SPCR in the past was essential if you wanted to 'tone down' your PC noise levels. Today, so many quiet products exist that building a quiet pc has become easy with off the shelf products. Back in the Athlon XP / P4 days you had to be more hardcore if you wanted to compute in near silence. However, I still enjoy reading silent pc reviews on SPCR, as its done quite thoroughly and analytical. I greatly respect SPCRs science of building a 'dead' measuring chamber for pc parts and calculating efficiency, measuring aiflow etc.

That is why I don't understand how you can mention the cable types used in an audio review. I don't mind it as such, in any hobby, some people go too far and end up believing in fairy tales. But it takes credibility away from the main reason SPCR is what it is: unbiased properly measured and hardcore silent pc reviews. Cables are very important in audio systems, but only because without them you don't hear anything!

Its just a minor '-1' or 'dislike' or what is it called in these modern times... If I was SPCR I'd review any damn thing I want in any damn way I'd choose, so by all means keep doing what you do. I just have a hard time understanding how someone 'scientific' can have anything else but normal copper $2/yd wires in his audio system.

You know that there's a huge international community of hifi enthusiasts -- both subjectivists and objectivists -- who will rise up to argue with you about the audibility of cables, so I won't.

Let's put it this way: If I mention what cables are used, the idio... I mean audiophiles don't just blow the review off as unenlightened trash. As with cases or motherboards or fans, all the relevant ancillary components, test gear and conditions need to be disclosed in a good review, anyway. So the audiophiles read it, and if they like the rest of my review, maybe they come back for more later.

You, on the other hand, don't think cables make any difference as long as they close the circuit, so then my using this or that cable and mentioning it shouldn't make any difference to you, right?

Some people will also argue that what SPCR has been reporting all these years -- about fine differences in the noise of various components, fans etc, is a lot of subjective mumbo jumbo, too, because we still cannot quantify everything we hear on the basis of measurements. Is it so hard to accept that this is also true of music/audio reproduction? (Granted, the high end audio review world is much more rife with voodoo magic than SPCR).

<insert cable joke here>

Thanks for the review. I wonder how well these would sound using the threaded insert and wall mounts...instead of being 3 feet away on a desk, they'd be 6ft or more away. With the remote, it solves my biggest gripe about the original version.

Also, I was impressed by the idle power using a Class AB design. Glad to see this has evolved.

Actually, only delu... I mean, subjectivists really will. Objectivists will just mention a quick reminder that:
- speaker cables can matter if they are too thin (ie, if their resistance isn't negligible compared to the speakers' impedance);
- interconnects can matter too - if you have very long cable runs or a very challenging EMI/RF environment (though that's never the case for home HiFi systems).

Edit: Forgot to answer to this :

There are simple answers to that:

- In the audio world, the only parts that are difficult to measure objectively are speakers/headphones (because you need to record them with a microphone, in controlled conditions). Everything else (sources, preamps, amps) can be measured easily enough with an audio analyzer, with a far better precision than what our ears are capable of. At SPCR, everything you measure has to be recorded with a mic, yet you've put a lot of efforts into those objective measurements - building a semi-anechoic chamber, publishing frequency spectra and so on, to support your claims. Most audio reviewers, OTOH, don't even bother with measurements that would be much easier to do.

- If there really is an audible difference and you can't measure it (or someone disputes the validity of your measurements), you can use a double-blind test to prove your point (or disprove it). Many audio reviewers make claims about things that they would likely be unable to hear in a double blind test. If you want to make a small experience, you can pick up two fan models which, in your opinion, have a subtly different (but very close) noise signature, level-match them (set their speeds so that they have the same noise level in dBA), and check whether you can reliably tell which is which in a double-blind test... If the double blind test shows there's a real difference, then you subjective opinion wasn't mumbo-jumbo at all.

tl;dr version:
Subjective test != mumbo-jumbo.
Bad methodology in a subjective test = mumbo-jumbo.

I have the smaller version of those, also reviewed by SPCR, and I LOVE them. I might be buying the A5s for the living room, and move the A3s to the office.
Thanks for the review Mike !

I wish there was a more convenient way to assemble these into a 5.x home theater arrangement. The only thing I use my receiver for is amplification - my sole source is the HTPC - and I've been itching to replace it with active monitors. Proaudio monitors are an option, but these audioengine's look like a tremendous value. 4.x would be easy ... it's that 5th channel that throws a wrench in the plan.

Hmmm... with 2 pairs, the 2nd pair can be connected to the line out of the first (which is controlled by the remote), but what to do about the center ch?! Does the audio card in your HTPC have a center ch output? what kind (dig? analog?) You could get a pair of the A2s and use just the left one for the center. They're only $200/pr, and the sound quality is very good, certainly good enough for voice. For me, considering the relative low importance of the back channels, I'd be tempted to go with smaller, easier to place A2 + the wireless adapter for them.

I sent Brady of AE an email about your quandary, asking whether he had a solution. Surely this question has come up before.

Exactly. I could honestly probably live with 4.x, since I've been living with 2.0 for so long w/phantom center. 4.x is as simple as buying 2 pairs.

It's the Realtek ALC888B on my Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L, and claims 5.1 & 7.1 analog output. I've been using my motherboard's onboard spidif to send audio to my AVR. If I switch to an all-active speaker setup, I will certainly get better analog soundcard. I'm not married to ANY of my current gear. All of it works fine, but could use updating.

In the grand scheme of things, my wife and I plan to be living in a different house in the next 3-5 years, so I'm a little hesitant to make major HT investments without knowing the size/shape of the next theater.

Brady from AE replied:
Most people that use A5 in an HT setup buy a 3rd pair and use the left (powered) speaker for the center channel. Not as clean as offering a dedicated Audioengine powered center channel, but we're trying to stay focused on 2.0/2.1 computer audio and just no time to tackle this. We've also thought about doing a soundbar w/wireless sub but everyone seems to be doing one and we would need to do a decoder, etc. which is more difficult than it sounds.

Regarding the remote, yes, each remote has the same code so if you have more than 1 pair of A5+ next to each other the remote will control both. It's an IR remote so it is fairly directional which helps if using A5+ as front and rear speakers.

Maybe they're over-thinking it: they could simply sell the powered A5 speaker separately, at a moderately reduced price.

Thanks for checking, Mike.

While these speakers are not expensive as speakers go, in the price range you will be much better off going passive with an amp. Good amps are cheap these days. And for only slightly more you can get low end active speakers (i.e. with internal amplification and line-level crossovers) that will massively outperform these speakers.

I mean they are just poor design. I wouldn't spend $400 on a pair of speakers one of which is much heavier than the other and structurally completely different! Taking a power supply and line level inputs, as if you were going to make an active speaker, and then going and putting all the amplifiers in one speaker and doing passive amplification is just really cheap and not appropriate for speakers more than $50 each.

Quoting you out of order for the sake of argument...


If I understand correctly you are contrasting the AE speakers, which use a two-channel amplifier and passive crossovers, with speakers using active crossovers upstream of dedicated mid and tweeter amps in each speaker. If so, given your earlier comment:

Going passive with an amp is essentially what the AE speakers are, yes? So your criticism is really that there are better passive speakers and better amps, not specifically that the concept itself (passive crossovers) is flawed. If so, I agree.

I think a good application for these AE speakers is one where you do not want any components (CDP, AVR, amps, etc) at all - say you only have an iPod or Squeezebox - and you do not have electrical outlets near both speakers. The powered speaker goes near an electrical outlet; the unpowered one can go wherever you can string speaker cable.


What would you pick in each category?
1) Good, cheap amp + passive speakers
2) "True" active monitors

I think - even shopping used - finding a good cheap power amp and decent passive speakers for under $400 is a challenge. Emotiva's Airmotive 4 (also $400) looks like good competition.

http://emotivapro.com/products/powered_ ... motiv4.php

Thanks for the review

I wondered why the A5+ did not include SPDIF input as part of the upgrade? Is this because SPDIF would require expensive DACs on-board, and few people use SPDIF?

croddie --

Your criticisms are entirely conceptual --

1. If by "passive amplification" you mean bi-amping w/ electronic xover, this is a more costly technique, and most useful for a low xover point (2-300 Hz or below) when the mid driver can be relieved of high bass excursion demands. It's been shown in many designs over the years (and in technical papers) that for a high freq point, a passive xover works very well, especially when the manufacturer has control of all the components -- ie, match the tweeter & mi/bass, choose the best xover freq, sensitivity, etc. (note -- the xover freq in the A5+ has to be >2kHz; a 1" tweeter generally cannot be used lower due to increasing distortion & excursion limitations at lower freq.)

2. Good amps are cheap these days. Name one.

3. And for only slightly more you can get low end active speakers (i.e. with internal amplification and line-level crossovers) that will massively outperform these speakers. Massively outperform? I'd like to know what products you refer to.

4. I mean they are just poor design. I wouldn't spend $400 on a pair of speakers one of which is much heavier than the other and structurally completely different! Taking a power supply and line level inputs, as if you were going to make an active speaker, and then going and putting all the amplifiers in one speaker and doing passive amplification is just really cheap and not appropriate for speakers more than $50 each.
If there is a difference in the internal volume of the 2 enclosures, and no adjustments of any kind were made for this, sonically, this would show up only below ~100Hz. In reality, I cannot believe the designers did not make adjustments for this difference, with port tuning and/or active equalization, because in actual listening, any differences are simply not audible. (This is after >3 mos of hands on, ears-on, mind-on listening).

Looking around for self-powered speakers, I can only see a small handful of speakers for home audio use in this price range that might be competitive sonically, and all of them feature a single amp per speaker w/ passive xover. Example -- http://www.nhthifi.com/Powered-Desktop- ... egory=3772

Perhaps you're referring to "pro studio monitor" speakers sold mainly through stores that cater to musicians and recording studios?

Finally, the proof of any technology or product is in the results. imo, these A5+ speakers sound amazing, and not just for the price. About the only thing I'd change is to bring up that top end (10~20 kHz). This will not be very audible with a lot of music, and it might actually make it sound worse poorer quality material and sources, but it would help with some.

leem --

Putting a good DAC in this speaker would have pushed the price up considerably. Audioengine offers a standalone DAC (24/192) for $169. I'd guess putting that (or similar) in the speakers would have pushed it up >$100.

Contrasting these (passive design, amp inside one of the boxes) to both regular passive speakers and active speakers.

Sure a speaker cable can be thinner than a/c power plus line level cable (comparing with active speakers). An amp is not necessarily large however...

For example a lot of tripath amps get sold that are small, cheap, and good enough for all but high end or high power applications.

It's tight, but if you spend $50 on the power amp that leaves $175 per speaker and you can get a reasonable budget speaker for that price - not great but not massively compromised like these AA speakers.

No, I mean the normal consumer speakers where you have a separate amp feeding a high power signal to the speakers with a passive crossover there.[/quote]

Search ebay for tripath amps.

Try this one: http://www.amazon.com/KRK-RP5G2-Powered ... B001A6G6CY
Current Amazon deal is $150 per speaker. Much lower than I thought, astonishing value actually.

You can do some amazing things by dsp but it's rare in speakers. I hope this becomes more common but it is not at the moment. I have come across one or two "audiophile" speakers, and a discontinued monitor speaker with this. It it does become common, yes it will be forgiving to poorer speaker designs.

Trouble is that a subjective evaluation is not very informative.

My estimate for the cost of good DAC components is much lower, less than $2 including the digital port. But the advantage is not very great unless you want to do dsp in the speaker or have ground loop issues.

I'm thinking about replacing my aging and cheap Creative Labs 5.1 set, and while I know my way around IEMs and headphones, I'm utterly lost when it comes to amps and speakers. I don't know how much I ought to spend (always a figure dependent on your personal situation and expectations), much less what to spend it on!

This review helps a bit, as does the discussion. For example, those tripath amps look interesting -- classical amps always seemed totally over the top, I don't need 10 different inputs and a power output to service an arena, I'd much rather have something compact. Powered speakers are very enticing for the same reasons, although drawing from experience in other areas it always seems like a good idea to separate functional components where possible.

I'm a bit worried about going 2.0 for games and movies, though. I wish there was an easy way to just add three cheaper, inferior speakers to get to 5.0.

Several points --

You'll never see an "objective review" that actually gets at the essential quality of a speaker's performance. And afaik, there are only (primarily) subjective reviews for public consumption.

Having played now for several years with a fairly high resolution audio analysis system, I'm stymied by the sheer range and number of measurements and tests you can run on speakers -- and how infrequently those results tie closely to what I hear. I've been an amateur student of speaker technology for nearly 50 years, and spent many of those actually designing and building my own, using extensive CAD tools as well actual measurements of the drivers I used, in the enclosures built for them as well in more standard square meter test baffles. I was also involved in high end audio retail for 7-8 years, and have had exposure and hands/ears-on experience with a great many audio products.

While, there's absolutely no question of the need for objective analysis for designing speakers, I also don't know of any objective speakers reviews that do a thorough enough job of the testing to get even close to what a single well-written paragraph by a careful listener can get across. Without those "subjective comments", even the most extensive set of measurements don't cut it. Again, show me a really great objective review.

What you're saying is that my assessment has no value for you whatsoever. That seems like an insult.

I've been lurking around here ever since I stopped working for Mike a few years ago. I don't consider myself as much of an audiophile/audio enthusiast as most around here, but at the end of the day, what is it that really matters when it comes to audio equipment? How it sounds!

Who is it that decides whether speaker A or speaker B sounds better? The listener. No analysis software is going to tell you that outright - it might give you some insight as to what to expect, but when dealing with high-end equipment, the subjective analysis is ultimately what is going to sell you the product.

I still chuckle when I see headphones (my primary source of listening these days) that advertise playback capabilities well beyond the 20Hz-20kHz range (I'm talking 5Hz on the low end, and 30kHz on the high) - you're not going to hear those frequencies, and yet somehow they matter? It's surely something you could measure with the proper equipment, but is it going to make them sound any better? Nope.

I was very excited by the article's title, then disappointed to see that the wireless audio adapter wasn't a stand-alone product. Are there any products at a similar quality/price point that allow for a wireless audio connection with any standard home theater equipment (third party receiver, third party speaker)? An AC power connection for each speaker/wireless RX isn't an issue, but speaker cable all over the room is.

I'm not sure why you reached this conclusion -- it is very much a "standalone" product. It is a radio receiver/sender pair -- powered by any USB socket or charger -- for audio signals between any two components. I only used it to send signals to the A5+ speakers from a PC or the Squeezebox, but it can go between any two audio components that have at least analog line in/outputs. (Between 2 computers, I think the USB port is all you need for the signal transfer.)

Actually, the funniest thing isn't even the meaningless 5 Hz - 30 KHz claims - what's even funnier is that headphone manufacturer pretty much never mention the maximum attenuation level within their claimed range... So those data are basically always 100% meaningless.

I think that the 20Hz-20kHz "limits" to our hearing is not actually true. Especially on the high end -- do you realize the overtones of percussion instruments like a piano or a triangle or a snare drum go well beyond 20kHz? We might not be able to hear *pitch* up that high, but I posit that we can and do hear these overtones.

And we *feel* pitches below 20Hz. A car door slamming makes a powerful noise around 5Hz. You can tell when a subwoofer that can reproduce frequencies below 20Hz.

I have found over the years that the quality of a tweeter really can make or break a speaker. My current favorite tweeter is still the Lineaum dipole tweeter. I detest directional tweeters like horn tweeters, or any tweeter that get "beamy" at higher frequencies.

That is one of the myriad of qualities that speakers have that cannot be nailed down with objective only measurements -- the balance of the sound dispersion. Speakers that make you sit down or be in the center to hear properly are annoying. The location of the woofer(s) and the port (if any) in relation to all the room boundaries (floor, ceiling, back wall, side wall, etc.) all have a huge effect on the bass response.

@ NeilBlanchard: There have been a lot of double-blind studies conducted to show that 44 KHz sampling is audibly transparent (and it can only perfectly reproduce frequencies up to 22 KHz - in practice, that means cutting all frequencies higher than around 20 KHz with a filter). IOW, people can't reliably hear a difference between music sampled at 88, 96 or 192 KHz and the same down-sampled to 44 KHz (when the down-sampling is done correctly), even though all frequencies higher than around 20 KHz are lost in the process. It's easy to test it for yourself using an ABX setup (like the one included in Foobar 2000 - the nice thing with differences in the source files is that they are easy to ABX without needing someone else's help). As for the importance of tweeters: yes, they are important. Not to reproduces frequencies higher than 20 KHz, but to properly reproduce frequencies higher than a few thousand KHz...

Very low frequencies are a somewhat different issue, because you can feel them with your whole body (when they are low enough and strong enough) even though you can't hear them. That being said, it doesn't really matter for headphones, because they can't actually reproduce those very low frequencies. When manufacturers claim a "5 Hz - 30 KHz" frequency range, what they don't say is that the attenuation may very well be - 60 dB or more at those extremes... So it's completely meaningless.

Finally, sound dispersion can very well be measured objectively... It's just that the amount of work required would be huge. What is annoying with most professional audio reviewers, though, isn't the lack of measurement for speakers (it would be hard and complicated to do) - it's the lack of measurements for sources (CD players, DACs...) and amplifiers, which are easy to measure if you can afford to spend a few thousand bucks on a decent audio analyzer. What's even more annoying is the lack of double-blind tests, which are the only way to sanity-check a subjective impression.

Try some emotiva Airmotiv 4's.

Having discovered the Audioengine wireless adapter through this article, I bought one today (the new W3). I have tried a number of wireless products and found they had noise issues. These, however, are a really good product. I was prepared to be disappointed but I'm not! I wouldn't call myself an audiophile, but I run a home studio with reasonable gear and I do a lot of listening. I did a comparison by running a cable and switching between the cable and the adapter. I really couldn't hear the difference. If you have a high end system I guess you would, but you wouldn't be looking for a wireless solution for a high end system anyway.

I'm using it to transmit from a preamp in another room and back to my PC. This is the opposite of what it is designed for, and I found that using the PC usb power for the receiver introduced some pretty nasty high frequency noise. But it works fine with an external power source.

So thanks again SPCR!