If we may ask, why are these 9.87 wrapped? You just got these or prepped them to sell? Or is this just a protective measure to have paint job intact?
KeithR's "Dream Speaker" Search
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If we may ask, why are these 9.87 wrapped? You just got these or prepped them to sell? Or is this just a protective measure to have paint job intact?
No, one of the few I have not heard.
Feastrex are amazing, the D5NF isn't crazy expensive, but I have not kept up with their pricing so idk...
AER can be great too, but I think most BLH are problematic, and using dsp to solve these issues in the context of a single driver is ridiculous.
IMO, single drivers don't have a place in today's audio landscape with the exception of lower priced speakers, today's multi-way speakers simply don't have many of the issues they had in the past. They can be a great one-trick pony as far as girl w/ guitar music, and they work well as an extend range midrange driver. For a few grand I think Omega speakers are wonderful but if I had the cash for the top brands I'd buy something else, TBH they wouldn't be near the top of my list at all.
Yeah, I have reached a similar conclusion and I use my Supravox 215-2000 drivers really as a more or less typical but high sensitivity mid-bass (this model is used in the Cessaro Wagner and also the Lansche 4.1). I know BLH can work VERY well (give the AC Symphonia a listen someday) but generally they are too lightweight sounding or timing is off. I am currently very partial to TQWT loading, which a cross between horn and reflex. Our Dynamikks brand has very well done reflex loading (more damped than most).
I think a great alternative to a single driver are some of newer coax drivers that have come out. In particular the ones being used by Dynamikks (proprietary) and by Live Act Audio (Radian with Be diaphragm in the top models) are very good and capable of near full range response. I may try the Radians in a future design.
I was with Keith for this audition. The Voxativ is at-once engaging, peculiar and off-putting for its mix of characteristics, which on paper should yield an excellent speaker but in fact do not. Clearly more competent on simple, singer-and-instrument music than on poly-eventful, complex and scaled performances, the 987 nevertheless fails on light material too for unexpected reasons.
Rated at 101db/w/m like Zu, the Voxativ is dynamically bursty and quick. At some frequencies even quicker and more explosive than Zu for percussive attack. The speaker has the spatial coherence you expect, but is remarkably incoherent wrt having stratified tonal and dynamic characteristics. The powered subwoofer attempts integration with the quick FRD by moving quickly for initial transient but is overdamped thereafter. No real bass decay, yielding "dry" bass lacking natural resonance and tone. Bass source differentiation is truncated. The 987 main cab has useful response down to ~40Hz, and I suspect it sounds better alone. The lower range of male vocals is over-warm, with some latent nasality that's distracting and untrue. There is a narrow range for male tenor and female contralto singers where voices are quite natural. Really beautiful. But heading into the soprano zone stridency is an unwelcome passenger, and it also infects upper tenor ranges in crescendo.
But then percussive events above the troublespots hang projected, transparent, spatially anchored, harmonically complete and clear. Meanwhile the speaker does not maintain articulation with complex music with a rapidly rising number of simultaneous events. The resulting smearing and blurring is most acute in the ranges where voices are the most unnatural. If you start with simple, low-complexity music, the Vox is seductive for its speed, transparency and its strobe-like bursts of clarity in the frequency strata where it shows greatly authentic midrange tone. The driver is remarkably extended and lively on percussive events.
Where the 987 is great, it's still hi-fi in that it delivers a form of "transparency" and intimacy you don't hear in live acoustic venues. It delivers the transparency of emphasized music, that's mic'd to truncate the influences of confined or open acoustic space, instead piping vocal output from singer's lips direct to your ear. Some of that is the fault of recording choices made in the studio or in the mix. This supranatural effect might be leavened and made more real if the characteristic remained present up and down its octave-to-octave range in balance, but it does not. You get it in Venetian blinds flashes of revelation, made unbalanced by where it's absent. In a singer, the balance between breath and tone is disturbed. Electric guitar tone inherits the male register nasality, and the upper stridencies, reducing the distinctions between amps, tubes, pickups and guitar types. Acoustic guitars sound better, as long as not too much is happening at the same time. A lot is being asked of a small wood cone, so it's not too surprising that it doesn't handle all complexities equally well.
As speakers go, this Voxativ is certainly in the restricted realm of tenable loudspeakers. Though not for me. Its offenses are ones that someone who greatly values its virtues, might overlook or even become accustomed to. There are probably better matches for the speaker than the Kronzilla SX. The preamp, btw, as a small correction to Keith's note, was the Audio Valve Conductor, not Audio Magic. The general patterns of performance we heard on Saturday were consistent with cues heard in show environments. Unfortunately, the 987 does not have the greater linearity and notable ease that the vastly more expensive Ampeggio Due has. Still, I think ditching the sub and mating more complementary amplification has some promise of mitigating the downsides and brining the speaker into balance. As we heard it Saturday, it had almost the chokepoints of a crossover-intensive speaker, but for different reasons. Where it is dynamic it is startlingly so. Where it is clear it is startlingly so. Where it is strained or strident (or strained and strident), it is disturbingly so.
A comparable Zu speaker ala Druid 6 or Definition 4 has many advantages and none of the stratified performance gyrations. Zu handles power peaks far better. It is tonally & dynamically much more consistent top to bottom. Zu is transparent enough. Where the V987 shows stunning transparency, it does so more than any Zu, though right now Druid 6 comes closest in that regard. But since some of that is synthetic and inconsistent (though seductive) that difference isn't actionable to me. It might be to others. Except you will not get it more often than you get it. Any Zu is distinctly better for bass performance. The Zu is the quickest dynamic speaker I know that is also natural and balanced. Where the V987 driver is quick, it's quicker than the 10" Zu FRD, though again this difference is narrowed by Druid 6. The Voxative driver is capable of remarkable subtlety along with its speed. Piano and strings decay is quite good, even exceptional.
One speaker can do it all, because frankly for most people, one speaker has to. How many people buy a speaker to exclude a genre or more? So of course any speaker is both a compromise and the buyer usually thinks they've chosen something that can do it all. They just live with compromises that surface while traversing genres of music. A few companies make speakers that are convincingly omni-musical, which is not the same as saying such a speaker is perfect or equally excellent in all conditions. What keeps the Vox 987 from being credibly omni-musical are its behavioral inconsistencies. It doesn't scale well. It doesn't have the electrically-induced flaws imposed by crossovers and others caused by relying on multiple drivers in the primary sonic range. The 987 driver seems physically limited in the face of demands imposed by complexity, along with intrinsic tonal variations up and down its range. If those problems could be tuned out or leavened either through further evolution of the design, better upstream component matching, or both, an omni-musical Voxativ 987 just might be possible. It is certainly well-made and beautifully-finished. And maybe more break-in time would help.
I was familiar enough with the Audio Valve, Kronzilla and TotalDac. Qobuz/Roon is benign. I was not familiar with cabling. The room is in a house, but has a hifi demo room's worth of gear in the living room demo space. Nevertheless very comfortable. There were Shakti Hallographs and a variety of other room treatments of unknown total combined effect.
I did want to like the Vox 987 on principle, going in. The designer is clearly aiming for the right conclusion. Building to its price point, the 987 is a work in progress.
Phil
Rated at 101db/w/m like Zu, the Voxativ is dynamically bursty and quick. At some frequencies even quicker and more explosive than Zu for percussive attack. The speaker has the spatial coherence you expect, but is remarkably incoherent wrt having stratified tonal and dynamic characteristics. The powered subwoofer attempts integration with the quick FRD by moving quickly for initial transient but is overdamped thereafter. No real bass decay, yielding "dry" bass lacking natural resonance and tone. Bass source differentiation is truncated. The 987 main cab has useful response down to ~40Hz, and I suspect it sounds better alone. The lower range of male vocals is over-warm, with some latent nasality that's distracting and untrue. There is a narrow range for male tenor and female contralto singers where voices are quite natural. Really beautiful. But heading into the soprano zone stridency is an unwelcome passenger, and it also infects upper tenor ranges in crescendo.
But then percussive events above the troublespots hang projected, transparent, spatially anchored, harmonically complete and clear. Meanwhile the speaker does not maintain articulation with complex music with a rapidly rising number of simultaneous events. The resulting smearing and blurring is most acute in the ranges where voices are the most unnatural. If you start with simple, low-complexity music, the Vox is seductive for its speed, transparency and its strobe-like bursts of clarity in the frequency strata where it shows greatly authentic midrange tone. The driver is remarkably extended and lively on percussive events.
Where the 987 is great, it's still hi-fi in that it delivers a form of "transparency" and intimacy you don't hear in live acoustic venues. It delivers the transparency of emphasized music, that's mic'd to truncate the influences of confined or open acoustic space, instead piping vocal output from singer's lips direct to your ear. Some of that is the fault of recording choices made in the studio or in the mix. This supranatural effect might be leavened and made more real if the characteristic remained present up and down its octave-to-octave range in balance, but it does not. You get it in Venetian blinds flashes of revelation, made unbalanced by where it's absent. In a singer, the balance between breath and tone is disturbed. Electric guitar tone inherits the male register nasality, and the upper stridencies, reducing the distinctions between amps, tubes, pickups and guitar types. Acoustic guitars sound better, as long as not too much is happening at the same time. A lot is being asked of a small wood cone, so it's not too surprising that it doesn't handle all complexities equally well.
As speakers go, this Voxativ is certainly in the restricted realm of tenable loudspeakers. Though not for me. Its offenses are ones that someone who greatly values its virtues, might overlook or even become accustomed to. There are probably better matches for the speaker than the Kronzilla SX. The preamp, btw, as a small correction to Keith's note, was the Audio Valve Conductor, not Audio Magic. The general patterns of performance we heard on Saturday were consistent with cues heard in show environments. Unfortunately, the 987 does not have the greater linearity and notable ease that the vastly more expensive Ampeggio Due has. Still, I think ditching the sub and mating more complementary amplification has some promise of mitigating the downsides and brining the speaker into balance. As we heard it Saturday, it had almost the chokepoints of a crossover-intensive speaker, but for different reasons. Where it is dynamic it is startlingly so. Where it is clear it is startlingly so. Where it is strained or strident (or strained and strident), it is disturbingly so.
A comparable Zu speaker ala Druid 6 or Definition 4 has many advantages and none of the stratified performance gyrations. Zu handles power peaks far better. It is tonally & dynamically much more consistent top to bottom. Zu is transparent enough. Where the V987 shows stunning transparency, it does so more than any Zu, though right now Druid 6 comes closest in that regard. But since some of that is synthetic and inconsistent (though seductive) that difference isn't actionable to me. It might be to others. Except you will not get it more often than you get it. Any Zu is distinctly better for bass performance. The Zu is the quickest dynamic speaker I know that is also natural and balanced. Where the V987 driver is quick, it's quicker than the 10" Zu FRD, though again this difference is narrowed by Druid 6. The Voxative driver is capable of remarkable subtlety along with its speed. Piano and strings decay is quite good, even exceptional.
One speaker can do it all, because frankly for most people, one speaker has to. How many people buy a speaker to exclude a genre or more? So of course any speaker is both a compromise and the buyer usually thinks they've chosen something that can do it all. They just live with compromises that surface while traversing genres of music. A few companies make speakers that are convincingly omni-musical, which is not the same as saying such a speaker is perfect or equally excellent in all conditions. What keeps the Vox 987 from being credibly omni-musical are its behavioral inconsistencies. It doesn't scale well. It doesn't have the electrically-induced flaws imposed by crossovers and others caused by relying on multiple drivers in the primary sonic range. The 987 driver seems physically limited in the face of demands imposed by complexity, along with intrinsic tonal variations up and down its range. If those problems could be tuned out or leavened either through further evolution of the design, better upstream component matching, or both, an omni-musical Voxativ 987 just might be possible. It is certainly well-made and beautifully-finished. And maybe more break-in time would help.
I was familiar enough with the Audio Valve, Kronzilla and TotalDac. Qobuz/Roon is benign. I was not familiar with cabling. The room is in a house, but has a hifi demo room's worth of gear in the living room demo space. Nevertheless very comfortable. There were Shakti Hallographs and a variety of other room treatments of unknown total combined effect.
I did want to like the Vox 987 on principle, going in. The designer is clearly aiming for the right conclusion. Building to its price point, the 987 is a work in progress.
Phil
Question: is the bass system using class D amplification? If yes, this could account for truncated decay, dryness and lack of texture.
Although much of what you are saying is inherent in most, if not all single drivers I have heard, the degree of it would challenge the acceptance or rejection of such a sound.
The break-in for such driver types is VERY long (Lowthers, for example taken over 1000 hours...and need rebreaking in if the sit for a long time.) and you heard them fresh out of the wrapper. Having worked with and heard similar drivers go through this myself I can say that the sound is terribly unbalanced with strain at certain frequencies much as you describe. Since I have only heard Voxativs at shows, maybe what I have heard there are also drivers needing break-in...one wonders.
I can also tell you with our Dynamikks speaker, Athos 10, for quite some time it was bright and pinched in certain ranges and the blend with the bass imperfect. All the drivers are stiff suspension profi drivers and they were all singing a different tune. Then they broke in and now the speaker sounds truly awesome, coherent top-to-bottom, huge soundstage (wide and deep), amazing bass and living up to the brand name by being a dynamic beast.
Now, the Voxativ might not ever really get there because what I heard from them I hear in a lot of other single drivers, including some difficulty when music gets busy (and why I prefer a true two-way) but I bet it can get a lot better than what you guys heard. Probably a good alternative sub would work better (something without class D?)
The bass module amp is Class A/B.
And I agree with you on break-in, although I scheduled the appt weeks in advance for this very issue.
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I think this sums up the Vox afternoon quite well, thank you.
It’s their mistake showing off a speaker not broken in. Almost everyone knows it is s horrible idea... almost.
I just know it had 5 hours of time this week as he was setting it up for demo. I would assume he's used them for demos before but don't know.
Either way, if the distributor decides to demo a speaker in that fashion and believes the sound is acceptable (he clearly said that), then what else is a consumer supposed to do?
Single drivers can be horrific before they are broken-in, I hope that wasn't the case but it honestly does sound like it. They are not perfect speakers but that description made me think they had some issues.
Nope, you have to assume you know more than the dealer...unless the dealer also a hobbyist (most are really not). He should know his product much better or his ears suck.
I have no doubt that more run-in time would benefit the speaker. But I have heard some of the lower-end Voxativs exhibit the same fingerprint of discontinuities even after extensive break-in. Whatever they are doing with the 2.5X pricier Ampeggio Due tames the unruliness of their driver design. Most other small FRDs exhibit worse behaviors as implemented, exceptions being the Audience ClairAudients and 47 Labs Lens II, both of which have just 3" FRDs with accepted bass limits.
Phil
Phil
Cobra,
Great write-up! Thank you for taking the time to do this!
I have only heard this speaker at shows. And I found it much more enjoyable that the typical multi-driver box speakers that one finds in virtually in every room.
Nevertheless, I have always found this speaker overly warm? Do you have any ideas why that may be? They tend to show it with their 805 integrated..
Also, do you have any sense why Zus came across to me as much more dynamic?
thanks!
Caesar,
Zu speakers are overall much more dynamic. Their shove and jump factor is consistent up and down their frequency range. And in a Definition, the 12" powered sub keeps up. The Voxativ has slots of exceptional dynamic vividity which are rendered more exceptional by nearby frequency strata lacking the same. Also, at certain frequencies the V987 sounds even quicker than Zu, but this is true in only a narrow band of incidence.
Another characteristic that affects your perception of relative dynamics between Zu and Voxativ is their power handling differences. We were listening in a modestly-normal size (for the US) living room, with the 50/50w Kronzilla SX driving the Vox. Now, on a Zu speaker, you would hit the amp's dynamic limit before the drivers. With the Voxativ it's exactly the opposite. The V987 driver gets driven to distress before the same amplier's limit is reached. The Zu FRD has tremendous power handling, more than any other FRD. A few years ago Sean told me no one had ever blown a Zu FRD in the field. He did it intentionally at the factory to find how hard he could drive them for preshipping break-in. The Vox driver isn't nearly so robust electrically nor wrt the cone's ability to handle bursty dynamics. I think Zu was always better at this than anything with Vox-sized FRDs, but Zu's treated-paper cones using advanced nano material put a lot more distance between Zu and other single driver makers wrt to dynamic grace. The Druid 6 is especially and palpably more dynamic than the Voxativ because it retains its shove at every frequency. The Voxativ does not. The Voxativ is more agile than the Zu at certain strata but that margin of agility doesn't carry the weight and shove of Zu, either.
You're right, the V987 is much more enjoyable than almost any multi-driver, crossover-intensive speaker. I was evaluating it against expectations for the holistic presentation of a single driver speaker and it fell short, with some sonic characteristics akin to the choke points of crossover-intensive boxes, and some of the dynamic limits of planars in some strata of its frequency range, where strain was evident.
I suspect the driver is intrinsically warm around and below middle C, in the overlap area between tenor and baritone. Early Zu was too and it took steady iteration over models and years to tune that out. The liveliness further up, along with the eruptive stridency masks the intrinsic warmth on some music, by distracting you with more obvious problems.
Phil
Zu speakers are overall much more dynamic. Their shove and jump factor is consistent up and down their frequency range. And in a Definition, the 12" powered sub keeps up. The Voxativ has slots of exceptional dynamic vividity which are rendered more exceptional by nearby frequency strata lacking the same. Also, at certain frequencies the V987 sounds even quicker than Zu, but this is true in only a narrow band of incidence.
Another characteristic that affects your perception of relative dynamics between Zu and Voxativ is their power handling differences. We were listening in a modestly-normal size (for the US) living room, with the 50/50w Kronzilla SX driving the Vox. Now, on a Zu speaker, you would hit the amp's dynamic limit before the drivers. With the Voxativ it's exactly the opposite. The V987 driver gets driven to distress before the same amplier's limit is reached. The Zu FRD has tremendous power handling, more than any other FRD. A few years ago Sean told me no one had ever blown a Zu FRD in the field. He did it intentionally at the factory to find how hard he could drive them for preshipping break-in. The Vox driver isn't nearly so robust electrically nor wrt the cone's ability to handle bursty dynamics. I think Zu was always better at this than anything with Vox-sized FRDs, but Zu's treated-paper cones using advanced nano material put a lot more distance between Zu and other single driver makers wrt to dynamic grace. The Druid 6 is especially and palpably more dynamic than the Voxativ because it retains its shove at every frequency. The Voxativ does not. The Voxativ is more agile than the Zu at certain strata but that margin of agility doesn't carry the weight and shove of Zu, either.
You're right, the V987 is much more enjoyable than almost any multi-driver, crossover-intensive speaker. I was evaluating it against expectations for the holistic presentation of a single driver speaker and it fell short, with some sonic characteristics akin to the choke points of crossover-intensive boxes, and some of the dynamic limits of planars in some strata of its frequency range, where strain was evident.
I suspect the driver is intrinsically warm around and below middle C, in the overlap area between tenor and baritone. Early Zu was too and it took steady iteration over models and years to tune that out. The liveliness further up, along with the eruptive stridency masks the intrinsic warmth on some music, by distracting you with more obvious problems.
Phil
Yes, the zu uses essentially pro drivers where power handling without significant thermal compression is a design criteria and Vox drivers don’t have that level of robustness probably.
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