaker, fullrange driver, comb filtering, GR-Research, Danny Richie, crossover design, measurements, best loudspeakers, tube amplifier, preamplifier, diy speakers, audiophile speakers, audiophile music, amplifier, best voice, audiophiles, high end, open baffle, fast bass, subwoofers, drivers, high power handling, low distortion, the room, speaker upgrade, audiophile loudspeakers, crossovers, DIY Audio, soundstage, Revel, Wharfedale

Id: 1S-jTJK43t0

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Ontario0000]

Is this shocking to anyone in Audio.Sorry but one the biggest hype in audio is audio cables.My brother in law is a engineer and somewhat a audiophile and when he reads some of the ads for $5000 cables he just laughs when they try to use some scientific jargon to promote the cables.I've been a "audiophile" for decades and what gets me excited these days are ChiFi items coming out that cost $75 for IEM and $700 for class D amps that sound damn amazing.

[u/waterfromthecrowtrap]

Genuinely feels like diminishing returns heavily intersecting economies of scale and more money being spent on the appearance of the cabs. Most people won't open up a speaker to make changes, so talking tweaks for optimization is great for DIYers but not helpful for the general market. Cool video. Like seeing comparisons show how DIY efforts can wring more out of both.

This reminds me of people buying sleeper performance cars and wringing them out (the old 80s Buick Grand National is an amazing example) to get wild bang for the buck. Glad someone is doing side-by-side like this. Maybe we'll find the Grand National of budget speakers if we keep pressing in this method.

[u/clipperdouglas29]

Funny - I love Revels, but the vids making me realize I love Revel's at second hand prices

I bought my Revel M16's used for not much more than the Wharfedales. And the previous owner actually did the upgrades to the crossover caps being discussed here. Although I haven't AB tested with an unmodded to really tell the difference. But prior had used M12's that I loved as well. Their retail prices really are outside of what I'd consider paying for though.

[u/Fi-B]

So I went for Wharfedale Linton Heritage speakers, largely because at the time Harbeth/Spendor and similar models were too dear for me. The Lintons comfortably outperform my first ever speakers - B&W DM2a, which cost the equivalent of about £2350 today, twice what I spent on the Lintons, with stands. At 65, I’m probably wise enough not to spend more on a difference that might not be there, and is beyond my hearing if it is. Whatever else, British design and Chinese manufacturing has brought down the entry cost. I’ve subsequently bought a pair of Wharfedale Denton 85s just to play with. And they’re probably closer in overall capability to the DM2s at a quarter of the price in real terms. I’d love UK-built speakers but can’t justify them without a windfall of some sort. FWIW, I wouldn’t mod my own speakers, beyond replacing connectors or whatever.

[u/nonmeagre]

As someone who paid $40 for a pair of those exact Wharfedales on CL (needed one pair of new binding posts, and later I replaced the rubber surrounds which cracked), I've got no complaints.

[u/39pine]

Remember wharfedale is a reputable company been around for over 85 years,theres a reason for that.

[u/Stock-Parsnip-4054]

I'm shocked that almost everyone seem to take this serious! This guy is selling power cords for 250 euro and he's using an FM radio to "prove" that only his speaker cables are good. It's a known FACT(measured a 100+ times) that power cables and speaker cables have ZERO effect on audio quality (besides thickness of speaker cables for a specific length).

All measurements on these two speakers are flawed; he's using an insane octave that flattens out almost ALL spikes and dips in the measurements and the measurements are WITHOUT the bass (it starts at 200hz !). He's not saying ANYTHING about the off axis response (something that Revel is the best in), no distortion measurements etc. etc. it's a scam to sell his own crossover parts. And besides that; do you really think that this guy knows everything better then Revel/Wharfedale themself? You will probably only ruin the balance that is carefully matched in these speakers by changing those crossover parts.

Really unbelievable that he gets away with it so easy and I'm the first one that posts this here.. ! I now start questioning myself: what on earth am I wasting my time for by telling you guys this? You should all know better! Come on!! Think again!

[u/senior_neet_engineer]

This is just the reality of boutique products. They depend on sparse dealer network and high margins to make a decent profit. Not really anything special compared to DIY besides the nice looking cabinet.

[u/[deleted]]

The way he goes over the xover costs makes me feel like we pay a ton for these components when buying individually. The cost of the revel xover is really 12-18$ in parts?