How to Make an $80 Speaker Beat $1,000 Speakers

hey i'm randy and you're watching the cheap audio man here at the cheap awning man we talk about high-value hi-fi home theater and headphone equipment and today we're talking about one of my favorite speakers ever the sony sscs5 not only are we going to talk about this we're going to talk about how to make this sony speaker sound like a 500 speaker or even a 1 000 speaker through the magic of science so sit down grab a cup of coffee and let's modify the heck out of this sony sscs5 [Music] today's sponsor is squarespace squarespace is a ridiculously easy way to start a website thank you squarespace so it's really exciting because we're having a push we're getting really really really close to 100 000 subscribers when we hit a hundred thousand we're giving away a whole bunch of stuff svs prime wireless speakers u-turn free orbit turntable fluance free turntable emotiva free set of b1 plus speakers and a couple of gift cards geshelly labs two or three j2 dax andover whole spin system periodic audio iems whole bunch of people iso acoustics some iso acoustics things in order to enter you have to fill out the google form i will link that in the description and also link the video that you can go watch if you want to you gotta subscribe obviously fill out the google form and follow me on instagram it's not a deal breaker if you don't have instagram but free stuff this speaker has a bit of a a pricing dilemma it goes from 88 around black friday and sometimes throughout the year 88 and then it goes up to 150 most of the time but apparently now it goes up to 228 but don't despair because even though the pricing is like your five-year-old that got into your red bull stash unpredictable it actually is predictable these are still a great speaker really at any price at 150 they're great speaker at 88 they're a ridiculous speaker at 228 still a good speaker i still think at 228 it competes with things like the jbl stage a130 really beats the klitsch r51m so even at 228 the sony sscs5 still a good speaker out of the box the sony sscs5 has very good base this is kind of a paper-ish woofer then it has a one-inch soft tone tweeter and a three-quarter inch supa tweeta so overall the sound signature on this speaker stock is clear bass bit of a scoop out in part of the mid-range very detailed top end and sound stages and images really well really a remarkable speaker can be a bit fatiguing at higher volumes also at higher volumes 85 db and up this speaker can start to fall apart but that is not exclusive to just the sony that happens to a lot of bookshelves a lot of smaller bookshelves it's pretty small it can be a desktop speaker it can be front channel speaker whatever you want it to be plant holder whatever so not only does the sony sscs5 sound good out of the box after i crack this thing open it's actually built very well inside it has a brace about 75 percent of the way up really between the woofer and the tweeters so it has a brace in there and it also has a whole bunch of corner gussets which is basically just a bunch of triangle pieces of wood glued into the corners inside the enclosure it has really good binding posts but more importantly the crossover is actually very well thought out and it uses decent parts uses air core inductors decent capacitors and frankly i was surprised when i took a look at the crossover back to squarespace so when i needed to start a website and i needed to do it in about three hours there's only one one choice that was squarespace actually there's more than one choice but i chose squarespace because it was easy and i had a discount discount code and you have one now it's called the cheap on email squarespace.com slash cheap audio man you get 10 off here's the thing if you have a business if you have a hobby you can create a website very easily neil the guy that's making these speakers you should start a website and you should use squarespace to do it take some pictures do some little diagrams and then you drag and drop it and then boom you have neil's speaker design nsb.com that's probably already taken but neilspeakerdesign.com maybe not be taken go check it out friends families drop your family photos in there you want to sell something you can add a shopping cart you can sell merchandise you can collect emails and send out a newsletter about quilting star wars quilting starwarsquilting.com that could be your new website i don't know if you're going to get away with that though but you could point being is if you've ever thought about creating a website there is never been a better time and there's never been a better place than squarespace i can't believe that rhymed squarespace.com chief audio man for 10 percent off your first order sony sscs5 this speaker started in more videos than i have just kidding i was in all my videos i think anyway it's awesome it's awesome it can be even more awesome let's find out how so this is a shameless patreon plug i've gotten to know a lot of my patrons and become friends with many of them and there is one person neil b in my patreon place who's a very talented speaker designer actually he designed a set of transmission line speakers with a lamb tweeter that he absolutely just loves and i would imagine they are spectacular we worked on something together and when i say we worked on something together i said hey why don't you make a smaller version of that with drivers that are readily available and that was about the extent of my involvement so he did so he's also working on that but we also talked about the sony sscs5 and i asked him can i get you a pair of these and see if you can improve upon it i don't know if you bought them or i bought them anyway he did and that's what we're going to talk about today so neil has all the equipment to measure the different driver responses and things like that all of it he's got all the fun toys and he took a look at this speaker and he put together really probably 10 different iterations of the crossover to get it just right and i think he got it just right but let's back up what even is a crossover a crossover is a set of components capacitors inductors resistors that you slap together to send the right frequencies to the right driver which means you want the high stuff to go to the tweeter you want the low stuff to go to the woofer sounds easy but it's not always that easy because there are characteristics of drivers drivers have a fault they have a sweet spot for the most part unless they're a full range driver a regular tweeter a regular woofer will fall off at certain frequencies and often times when they fall off they get a little angry and so there's spikes and stuff like that well if you put two drivers together and you don't have them crossed over well those spikes and troughs can add up and it can be a real mess when you try to combine two different drivers to get around that you can use different types of crossovers a first order crossover second order crossover even a third order crossover and what that does is basically isolates the driver even more for simplicity's sake a first order high pass or low pass doesn't isolate the driver as well as a second order high pass or low pass filter so as you get higher up higher order crossovers the slope of the fall off starts to get steeper so if there are issues between drivers you can mitigate those by using a higher order crossover with all that said neo really used second order crossovers in this design to get these things where they need to be he did some other stuff too but fundamentally he's using a very tried and true method to improve the crossover this speaker is actually a little bit more complicated to tackle when it comes to redesigning a crossover the reason being is it has three drivers one of which is a super tweeter generally speaking bookshelves are two-way so those are easier easier to redesign because you're only dealing with two different drivers when i got in here and pulled out the crossover i started seeing some interesting stuff number one again the parts were better than i thought they would be but the super tweeter was actually wired in what's called reverse polarity so the positive lead coming off of the crossover actually was connected to the negative lead on the super tweeter neil had some theories about why that was done but he changed it not only did he change it because we thought hmm i wonder what it would be like if we just replaced the stock values with better parts better inductors better capacitors and we did kind of an iteration of that neil wasn't really happy with that and i i don't blame him he ended up redesigning and utilizing these drivers in a different way than what sony designed them for and i think the results are spectacular here's another cool thing about neil's design is there are variations of it in his plans and you can start off with just replacing really one part and you can get a lot of sonic benefits from just replacing one part so if you're on a budget and you can't afford the entirety of the crossover that he recommends you can just buy one thing and he'll walk you through it i think there are two if not three different versions of the crossover that you can choose to do if you're so inclined and it really depends on what you want if you love the sonic characteristics of this speaker and you want to improve the bass a little bit more then you can start with just one part there are also some enclosure modifications or physical modifications that you can do all spelled out in his plans great pictures huge pdf he walks you through every single part of the process and he's also available to field questions he's a good guy he's only charging 20 for the planes i told him he should charge more but he's only charging 20. and you get unfettered access to him for 20 bucks and since he's only selling the plans he's not stocking the crossover parts he tells you which ones he suggests but you can source the parts from wherever you want to so you're not paying a markup on any of the parts that he's recommending so there's freedom you don't just have to buy what he says what he designs and what he sends to you you can get the plans and do it how you want to do it which is pretty cool if you want to go the full monty and change out the entirety of the crossover and you still i think reuse some components if you want to change out the whole thing i think the parts are around 180 bucks so 180 plus 20 comes in at 200 and people are gonna be like why would you spend 200 on a speaker that only costs 80 or 150 but i think we have to quit equating quality with price because there are high value products out there like the sony that has great bones this has a great enclosure these have great drivers if you put a great crossover in there you can take the performance from this 80 speaker move it way up to where it beats 500 and sometimes even a thousand dollar speakers because i've listened to all of them i've listened to this in comparison to higher priced speakers and guess what with the crossover mod i think this beats them in certain aspects i think this speaker with a crossover mod can beat 500 and even thousand dollar speakers the biggest improvement here is in the bass bass extension and base clarity but also in reducing the amount of smearing between the base and the mid-range everything got more separated everything got cleaner the sound staged improved everything sounded bigger and again this thing doesn't sound bad to begin with i was shocked i was really shocked when i turned these on for the first time and i started hearing the differences and i what i did was i did the mod on one speaker and then i left the other speaker stock and then i put my receiver into mono mode and then i just hooked up a left and a right what i did was i was playing the same song and then i rolled over to the right listened to it then rolled over to the left so i was a being the modded speaker versus the stock speaker and this it was i'm not gonna say night and day but it was a big difference with the modded crossover i think this speaker competes across the board with the elac unify the first gen across the boards similar sound characteristics across the board i think the bass though is better on the sony with the modded crossover i think the modded sony is better than the elac debut reference as far as base goes and that's a five or six hundred dollar speaker i think the base on this competes with the wharfdale linton which is a fifteen hundred dollar speaker you may laugh at me but i would recommend trying it yourself and a being it against speakers that you already have even at the full retail price which i don't recommend buying the sony's at the full retail price buy them at 150 or better yet 88 do the mod and you're gonna be happy as a clam mid-range balanced out way better than the stock speaker has a more rich tone to the mid-range this mod changes the overall characteristics of the sony but it never it never eliminates the magic that is the stock sony ss cs5 it just fixes things maybe brings down the treble a little bit but i think you can talk to neil and there are some resistor values that you can play around with if you want to bring that treble up a little bit more because neil's design is really more of a flat line frequency response since the top end is a little bit more controlled a little bit flatter it eliminates fatigue associated with the stock version of the sony's overall i think this is a brilliant design for a new crossover i think you have options if you don't want to do the full thing neil's a great guy he's gonna help you out and i think he's under charging for these plans but again good guy he's really talented and i think neil's probably gonna end up just designing speakers full time at some point he's that good he thinks outside the box and he plays around with transmission line stuff that really you can really make a full range speaker for not a ton of money if you are at all interested in diy speaker stuff or speaker modifications i think this is a great place to start you don't have to worry about getting an enclosure you don't have to worry about buying drivers the only thing you have to worry about is getting the crossover out of here which can be a little challenging because there's not a ton of real estate also when you go into this thing you'll see that it has four little bolts right here now this surround is actually glued into the enclosure so once you get the bolts out the bolts hold the surround this plastic surround thing and the driver and once you get those bolts out just put something in there and slowly start to kind of push it up a little bit around there and i've done three of these and i haven't broken one of these surrounds but you have to be a little bit patient you get something in there pry pry just a little bit just around keep doing that and then it eventually comes out neal will help you out and in the plans it describes the easiest way to get the crossover out i didn't do it neil's way a little bit harder i'm gonna do it neil's way from now on if you want to support the channel you can sign up for patreon patreon.com that's cheapanyman we have a patreonly discord server and we also have a patronally facebook group then you can meet neil and talk to him and he will answer every question that you possibly have you can also use the affiliate links in the description i'll link neil's email you email him if you want the plans i don't make anything if neil sells plans i'll link the sony ss cs5s if you buy those through my affiliate link i will get a commission off of that you can also sign up for amazon music or title music links in the description if you sign up even for a trial i do get a couple of dollars you can also buy a rock to push mug so don't binge watch anything on netflix or hulu binge listen maybe through your modded sony ss cs5s and fill your soul with happiness that's trademark by the way and with that i'm randy i'm the cheap audio man [Music]

Channel: cheapaudioman

Views: 406,375

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Id: Vuz8nElOxvc

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2022