$199 MMMM Vertically Oriented Measurements

The question remains as to how much of the variation in horizontal frequency response is due to wave interference between the drivers, versus the natural off-axis response of the driver itself. To answer this, we then turned the speaker on its side and measured how well it performed off-axis with the wave interference essentially taken out of the equation.

In the 1/24 octave chart below, it looks perhaps a bit better but very similar to what we originally measured. We’ll have to look at the 1/6 octave chart and standard deviation to see how much good this does.

In the 1/6 octave chart below, you can see that we essentially eliminated the upper midrange null around 1.5 kHz. The null was around -6 dB, which is quite audible, and when oriented vertically you can see all the variation is less than +/-2 dB with the exception of one frequency that increases to +4 dB. The lower treble performance is arguably better. The off-axis attenuation occurs at slightly higher frequencies, but is still an ugly mess, swallowing -8 dB of dialogue-critical treble. The 11 kHz tizzy spike is tamed down somewhat. Overall, the vertical orientation slightly improved the frequency variation, but not by much. The standard deviation of its radiation pattern improved only to 1.64. The majority of this speaker’s problems are with the radiation patterns and orientation of the drivers themselves. Starting with drivers like these, the speaker designer is for the most part doomed from the beginning.

In the chart below, you can see a comparison of how much variation the speaker had horizontally and vertically, and how they were related to angle. You can see that up to 20 degrees off-axis, the speaker performed better by having its drivers oriented vertically. Again, a lower standard deviation means less variation in frequency response. However, at angles greater than 25 degrees the angled front baffle was clearly worse off being turned vertically. There are several floor-standing loudspeaker designs that focus a vertical array towards the listener in the center plane, and you can see from these measurements why you wouldn’t do the opposite.

If you were shopping for a surround sound system from this company, you would be doing slightly better by orienting the speaker vertically and would presumably do better using a center channel that’s identical to your left/ right channels. But the driver performances are so bad, that it mostly doesn’t matter what you do. You could turn the speaker completely around or put it in the closet and it won’t get much worse.