Coaxials - Reality vs. Experience?
Should say "hype vs. reality" in the headline.
Coaxial speaker design has been around in one way or another for a long time. I often think I’ll be absolutely blown away by them, but in practice traditional vertical layout speakers often have sound as good, or have other features that make them sound better.
Thiel, KEF, Monitor Audio, Tekton, Seas are among the many players attempting such designs, but none has, by the coaxial drivers alone, dominated a segment of the market.
What are your listening experiences? Is it 1 coaxial speaker that won you over, or have you always preferred them?
It seems that the general consensus is that there is no consensus! What I mean is that co-axial speaker technology has not, by itself, won anyone over. Specific implementations though have. Another way to put this is, if you own a Tannoy for instance, and you could not buy Tannoy again, you would not focus on buying co-axial speakers. |
The new coax design from Technics (SB-G90M2, ~5k/pair) sounds shockingly good for any speaker under the 10 to 15k price point. I recently got to audit it more seriously at my friend's house, who has it paired with ~40k in electronics. It would be safe to say that the engineers at Technics know how to innovate/design a coax driver better than the guys at KEF and Tannoy (rinse repeat of older driver designs with the same crappy sound). |
@deep_333 Yamaha and Technics are so underrated! However, the low efficiency of Technics speakers in general made me look the other way. The story of old manufacturers recycling old designs is best exemplified by Focal. Their drivers have even gotten worse over the years for "economy of scale" reasons. The materials are of cheaper quality these days. The new Focal Vestia line is using tweeters from the Focal car electronics division. I am a bit perplexed about your statement regarding KEF. The build quality and engineering of the KEF LS50 is hard to beat for the money (you literally have to go to small boutique manufacturers which underprice their goods or assembled DIY projects with quality parts). The KEF R3 Meta measures extremely well regardless of price. But I'll concede that measurements don't tell the whole story. If it were the case, all amplifier companies would go out of business and everyone would be using class D mini amps from China (forshadowing maybe...). |
