$6400 Paradigm VS $599 Wharfedale What DO they have in Common?!

everybody welcome to what should be an interesting little episode here we're going to talk about speakers that have come in that i did not design anything for sometimes the feedback that i give the customer is you need to start over and that's the case with some of these we're going to look at also the the wharf dells compared to a very expensive paradigm speaker and we're going to make some comparisons and let you guys kind of see what you're getting for your money versus other options that there may be out there let's let's just dig right into it let's get the evaluation that i give the customer that sends these in so you guys kind of know where this goes when you send in a speaker to me i measure and test it i don't charge you for the measuring and testing if it's something big and heavy i may they charge you a handling fee to box and re-box and all that kind of stuff but as far as overall measurements i give you the feedback and here it is on this stuff this is the wharfdale diamond dwarf del diamond and it's the uh let's see it's the 2 2 5 model it's a little bookshelf speaker it's actually pretty well made it's well braced the front baffle is done in a real pretty piano finish and it looks nice the woofer has a little decorative plastic frame around it it does feel like maybe a paper cone driver and a pretty nice tweeter little dome tweeter in a kind of an odd shaped wave guide now first measurements i took of this thing was with these little girls and now the grilles actually fit into the little screws that hold them on so it's kind of kind of odd to put that back on you're going to have to feed those into the holes of those things and get them lined up like so and on the tweeter the problem is when you put this thing on it creates a little bit of a cylinder around the tweeter so it causes a significant amount of diffraction and really messes up the response i can get this even lined back up here and put back on there we go so what happened when i measured this thing well here's a measurement of this thing with the grill on yep up top that's a pretty big peak and that peak is directly caused by that grill right there here's the same measurement same speaker with the grilles off pretty smooth response actually a really balanced response if you own these things one big tweak right off the bat take these things off these things are ruining the response um looking at the crossover response because it's got two sets of binding posts on the back of it here it's got the little jumpers on here so you can you can buy wire or bi-amp that's a whole nother topic we're gonna get into pretty soon um crossover response looks pretty nice both drivers have a really smooth response with the grills off now if we take a look at the horizontal off axis it rolls off horizontally very well look at the vertical off axis vertical off axis looks pretty good it only barely starts to drop at the crossover region a little bit as you start really getting high in the vertical range so measurements wise it's looking pretty good so far and spectral decay on this thing is really clean so they did a really good job there now impedance does drop to 4.1 ohms so keep in mind anything you plug this into needs to be something that can handle a 4 ohm load because it's definitely 4 ohm the port goes right down the middle of the cabinet from about oh about about here all the way down and this there's a slot that goes all the way around this where there's like a base underneath the speaker and the port fires straight down into it so i don't know something something they felt like was ingenuitive or something there i i don't know it it makes it to where you're getting the same port output regardless of where the speaker is placed whether it's near a wall away from a wall or something like that but uh it's not real effective if you look at the impedance curve the port is not doing a lot unfortunately what it is doing is it's taking up the whole center of the cabinet there's bracing here and the whole crossover is mounted on the back wall behind the tweeter so for one it's almost impossible to get to the network and there's no room in this thing to place anything else if you did build a real network out of real parts and it would definitely need another network to bring it to the next level as well as they engineered it as much as you're getting for the money the crossover parts in this thing are about like what you see here it's it's the cheapest parts they can put in there so you're you're here at the performance level you've got good accuracy good tonal balance you've got nice engineering but the parts quality is really holding this thing back and again they have to use parts at that quality the whole speaker retails for 299 bucks for the pair so for the pair not bad i mean they could have spent a little more money used all poly caps and air core inductors like what we see in this crossover and they would have bumped the price up to maybe the 279 to 299 range but you got a whole lot better sounding speaker unfortunately there's just nothing you can do with it at this point so my suggestion is spend your money elsewhere if you have that great enjoy for what it is but when you want to go up to the next level step up to some of our kids or a different speaker because there's no not really taken that any further than it is uh if we look now at the speaker here over on my right we kind of run into the same situations here look at the on axis response it's pretty big hump up there in the in the tweeter's upper range there looks like from about oh six to six hundred six thousand to ten thousand there's a big lump there and it's caused from this grill and it's putting a cylinder around the end around the inside of the edge of the tweeter so it's causing this effect at that one frequency range it's a horrible grill design i don't know what they were thinking there i mean it i guess it looks cool but to listen to this speaker you need to take it off and taking it off you'll see that it's a pretty smooth response again they did their homework there as far as designing a network for this three-way that smooths things out and this is the warfdell diamond 240 and this whole speaker it's only 599 for the pair so 5.99 for the pair pretty nice cabinet the whole sides up in this upper section really well braced down lower i don't know if you can hear that but it's much more hollow down low uh where the braces are pretty sparsely separated versus this area here where the mid has its own little air chamber that it's in but nicely done and a piano black finish on the front looks really good so yeah on-axis frequency response looks good and if you swap the um the binding post there's two sets of binding posts on the back one's hooked up to the tweeter mid which is very typical the others hooked up to the woofers and i shot them individually you can see the crossover point is kind of right there in the mid-range which not a great place for them to cross but they do some very well they're balanced there and if you look at the same frequency response individually with the grilles off you'll see yeah nice roll off of each driver into the other driver they did a pretty good job there and if you look at the horizontal off axis you see really smooth off axis response it drops off evenly horizontally in both directions and if you go up vertically look at the vertical off axis you'll see very little of a dip in the response so as you're moving up or down it's maintaining a good phase relationship with the drivers nice tonal balance everything's looking good so far spectral decay looks really clean i mean they did a nice job the drivers are not holding stored energy um so that's pretty clean but then there's the impedance oh my goodness guys what are you thinking look at the impedance curve you'll see from about a hundred hertz to a thousand hertz it averages 2.6 ohms through that whole range 2.8 ohms i mean they may rate this as a forum speaker it's not this speaker is going to cause a lot of problems for any receiver that you hook it up to a lot of even amplifiers they're just simply not going to like that low impedance load and i looked at this thing pretty hard and i thought you know there's a little bit of tweaking that can be done but overall you could almost replicate the crossover with good parts because the parts quality on it is what you'd expect at a speaker that's 5.99 a pair it's super cheesy you know it's really the budget level of all parts again they could have spent a little money stepped it up and brought the performance up quite a bit now it's it is where it is and the impedance is so low there's nothing i can do with this there's no fixing that so if you don't own it i can't recommend it just based on the fact that the impedance is that low if you do own it if your amp isn't overheating and choking on it you know enjoy for what it is if you want to go to the next level there are a lot better options out there there's just no there's no fixing that issue so it was again another one where i said we're not doing anything with this now then there's this thing then there's this paradigm which is the signature six i think and it's sixty four hundred dollars a pair i know sixty four hundred dollars a pair this is supposed to be their top model and let's dig into this thing and see what you're getting for that kind of price first of all if you look at it it kind of has the same look as some of the other models that they've offered i've had studio 60s in here before it had the same configuration but minus the lower woofer and it had a metal cone driver with a face plug this is actually a um poly cone and this is not a phase plug this is a just a plastic dust cap that looks like a face plug that's on this poly cone woofer and the woofer is in its own little plastic tub that fits right behind it in a tight air space and then the woofers actually look pretty nice these woofers may have some pretty good response down low the tweeter is another one of their little metal dome tweeters it may be a beryllium tweeter because we see it has a grille completely covering it but it still has the same look as most of their other speakers other than a beautiful black piano finish which looks really nice frequency response as i measured it with the grilles off it measures pretty well check this out it's pretty smooth they did some nice work there what was weird though is it's got two sets of binding posts normally the upper binding post is going to be your tweeter mid and the lower binding post is going to be your woofers they separated it to where the mid and the woofers are on one binding post and the tweeter's on its own binding posts which didn't make any sense i mean the tweeter it's it's something you can add to a mid-based driver without affecting the amplifier or anything about it if you even if you were biamping the thing what you want to do is when you're biamping is you want to drop the low frequencies off onto a different amp so that it's not having any effect on the amplifier that's driving your tweeter mids or from your mid base up it doesn't make any sense to separate the tweeter from the mid-range because um whatever amp is driving the mid-range you could add the tweeter to it without any effect at all so that didn't make any sense that they wired it that way i thought that was kind of strange i had to take it apart and disconnect some of the drivers to get individual mid and to get individual woofers you can see the response there and it's it's not bad it's not bad at all but there there is an issue with this tweeter and i knew going into it because i've i've measured some of the other speakers in the past they have a sharp edge right here where this drops off and that's always always bad that's causing some diffraction the sound is going to reflect off of these edges and it's going to cause some brightness and you see it in the response of the tweeter you see waviness in the response it calls from that diffraction so i took some chunks of felt and i just put a piece of felt on each side of it and just taped it on and shot it again same frequency response look at the tweeter's response now look how smooth the lower end of the tweeter is and how much smoother the response is just from putting that felt on there so that made a big difference next i thought well the grill is designed to kind of fit into that area maybe the grill is flushing that out so i put the grill on there it took take a measurement and the grill messed up the response even more now we've got a dipped area there in that range and a couple of big peaks up on the top of the tweeters range so the grill did not fix it the grill made it worse so is what it is now um if we look at this response 10 degrees off axis it actually smooths out a little bit because some of that diffraction off of both of those sides are not coming straight off of the speaker at you when you move it off at an angle a little bit the diffraction is a little different reflecting on one side versus the other and it smooths the response out a little bit so 10 degrees off axis it's a little bit better and if you look horizontally at the whole horizontal off axis going from zero all the way to 40 degrees off axis it looks pretty good measures really well that way you look at the vertical off axis you can see a little bit of a dipped area there at the crossover point between the tweeter and the mid as you start going up but it's not bad it's not real bad also if you look at the impedance curve you'll see that's very reasonable and it drops to 4.1 ohm so keep in mind it's a forum speaker lastly let's look at the spectral decay on this thing um the first one is you i'm going to show you here is just the spectral decay of it just like you see it no grill and no felt around the tweeter and you know it looks good it's pretty clean drops off very reasonable that's a really nice clean response next you'll see it with the grill on it's still nice and clean but as you can see there's a couple of humped up areas at the top and there's that dipped area at the lower tweeter range it is what it is now let's look at it with just a couple pieces of felt put on each side now you're looking at something that's much cleaner and much smoother all the way across that's a really impressive spectral decay that that looks nice so measurements wise it's not bad if i were to dig into this thing i probably wouldn't really look to redesign it i'd figure out some way to put some nice decorative felt here to where i could leave it there and you could just replicate the factory crossover and you'd be fine but do you need to replicate the craft factor crossover what has it got in it what's the insides what do the insides really look like so in other words are the guts of this thing high enough performance to bring this thing up to the level of the price point that they're selling it for well i took the back cup off and that's where the crossover is only for the tweeter what i found was not this we did not find super cheese we found this exact level of quality here we found bennett poly caps just your your inexpensive two dollar apiece poly caps we found a very small gauge like this one here well maybe a little lighter gauge than this very small gauge air core inductor and two resistors that were not sand cast resistors it looked like maybe a couple little omac resistors so we're looking at decent quality we're looking at the same quality of parts that we saw in the xls classic that was 199 a pair we're looking at that same level of parts on the tweeter on this thing so you're thinking ah you know not bad kind of the same as what we saw in acts down audios uh the revels were kind of at that range so i'm thinking not bad but the crossover for the tweeter is the only crossover on the binding post cup to see the rest of the crossover i have to take these woofers out and the crossovers mounted at the on the brace right behind him what was going on there the mid and the woofer crossover oh it looked like this it was oh it was cheesy it was super cheese the mid circuit had electrolytic caps in it it had little iron core inductors in it same for the woofer circuit you're looking just all uh iron core inductors electrolytic caps i mean again you could get away with a large laminated i-core on the woofers only because they're crossing at about 250 so hey not a problem there you don't have to have an air core inductor on the low woofers but on the mid come on guys this is sixty four hundred dollars here you expect more than just fifteen dollars worth of parts on these drivers that's really gonna hold the whole thing back that doesn't make any sense at all also the wiring that was on this looked like it was all aluminum coated copper you had push on connectors on everything as come on guys 6400 bucks you got to step things up a little bit you're you're you're offering me the same quality here that we saw in the little wharfdale uh at least on the mid and the the lower woofers granted it was a little better on the tweeter but there was no high end you know high quality anything there it was just your next step up budget level good quality parts so the customer decided he wasn't going to have me spend a lot of time and effort to try and replicate the crossover go in and rebuild the whole thing point to point it just it just didn't make any sense he decided to build some xls encores he's going in a different direction he just didn't want to spend more money on top of the monies already spent on these things it just didn't make any sense if you don't own them i can't say that i recommend them it's the same with the dwarf deal if you don't own these i can't recommend these because the impedance is too low if you've got an amplifier that's stable down to a 2 ohm load or less then you probably have a high enough quality amplifier you're not looking at 600 speakers so this is one of them situations where i wouldn't recommend any of this stuff um could i make something out of this yes by the time you're done you'd have you know seven hundred seven thousand seventy two hundred dollars probably in parts in this thing and you're still limited to a little polycone woofer and whatever tweeter this is in a pod that needs felt put on it because it's got diffraction issues so it's one of those deals where just start over if you already own it you want to go to the next level there are options for under a thousand dollars that'll take you past this in performance granted they're pretty if you like the look the cabinet looks nice um the little feet on the bottom are kind of cool i noticed all the weights on the two pieces or the two legs at the front and not on the back which is kind of odd and the ones on the back really didn't meet the whole cabinet all the way it kind of stuck at it the quality control was not that great i'll show you a picture of that but yeah sometimes things come in i measure and test it and i tell the customer no just just start over sometimes stuff comes in it's engineered and designed really well and i say that it's engineering design really well and i say hey let's just throw a few higher quality capacitors at this thing get rid of the binding posts put some good wire on it building blocks are here for something really really special just add a few tweaks and take this thing up a few notches or sometimes i redesign a whole crossover for something because it's a super budget speaker and for a couple hundred more dollars it makes for a fun project the end result is really great there's a whole bunch of them out there that kind of fit in that category you've seen the videos on that and those are good entry-level diy kits i mean you can go in and learn to do an upgrade have some fun with it the results then are really good even some of them that are fairly expensive like the dine audio that we did and some of the others it's worth spending a little bit of money on to take it to another level so i know you guys sometimes you look at these upgrades and think why not just buy a better speaker well sometimes more money does not necessarily equal better performance sometimes it's better just to start over and that's it for this episode i hope you guys enjoyed it hope it made you think a little bit and i want you guys when you're looking at some of these commercial speakers out there look at the guts look what's inside did they put any money into what the quality of the parts are on the inside that'll answer a lot of questions for you even if you can't see the measurements or things like that look on the inside if you don't really understand what it looks what the value or what the quality is by looking like it by what you're looking at just send me a picture of it in an email i'll tell you what's there and what it's worth and what it cost or if it's great or good or poor or super cheesy i'll let you know if one thing's for sure whatever i see i'm going to be honest with you and i'm going to tell you like it is good or bad i'll praise it when it's good and when it's not good i'm going to say it's not good so like i said that's it for this episode hope you enjoyed it thanks for watching thanks for subscribing i'll see you guys in another video

Channel: GR-Research

Views: 9,167

Rating: 4.9409156 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, baffle step loss, open baffle, fast bass, subwoofers, line source, drivers, low distortion, the room, speaker upgrade, audiophile loudspeakers, crossovers, DIY Audio, soundstage, paradigm, wharfedale

Id: WtWb7-XoeuA

Length: 23min 53sec (1433 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021