I had a chance to hear a pair of these at a friends house on Friday and was quite impressed with their performance for their size and cost. Having procrastinated for long enough (right word this time) I took the plunge and bought a pair. These arrived remarkably early this morning at my work address and cost me a miserly 104 ukp all inclusive.
My first test was at the office stuck on a fairly ordinary 20W stereo amp. They sounded pretty good with known commercial recordings, and with oggs of my own tracks, although I though they sounded a little harsh in the upper mid range.
The bass performance was far better than I expected, but then I hadn't realised they were ported enclosures not 'infinite' baffle types. It didn't extend all that far down (they are only 'bookcase' monitors) but the roll-off was smooth with no noticeable lumps or bumps - this was confirmed with sinewave testing from and audio generator. The lack of sub-bass is not a problem as I have the Hi-Fi setup in the lounge with rather exceptional floor speakers which I can use for final setting of bass levels.
As work was quite light today the boss let me quickly throw together one of my minimum feedback amplifier ideas to give that a try. The design was originally for 30W into 8ohms but can throw out about 70W into the 4ohm load that the Alesis present.
It was immediately obvious that my transistors were having a love affair with the speakers
The grittiness had completely disappeared, and the tracks I tried all sounded clearer. Some of the commercial ones showed up oddities in the mixing that I hadn't noticed before, particularly stereo positioning and frequency dependent shifts (I swapped channels to prove it was the source and not different performances from the amp/speaker).
Once home, this evening I immediately slapped them on my normal amp. Again, a great improvement but not quite as good as the workshop rats-nest.
Overall I am very pleased. I don't have perfection, but I do have something that is very much better than what I've been using up till now, and quite good enough for my needs.
Hmmm. With these, and my AKGs I don't have any exuses for crap recordings
