JBL, Klipsch, MoFi or Wharfedale? Modern “Retro” Speaker Comparison.

in this video I'm only going to focus on the speakers that I've laid ears on myself that I have listened to myself that I have reviewed myself which means inherently that some speakers with a retro look are going to be left out and I'm not doing that on purpose I just don't want to talk about anything that I don't have experience with at that point I'm just a mouth you can read anything you want to and I can make anything up just doesn't make sense I'm going to talk about what I heard give you my honest assessment and summary but then I'm going to followed up with objective data so if you don't believe what I think I heard that's cool we can just look at the data together and we can do objective comparisons that way maybe one speaker sounds brighter than the other well there's going to be a reason why maybe one doesn't extend as low on the base as the other well there's going to be an objective reason why so we're going to do that together and for what it's worth I am leaving out the KLH Model 5 not because I don't think it's worthy but because I've already done a direct comparison with that versus the warell Linton 885 let's start start with the ,000 prepare JBL l52 classic they have a unique design with a walnut cabinet and a blue foam Grill but also coming other color foam grills however I just frankly didn't really care for the overall sound of these speakers there was an inconsistent sound with a sharp hand clap in the J Giles band's centerfold song There was a lack of Rumble in the lower base and that's because the Bas really Peaks around 100 HZ so while it's punchy it doesn't extend low the sound stage width was also inconsistent it would kind of flare out and flare back in at different frequencies and that caused vocals to not be as pinpoint as they should sometimes things in The Sound Stage might be a little bit more inside where they should be compared to something else in the Sound Stage and of course all this depends on the source that you're listening to the way the music was mixed and mastered but if you have a track and you know that the Sound Stage has a particular instrument panned hard left then you expect it to be there but but with the l52 classics what I found was that at some points that pan might be hard left but something else that's also supposed to be panned hard left maybe didn't align where the other sound did another thing I noticed was a lack of detail or attack or Flack even in snares and I know why that is now having looked at the data so we'll talk about that in a little bit next up is the warell Linton now these run anywhere from price of about 1,500 bucks to about 2,000 bucks depending on if they're on sale and if you get the stands with them or not I think these are probably my favorite overall speaker in terms of what I would consider value and I understand that this not for everybody going to be the same way but for me personally I just really like the sound of the lintons they have nice deep base extension in room down to about 40 HZ so you don't necessarily have to use a subwoofer and I'll caution everybody when I say you don't have to use a subwoofer I'm talking about for the majority of music but but there's certainly songs that do extend below 40 HZ below 50 HZ with authority it's just mostly a very neutral laidback sounding speaker there is some lack of attack and Detail in Clarity in the lower mid-range or I should say lower treble upper mid-range but it wasn't enough to make me feel like it's not a good speaker The Sound Stage width on these speakers is nice and wide at about plus orus 70° and if you like speakers that have a wide throw in their Sound Stage or maybe you have a very small room with very reflective walls glass and things like that then a speaker that radiates very widely might not be an option for you but personally speaking plus or minus 60° is kind of my sweet spot 70 is within that region and I really like these speakers ability to radiate widely while also remaining neutral in Balance it's also worth noting that this speaker performs best when when the grill is on do not remove the grill if you want the best sound The mofa Source point8 retails about $2,800 perir without the stands but they are currently on sale for about $2,000 without the stand these are my favorite speakers in this category and the reason why is because they are similar in tonal characteristic to the warell Linton but what they do have that the warf Dell doesn't have is they have a more neutral sound through that upper mid-range lower treble region where it doesn't sound like you have a lack of attack or detail now some people might like that where it has a little bit of a dip through there some people me don't I like that to be more smooth through that region they have adequate low frequency output but they don't extend quite as low as the warf Deale does so they get down to about 50 HZ in room but once they do that they start rolling off pretty rapidly one really nice feature about these speakers and then the next one we're going to talk about is that they have a very even dispersion vertically and horizontally so you don't have to sit at the same spot all the time to have good sound you can sit off to the side you can stand up you can walk around you can have good even dispersion and the sound is going to be pretty much the same within reason no matter where you are now Imaging and things like that are going to change certainly As you move from the left of center to the right of Center but just the overall tonal balance isn't terribly affected by your position which is something that a good coaxial like the Mofi Source Point 8 will have and speaking of positioning these speakers and the Mofi Source Point 10s that we're about to talk about do benefit from being towed out slightly and when I say towed out here's an example 0 degrees which is how pretty much all these measurements are made on axis directly in line with the reference plane usually it's the Tweeter that is directly on AIS any deviation from that Z degree plane is going to be off axis what I typically find with coax speakers is to tow them out maybe not 30° but 10 to 20° so 30° would be firing Straight Ahead 10 to 20° is going to be somewhere in between here and that's typically what I find to work best for these Mofi speakers the Mofi Source Point 10s the Big Brother of the eights are a little bit more expensive at about $39.99 per pair regular price but currently as of this video are on sale for about 3,300 bucks now that's without the stands if you want to add the stands that's another two to three hund bucks per pair the overall sound difference for the mofas SCE point8 versus the 10 is actually pretty significant the 10's higher frequency is bumped up more so if you like an increased treble which personally I don't but if you like that and you consider that more detail or more high resolution which a lot of other reviewers will call speakers with higher frequency bump then the 10 might make more sense to you the base extension isn't a lot lower than the eights really they start to roll off around the same point but what happens is the 10 rolls off at a more shallow rate than the eights the clips heresy 4 retails for about $3,200 per pair now while these speakers do have higher sensitivity they trade off base extension they roll off around 100 HZ now I've heard another reviewer really praise these speakers and even say that you don't need a subwoofer but I disagree and the data really backs that up in my experience you you have to have a subwoofer you're barely getting down to kick drum region with these in a room which is around 40 to 60 HZ centered around 50 HZ or so and for the majority of the music that I listen to that has a lot of Kick Drum content in it and it really just did not make me satisfied with the base output on these speakers so in my opinion if you're going to look at these speakers you either need to be prepared to EQ the base up up or add a subwoofer to them if you want base response below maybe even 60 HZ in your room to be frank I just don't like this speaker now the first thing I noticed about it was that there are a lot of lower male vocal resonances what I found through further investigation was that there seems to be a lot of internal cabinet resonance for this speaker much more so than I would have expected given its price and I'm just being honest I know some people really like these speakers and that's fine but I'm telling you the reasons why I personally don't another thing about these speakers is the radiation pattern is it's just not uniform some frequencies are going to sound broader than others and this is to a much higher degree than the JBL l52 that I mentioned earlier what will happen is the Sound Stage radiation goes wide and it goes narrow goes wide goes narrow and it just kind of bounces all over the place so it makes Precision of images not as good um it also really messes with me when I'm listening and expecting certain sounds to be at certain locations in The Sound Stage you know if I expect a vocal over here and I know that from listening to that speaker through headphones or other speakers that are more consistent in their radiation that another sound is supposed to be also with that vocalist then what I might have found with these speakers and did in many cases is that that other sound would be over here it might be more Inward and and it really just kind of flares out so the Sound Stage itself is not uniform the Reflections in the room are not uniform and that really just kind of did a number on my personal subjective evaluation the clips Forte 4 retails for about $5,000 per pair these are also High sensitivity speakers and they do actually get low within reason especially compared to the heresy 4 and I do think in my opinion that they are definitely a step up from the heresy 4 but they are quite a bit more expensive the overall tonality is better than the heresy 4 but it's still uneven too much for me there are certain frequencies that are too accentuated in the speaker and the radiation even though it is more well controlled it's still too wonky again there's that same word where it's just not uniform so sounds that are radiated off the walls at certain frequencies may not be radiated off the walls at other frequencies in a consistent pattern I also found these speakers were a little bit too subdued in the upper mid-range area in that 2 to 4 khz area but they're contrasted with a peak around 1.5 Kilz and that made them sound forward so there's a forwardness followed by an immediate recess and I think that contrast you know if one were there and the other weren't then it might not be as bad but the contrast made that particular mid-range area just not sound natural to me now what I want to do is give you some data to back up some of what I was saying and keep in mind that when I review speakers I always listen to them first and then I look at the data afterward because I feel like if I look at the data first and then listen then I'm going to be biased by what I see in the data or maybe I'm going to be listening for certain things and not being able to pay attention or capture some of the other things that might not stand out as well in the data future a in here as I'm editing this video I realized it's going to be like 40 something minutes long if I leave in all the data so what I'm doing is I'm chopping out a whole lot of it I'm going to leave just the really the details that I really want you to know and if you want more information about why I heard what I heard please feel free to go watch the individual reviews or go to my website aens audoc corner.com and you can look at that data there okay let's get back to it so with that said we're going to start off with the l52 classic from JBL first mean SPL is at 85.1 DB F3 is at 62 HZ F10 is at 45 HZ but you see this bump right here around 100 HZ so so that gives it that Punchy sound that I liked but then it starts to roll off pretty quickly below that the overall frequency response is about plus or minus 3db and so while it does remain within that window you can see that it's kind of bouncing around that's the issue that I had now if we compare that to the warell Linton 85 we can see the Linton 85 is more smooth overall it's more neutral roughly the same sensitivity F3 is a little bit lower at 52 HZ and F10 is at 35 hzz and there's not a bump here so it's not going to have that Punchy sound but it will extend lower overall The mofas Source point8 at about 15° off axis remember I said 10 to 15° is usually the best place for a coaxial mean SPL is at about 86 DB so a little bit more sensitive F3 is at 52 HZ F10 is at 42 HZ now that means that this speaker once it starts rolling off it rolls off pretty quickly and that's what I was talking about earlier when I said you might need a subwoofer for this for the majority of your music as you can see the overall response is within about about 2 DB give or take and it's reasonably neutral so it's not perfectly neutral the on-axis response is a little bit kicked up around here so there's some defraction effects going on but overall it's pretty neutral in room and we'll see what I mean when I say that shortly the 10-in version higher sensitivity but not quite the base extension that I would have expected the main difference that I heard is that the high frequency is bumped up so if I go back to the eight we can see that the eight actually is a little bit cut right through there where the 10 is bumped up the clip heresy 4 sensitivity is high 94.5 DB so it definitely has plenty of sensitivity to get loud but they' traded off base extension for higher sensitivity and that's typical normally what you'll find is if you have a high sensitivity driver its F3 is going to be higher in frequency meaning that it doesn't extend as low in base as a speaker that has lower sensitivity that's normal and that's just the trade-off that you have to accept and you will pretty much have to use use a subwoofer with this unless you just find that you don't have music that doesn't extend below maybe about 60 HZ now I talked about the response being a bit all over the place and and you can see it it's just kind of bouncing all around it's about plus or minus 4 to 4 and a half DB it's just bouncing all over the place and that's the issue that I have with this speaker is it wasn't really consistent I also wanted to note that it does have internal resonance from the enclosure now I don't put this for all the other speakers because I don't need to I do it for the heresy 4 because need to to show you this is amplitude over time so this is your time axis the longer this amplitude remains it means that the signal is not decaying quickly from that speaker now sometimes that can be from the driver itself ringing or it can be from the enclosure having an resonance inside of it so what we see here is a resonance from about 100 HZ to 200 Herz lingers for quite a while that makes Mel vocal sound over overly chesty overly boomy and you can actually hear them ringing for too long the Forte 4 sensitivity is about 93.8 DB again High sensitivity but just a little bit lower than the heresy 4 the F3 is actually a little bit higher than the heresy 4 but what they do is they extend that base out a little bit to give you an F10 of 39 HZ so music that has Kick Drum and that 50 HZ region you'll be okay without a subwoofer but if you have music that extends below that then you're still going to need a sub the linearity of the speaker is within about 3 to 4 DB you know it kind of Peaks up around here just there's a lot of defraction effects from these horns that I wish were better maintained because it would have resulted for me at least in a more pleasurable speaker now what we're going to do is we're going to talk about the estimated in room response it kind of gives you an idea of the overall tonality of the speaker now this is all generated from anaco data but I can tell you that from my experience that anaco data that generates this estimated inter room response typically lines up exact exactly with what I hear in room it's it's pretty uncanny it's really cool it just shows you how much science can tell us about a speaker so we're going to start off with the l52 and what I've got here is the estimated intering response at 0 deg in black and 30° in red which aligns with this graphic I showed you earlier black is pointed directly at you 30° is pointed away from you I've drawn some notes in here based on my subjective impression and this trend line is usually kind of lines up with how I hear a speaker so in this case what I heard was punching mid base a lack of snare that that Flack in that snare and then some aggressive hand clap and you can see that the lack of snare there is a dip around 800 to 900 Hertz next up is the warf Del Linton 885 and if I draw my trend line through here nice extended in room base mid-range lacks some attack in that 1 khz area and then the treble is rolled off now I've seen other people in forums had these same comments about the lack of attack or detail and the rolled off treble so this isn't necessarily just my opinion this does seem to track pretty consistently with others as well and I find that pretty interesting but cool at the same time The mofas Source Point 8 we can see if I draw the trend line through here it's pretty smooth I mean this trend line lines up with what the data shows us which then is a mostly neutral speaker this 500 HZ dip right through here can sound like vocals may be a little bit Hollow but I didn't really notice that in my listening sessions in fact I thought the speaker was pretty dang good good one thing I wanted to note is that the high frequency rolloff is more positionally dependent than maybe some other speakers so if you point it directly at you versus Towing it out you're going to experience some high frequency rolloff you can use that to your advantage whichever sound you like the most just turn the speaker the correct way get more high frequency detail or turn it away from you if you feel like it's a little bit too much extension to 50 HZ but Falls quickly below that see Falls below that The Source Point 10 same kind of thing now this one has extension to 50 Herz but it's a more shallow rollof it doesn't fall off as quickly as the eight does but the main difference that I notice is in the high frequency it's about 2 to three Deb higher than the mid-range and it definitely stood out to me as sounding that way if you like that sound the tin makes sense for you if you like a more neutral sound overall a more relaxed sound even then the eight makes more sense this is the clips heresy 4 on axis I did this review a long time ago I don't have 30° off axis just keep that in mind I'm not purposely excluding it and it really wouldn't change much other than the higher frequency information up here so it does have Punchy base but it starts to roll off below about 100 HZ there's a pretty significant dip to this mid-range of about 3 to 4 DB which is weird because there are significant midrange resonances between 100 to 200 Hertz which makes it sound bloated and boomy through here but very Hollow through this region so female vocals can sound hollow while male vocals lower male vocals can sound too saturated and too thick there's a very wonky mid-range due to the numerous resonances above 600 HZ even and it's just kind of all over the place and I think this also gives me a hint to why I didn't prefer it subjectively the Forte 4 extended base so it starts to roll off around 100 but see it kicks up a little bit so this does extend lower than the heresy 4 if you want to find out more information about each of these speakers please go check out my individual reviews because I go into a lot more detail uh my summary is basically what I said upfront that the mofa source point8 is my favorite out of this list I like that it's a concentric design because those tend to have a more enveloping Sound Stage a more round shaped Sound Stage where you don't have hard edges they also tend to have a more uniform Sound Stage as opposed to something like you know the clips heresy 4 the Forte 4 where there's really just ambiguous portions of the Sound Stage and and things maybe aren't right where there's a supposed to be relative to another instrument or vocalist I like that the eight has an overall very neutral sound to it of course in the ideal world I wish that it would extend lower and personally I'm going to have to use a subwoofer or two to really dial in the system to make it sound the way I want it to sound the warfel Linton 4 Linton 4 the warfel Linton 85 is my second choice and is probably one of my favorites in terms of overall value it's a great sounding speaker it does lack some attack it does lack some air depending on how you aim it but the air can be made up with a simple tonal adjustment if you have EQ the lack of attack can be just brought up a little bit so EQ is a is a good feature to also have with that particular speaker but you don't necessarily need it either I like speakers that are inoffensive if you watch some my other videos you know what I mean by that there's a lot of speakers that just do a lot of things that are exaggerated or hurt my ears and made me stand like G cringe but the warf Dale 85 and the mofa 8 neither one of them do that so those are my two favorites in this list having said that if you're interested in buying any of these things that I've talked about I will have some affiliate links in my description below and if you're interested in using those to buy any of these speakers that would certainly be appreciated by me it helps me with a small commission it doesn't cost you anything extra and if you're worried about Shilling or anything like that look I've just told you that the two most expensive speakers in this list are the ones that I like the least so take that for what it's worth um if you'd like to join me at patreon.com you can do so patreon.com audoc corner I will talk to you all later take care peace

Channel: Erin's Audio Corner

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Keywords: erin's audio corner, erin klippel, audio science review, home theater, diy home theater, audiophile, youthman, music, home theater livestream, speaker, best speaker, dolby, amplifier, erin review, cheap audio man, andrew robinson, speaker review, subwoofer review, budget subwoofer home, klipsch heresy iv, klipsch forte iv, wharfedale linton heritage, klh model 5, mofi sourcepoint 8, mofi sourcepoint 10, klipsch heresy iv vs forte iv, mofi sourcepoint 10 vs 8, retro speaker

Id: Rtum62LsvDQ

Length: 21min 43sec (1303 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024