High Efficiency Speaker Asylum: Re: test of Ciare CH 250 in Hobby HiFi 5/04? by jsilence

Hi,

yesterday I built a very simple H-baffle version with this speaker. I must say that I was very surprised by the result. This is a very simple box using 15mm plywood, 45cm width in every dimension. I did no calculations whatsoever. I am currently building cubic boxes for another purpose and simply used two of those. The speakers are connected directly to the amp, which is a medium to low end Marantz.

Listening impressions:

- good resolution and soundstage. A vocal and percussions jazz recording from Karin Kroog allowed me to actually point my finger at the instruments.

- surprisingly good bass. Not really bottom deep, rather slim and unobtrusive, yet far away from missing. Amon Tobin (aka Cujo) stuff is still fun to listen to. Bass is not boomy. Slight resonance from the box. I think about making a wooden cross in the back of the box.

- Upper frequencies beam. Can be clearly observed by moving the head on and off axis. For me this is absolutely not a problem because the high frequencies are really OK off axis. I am not a fan of hissing anyway.

- hump in the frequency response in the middle frequencies. A vibraphone for instance is a slight bit too loud. I'll wait a while until they are played in and decide later whether I will do something about it. I guess I wont.

- Soundstage desintegrates when played too loud with 'full' music (many instruments all played at the same time). Too loud in this case is actually also too loud for my neighbours.

Money/Value ratio is excellent. Time to build these: roundabout 3 hours.

http://www.immerwinter.org/~rolf/images/speaker/CiareCH250_front.jpg
http://www.immerwinter.org/~rolf/images/speaker/CiareCH250_back.jpg

Greetings,

-silence