Rat Shck Presidian 40-5053. Next Sonic Impact?

Hooked 'em up tonight. First impressions - they are undoubtedly excellent for the price, and may repond to some tweaking or EQ. They image very well, and do have an excellent coherence - which is of course to be expected since they're basically crossoverless. Without having done any measurements, I'd say they're a fair bit forward in the 3.5 k to 4.5k freq. range which is a little fatiguing. The highs are quite good though - these appear to be decent tweeters. The 65 hz low end stated in the specs is a bit of an exaggeration. I don't think they go much below 100 hz, and even there it's pretty rolled off. Plus, I'd say from 100 up to about 300hz is pretty sloppy - not audiophile quality.

My best guess is adding a small sub that could crossover at 120hz to 150hz might make these very affordable monitors for someone on a budget. A stack of 2 per side might help by inducing some coupling in the lower end and altering the effective EQ. I'd also experiment with leaving out one pair of tweeters from the mix. Placement in room corners would definitely help - which I'm not able to do in their current location.

I'll post again when I have time to experiment.

BTW - Mine state on the cabinets "ASSEMBLED IN CHINA" - so there are apparently different manufacturing lots out there (per Eldartford's version).

6r4apo001@sneakemail.com..."Coasting along" Exactly what we want to get decent volume without distortion.

I'm waiting for a pair to hit the classifieds. Hopefully Audiogon will have a used bluebook price soon.

Just shoved an old t-shirt a few inches into each port and draped the rest over the top and then behind. Makes the upper lows and lower mids much more natural IMO without any effect on the freq. range as far as I can hear. So it's probably worth adding damping to the cabinet and filling the port tube with it. I doubt that the "port" had any audio design parameters involved in the first place.

Can someone who's listened to these give me some sort of reference as to just how good they are for the money? I mean I see that it's obvious from the previous posts that they sound way better than their $40 price would suggest... but does that mean like speakers in the $200-$300 range, which I usually find unlistenable, or does that mean these compare favorably to speakers in the $400-$700 range like System Audio SA-205 or Krix Equinox or Quad 11L???

Yeah, yeah - I know that it's only forty bucks so I shouldn't worry about it, but I have WAY too many speakers already and have been on quite the spending spree as of late. Also I don't wanna buy stuff and then return it just in order to get my kicks and giggles to hear it - I don't think that it's very fair to the retailer.

But if there is some way that these speakers really do compete with some of the mini-monitors mentioned above, even if they are a bit less than them performance-wise, then I want a pair. After a good time spent listening and evaluating, they would probably then be put into service as a replacement of the rear surrounds in my stock home theater system. (I've already replaced the fronts and middle with Krix and Celestion and the improvement has been wonderful).

Thanks!