Do $2k speakers + DSP = $50k speakers?


Now that I have your attention, I’d like to share one of my recent experiments. Like many of you, I've never truly been satisfied with my system and often consider purchasing higher-end speakers. I have a variety of speakers in my house including small, high-quality monitors, and mid/high level floor standers and a few subs (all names left intentionally blank) from $2k to $15k. One part of me enjoys the flexibility of monitors while the other part prefers the full-range sound of floor standers. I have a mid-sized room with some strategically placed panels, but the room is average at best.

As a fun project, I used Dirac room correction and bass management, via a MiniDSP unit, to tweak the frequency response of my floor standers. I then used Room EQ Wizard to further tune the frequency response and properly integrate my subs. They sound “good” (and far better than they did without the EQ), but I suspect they’re ultimately limited by the room. I then used this result as a baseline to see how far I could go with my monitors (1/10 the price of the floor standers). I set up my monitors in nearly the same position and went through the same process. I worked to bring the response as close as I could to the floor-stander baseline as possible. I did not fully invest the time to seamlessly integrate the subs, but I must admit I was pretty shocked as to how close I got things when I A-B'ed them.

There are so many speaker manufactures out there with unique strengths and focuses. If you select a speaker with good quality drivers, a solid cabinet, low distortion, good off-axis response, and solid engineering behind it, is the only hurdle left frequency response differences? Can a $2k speaker (with subs and DSP) = a $50k speaker? Thoughts?

hifiguy5

I was a bit confused with your tag line question.

If you were to say DSP applied in an active crossover, I would say a $2K speaker could sound like a $8K speaker.

Since you clarify that your DSP was meant to actually refer to room correction, I would say a $2K speaker could be made to sound like a $4K speaker.

My opinion and experience.

So you are saying running DiracLive on a Genelec 8351 for instance would increase the sound quality much more than say running the same thing on a TAD ME-1? Simply because the electronic crossovers have steeper slopes and do phase correction? I mean DiracLive also corrects for phase too, so it sounds like we are talking about just steeper x-o slopes.

The Kii 3 being stand mount speakers go down to 20hz without a sub,. Having 6 speakers and 6 Amplifier's per cabinet. Amazing really.....
Wonder how the Kii 3 compare to the Dutch & Dutch 8c.
that would surely be a great contest.