Green Mountain Audio Chroma HX Review
It's not odd when you've been in this hobby a long time you learn that what you read in magazines is not always accurate. Ultimately what you read in magazines are opinions. Eventually you realise that opinions can differ greatly and there's no reason to value a reviewers opinion more than anybody elses Magazines like 6moon do not even bother to measure the frequency response let alone claims about time coherency and more detailed information like distortion. Sterophile do at least carry out such kinds of tests at the end of their reviews. even then nobody has still figured out why some speakers sound better than others or what parameters should be optimised in a high end speaker. The moral is never trust a magazine review simple as that. That is precisely the mistake I made when I bought the green mountains without spending enough time listening to it. Ask the manufacturers for evidence which can be independently verified. We have every right to if you're spending thousands of dollars on a speaker. If they get defensive or don't reply, I would not bother with them. |
@mindlessminion None at the moment. I'm in no hurry to buy another expensive pair after the previous mistake. Ive seen green mountain chromas come up for sale online over the past few years for a fraction of the original price. Another tell tale sign of a bogus product is any benefit which is promoted and based on snake oil. For example the original post refers to "Unobtainium (not for sale) Litz wire is used with the latest unobtainium solder." This is just bogus bs. Stay away. |
Speaker design is not just an art it's also based on science. There are rules on what size box can be used with what driver parameters. This is a basic consideration. there are ways to measure cabinet resonance. Getting this wrong is a serious mistake. It will seriously affect the sound you hear. I think it's important for audiophiles to learn and understand these things and the difference between bogus and genuine claims. there are plenty of bad and expensive speakers out there. We need to understand how to identify and avoid them. |
No I think I’m entitled to post my comments on my experience and opinions about green mountain speakers which somebody has created a topic on. Feel free to respond to the reasons I’ve given for my criticsm. You shouldn’t be afraid to discommend a piece of equipment you’ve bought which you weren’t happy with. Why should only good reviews be allowed and encouraged? |
The title of that thread and the very first reply to it simply confirms that the green mountains do not have a neutral tonality due to the resonances and incorrect bass response. Some like resonance and poor bass response. Most do not. Obviously the designer of the speakers enjoys this type of coloration and perhaps can't hear it. That doesn't mean nobody else can hear it and find it unpleasant. |
There were no measurements. He just stuck a 0.21mh coil on the woofer and called it a day. No baffle step, nothing. The baffle is so heavily slanted that you're never on axis unless you stand up. All in the name of time coherence and all at the expense of a smooth polar response. Which by the way you'd never get out of a cabinet the shape of the chroma. Olsen showed that a cylinder is the worst possible shape yet the eos is essentially a tweeter sat on top of the cabinet with no boundary other than its faceplate. Could have used a waveguide at least! |
https://youtu.be/XpQqqW4SLAI Somebody has posted a recording of the green mountain rios. You can hear just how colored the sound is even through a YouTube video. Listen to any other YouTube video of a high end bookshelf speaker and hear the difference. There's no warmth, no bass and mids are colored. Horrible |
Hi end audio to me is about elevating the standards of audio reproduction not diminishing it. There are quite a few speakers out there that not only don't fulfill this definition but does a disservice by misleading us into thinking we are hearing high quality sound. The green mountains are colored. Its not easy to prove but it's a fact. It's important to separate speakers that are colored to suit people's taste from those that are engineered to elevate the art. Using a cheap woofer in a 5k speaker is just not right. Mismatching the woofer and the cabinet volume is a basic mistake that no serious speaker designer would make. The result is poor bass response. Even the reviews mention this. It's undeniable. |
The green mountains use no baffle step compensation, highly resonant cabinets which ring, very cheap parts and are highly overpriced for what you get. do you expect us to believe there’s not even one better woofer that money can buy than a 5 dollar car woofer? The woofer is mismatched which is why you get poor bass. You need a bigger cabinet, or a different woofer. This is basic speaker design 101. Every bookshelf speaker I’ve heard or owned has deeper bass than the green mountains. No speaker has sounded as cold as the green mountains. This is mentioned even in the reviews. The crossover IS improperly designed because there’s no baffle step compensation and too much energy going into both drivers which is why 99% of speakers don’t use first order. The tweeter has no impedance correction either so youre not even getting a first order roll off over most of the bandwidth. Instead you get a severe hump at its resonance frequency which you can hear if you play the tweeter on its own. Green mountain do not send their speakers to be measured by reviewers so it’s impossible to know how they measure. But measurements don’t give you the whole picture and may hide any problems with the design. You would need a blind test where you listen to green mountain alongside yg acoustics, wilson audio, dynaudio, magico etc then I’m sure you’d hear which speaker was inferior or superior. Unfortunately despite being around for many decades green mountain audio is not widely distributed by all the hifi dealerships so it’s very unlikely that an opportunity to make such a comparison would arise. The dealerships that carry green mountain do not carry the big names like yg acoustics, but only other less well known boutique speakers. If you look at what else is available you can quickly see that green mountain are indeed selling you an overpriced product. The coloration of the speakers is so bad that it’s easily heard by listening to the YouTube video I posted the link to. The knuckle test clearly shows how badly the cabinet rings right in the midrange. Putting your ear against the cabinet reveals further ringing only on certain frequencies. The baffle is so thick that there’s no room for the woofers rear wave to escape freely. This is all very poor design. |
The driver used in the green mountain Eos/Rio/chroma is the Aurasound ns6 255 4a 4 ohm version. They claim it's customised but it looks identical. I found a discussion on a DIY site about these drivers. www.avsforum.com/forum/155-diy-speakers-subs/1421821-aura-ns6-255-8a-they-any-good.html?t=1421821#/t... It says: "For bass, a large ported box (1.3cf or so) and tuned to 40hz works nice." The green mountain chroma is about 12 litres? Can somebody confirm the exact volume? If so that's about a third of the required volume according to the simulations done by those guys. So what happens if you stick it in a smaller box? Higher f3 and poor bass transient response. Which is the antithesis of green mountains claim of time coherence. The tweeter used is SEAS H1462-06 27TDFNC/GW. SEAS recommend a minimum crossover point of 2.5khz second order so it's being overworked by using a first order. Its impedance from 2khz to 750hz goes from 5 ohm to 13ohm so you're not getting a first order slope because the tweeter starts rolling off and the impedance rises. The 1uf zobel across the tweeter does nothing to correct the impedance hump. Is it a coincidence that the 750hz resonant frequency of that tweeter is one of areas of the frequency range that I hear peaks on certain notes? The woofer has a 0.21mh coil which gives you first order electrical lowpass slope at 4ohm at 3khz but once you put the woofer in the cabinet, you won't be getting first order acoustic slope with a single coil. Incidentally the values chosen for the tweeter zobel and woofer filter are the exact values that you get from an online calculator which suggests that no effort has gone into calculating them by measurements. The importance of chamfering the baffle is greatest when the baffle is thick as in the green mountains. Similarly woofers should have very open baskets to miminise obstructions to the rear waves. In light of this, companies like b&w use drivers that have open basket designs. The aurasound woofer uses a resonant stamped frame which is not very open. The situation is even worse because it sits inside a thick baffle that surrounds the woofer from the rear. No other high end speaker uses these parts based solely on their performance. It's bizarre to suggest that there are no better parts than these. I've seen high end tweeters and woofers with far greater extension than the aurasound or SEAS. All the above are ommissions or mistakes that justify my view that the green mountains are not well designed |
