Most recent speaker you audited in room and returned? Why did you return it?


Just as the title says, what was the last speaker you got hyped by, purchased and returned subsequently? If you returned it, what did you not like about it in your room? What equipment did you try matching it with?

Hearing about such experiences of unmet expectations could be an interesting topic.
 

deep_333

But then I don’t buy speakers just hoping they will just happen to sound good. If my research suggests (absent an actual in home audition) that the speakers have the characteristics that are important to me in the first place, which are supported by user/professional reviews, I buy them and I will dedicate a considerable amount of time, in some cases years actually, to dial them in by finding the appropriate electronics and carefully setting them up in my room. No small feat I think, and I can always sell them if I can’t make them work for me.

@newbee , I don’t fall for that innuendo, i.e., "It’s never the fault of the speaker and the guy who made it. It is always the fault of the guy who bought it". Such innuendo generally emanates more from guys who sell things in higher price brackets. And no, i won’t be sitting around for "years" to make it work. I have a couple of different legit rooms and a few different types of legit electronics. If it underperforms or doesn’t meet expectation, I send the speaker back to speaker’s daddy and move on to something else. It’s quite simple and life’s short.

Kef LS50 Meta.I’m not so sure that I didn’t get a bad set though. The left speaker sounded like it was breaking up at volume.

I’ve also owned some sacred cows on this forum from smaller manufacturers that shall remain nameless for fear of reprisal.

@audionoobie

Well, it’s a free country. If a cow wasn’t all that sacred in your experience, you should be able to say so freely and without any reprisal (i.e., it is the purpose of this thread), " I did not like that cow...A different beast worked better for me"...No problemo....

Thanks for the story and advices ... This will be useful for all ....

I already damp mine and isolate them and i modify the port hole design ...

I modify my headphones too ... Damping against vibrations is important ...

I also used my own homemade plates against EMI ...

It is so effective that there is no relation between before and after ....

But unlike you my craftmanship ability are not very good ... I dont modify the crossover and the electronics and i dont solder ...😁

I taught reading all my life, not  manual craftmanship .... But reading acoustics help me a lot to create  S.Q. without money  ...

I am inspired by acoustics or mechanical  concepts not so much electrical one ...

Anyway i am happy with what i own , speakers and headphone , modified ...

My very best to you and my warm welcome here ...

 

mahgister: I’ve read some of your posts and see that you like to improve speakers. I just wanted to mention a couple of things that also make a big difference and are not very costly, just in case you haven’t already done so. By the way, I began building speaker enclosures, reconning, designing and building crossover networks in my mid-teens, over 40 years ago and also used to build the cabinets for the home line of speakers for the late engineer Dave Prophit. If you are not familiar with him, he patented the Bazooka speakers that used to go behind truck seats. He later sold the patent. I later pursued many other audio related endeavors. I got into speaker building because I could not afford what I wanted and my father thought that stereo equipment was a waste of money, so he wouldn’t buy me any, although he could very well afford it. he preferred to see me active in outdoor activities. His stereo system consisted of a YORX receiver, which I eventually burned up by trying to boost the wattage by cutting, stripping and connecting an extension cord to the speaker terminals-lol! If you are not familiar with YORX, they were about as crappy as you could buy, but sounded pretty trippy after the consumption of "certain chemicals"! When he came home from work he smelled "burned electronics" throughout the house and just laughed it off after I told him about my latest experiment. Bless his heart! I learned abou speakers by checking out books at the library and saving my allowance to buy speaker building books whenever a new edition came out at the local Radio Shack. This was before the internet existed. I continued with the "speaker building" hobby for years, until I finally got tired of it. It became a "been there done that thing". Now I prefer to just buy something already made, age has made lazier, and my finances are no longer what they used to be back then. Anyways, I am getting sidetracked here... If you haven’t already, try using self-adhesive sound dampening material and line all the interior of the speaker cabinet with it. The heavier/denser the material the better. The same stuff they use to line car interiors for sound dampening. If the drivers are stamped steel instead of cast, also cut small pieces of this material and stick it to thin areas of the frame of each driver. Also wrap the outer perimeter of the port/s. This will cut down the unwanted resonances dramatically and the difference will be very audible. You can also use heavier gauge wires between the crossovers and each driver, preferably oxygen free thinned fine pure copper stranded wire. Siver begins to get expensive, unless you make your own. I’ve made many. Silversmithing is another of my countless hobbies. You can also replace all of the capacitors and resistors with as good as you can afford, while keeping the same values. Same with the coils. You can even buy quality solid wire and wind your own coils instead of buying them premade. There are charts and formulas out there that will tell you what gauge of wire to use and how many turns around a specific diameter to achieve a specific value, but you will need to have test equipment to know the original value of the coils first, since these are usually not marked with their values. You can also brace the cabinet by gluing wooden dowels inside. To some this may sound like snake oil, but doing these simple and inexpensive modifications will make you a believer. There are other modifications that you can make, but getting rid of resonances is the most important! I thought about starting a new endeavor and starting a solid concrete speaker company, but life’s short and there are too many other things I want to do with the rest of my time now that I am retiring.

 

Tekton Pendragon.  I really wanted to like them, tried a 100wpc Rogue tube integrated, a Parasound Halo Integrated and my Mac 200wpc integrated amp.  Speaker sounded anemic, and shrill.  After a week of moving them all over the listening room, back they went.  I keep thinking, good riddance.

Although I didn't return them, I was very disappointed in my KEF LS-50s, in my living room, both with and without a subwoofer. I even put them through a thorough break-in to make sure that wasn't an issue. They just just sounded small and lost. Then I realized they were indeed a nearfield monitor, and the critical distance in my room worked out at about 3 feet, my listening distance almost 3X that. So I packed them up and replaced them with a pair of Monitor Audio Silver 300 7Gs. I really wanted a set of Maggie 1.7s, but they are totally unfeasible in my room. I absolutely love the MA 300s. They have the dynamics of a JBL and the character of a well executed British speaker. As for the KEFs, I thought about selling them, then decided to build a nearfield system in my office Consisting of them, a Bluesound Node driving one of Adcom's Nelson Pass designed MOSFET GFA-5200s. In here, they sound great.