Buchardt A10 vs. Klipsch RP-600M ll - Listening Session Diary! READ VIDEO DESCRIPTION!
[Music] [Music] see here here [Music] hey guys and welcome here in the office of sternol reviews today I'm comparing two speakers side by side and decided to do two different systems using modern technology the one is the primar sc15 Visa amp which is a wireless amplifier with connectivity and streaming built in uh and a set of Bart A10 speakers connected wirelessly and of course we're going to do a uh Team test of the bookard a10s as well as some other speakers so look forward to that here on the Channel please please to help me with my H sack oh yeah sure why not the primar has a a room correction system built in and so has the linkor 3400 which I'm using as a power amp and streaming amp with a pair of Clips RP 600 the price parage is almost there between those two systems so it will be interesting to see what is what and how they sound side by side before doing the experiment here I have been playing around with the both the clips and the bookarts for for quite some time this is a day in the office of ster home reviews video we're not going to end up with some big fancy conclusion and I'm not going to do a full review of either product I'm just going to take you with me on the journey that is setting up and using the room correction systems and listening to the systems and uh and giving you my first impressions here and you will be listening in using this microphone setup behind me let's set it up we start off by launching the primar app okay in here we have the ability to uh start the room correction process uh and also also I'm going to be using this uh send microphone uh which is one of the solution that is offered you can use either a iOS device like a iPad or iPhone or you can use this s microphone so this one has previously been paired to the wireless network which is the way it communicates now turned green that's a good thing I I'm guessing here but it's probably a good thing and then we are going in the settings the audio settings which is totally counterintuitive uh we go in the EQ settings which is called in audio settings and in here there is a old room EQ curve you can see and I will just go redo this but first I will enable the microphone up here you can either select the telephone or the microphone I'm selecting the send microphone and I hope that they can see each other and it's paired and all that stuff is working I've experienced a lot of box with this and then you can er um set up the lower natural roll off frequency of the loudspeakers and to be honest I'm not actually 100% sure with the uh a10s here I'll say 30 HZ it might have to be a little higher but that's that's how we do it uh for now and uh then I'm just going to begin the room EQ uh measurement here by pressing begin and when I press begin I should be able to see this little LED turn red and if it doesn't e and what I should have explained before I actually just started the measurement was that I in the manual it says that you should go and uh walk around the entire room I never do that I actually just create a box around the listening position but if you're not a focused listener like I am usually I will sit down and then I listen in between the speakers then it can be a really good idea just to Mees out the whole room so you get a kind of average curve for the room I'm interested in the most accurate response in the listening position and I don't care that much about the other places in the room to be honest and this system can only hold one Focus profile at the time so we got some really interesting kind of weird looking uh curve here but that's fine we'll just press the calibrate button and I turn off the mic again no reason to use the battery which is rechargeable by the way and of course when you handle the microphone you can't be you know uh touching it too hard anything like that you have to hold it firmly so you don't get any noise entering the microphone so that's a send microphone and it worked this time so now I'm enabling the room inq uh EQ here by pressing the enable button and uh it should be active in the primar system here uh it uses a DSP that is able to besides the EQ curve that is done right now uh it's actually able to do a manual EQ so if you want to voice the speakers in some way uh you can actually add a filter um and here you see a couple of filter you you can add more filters by going into the editor and here you can actually select between a couple of high and low path filters uh low shelving High shelving and paramedic EQ uh and with variable q and frequencies and so on and I I don't know how many filters you can actually apply I tried applying like three four filters and it worked I mean it's a little buggy this system I must say um using the presets for example is a kind of a mess you can override the presets but when you enter the editor you see it loads and then it unloads and oh then they got back here it's it's a mess to use these filters to be honest uh you can a the filters uh individually by pressing that little round button there like so uh and this way you are able to work the frequency response adding more mid-range cutting them off uh the low end whatever you need to do uh you can also just experiment if you feel that the speakers are lacking so something or your particular music needs some extra bite of some sorts uh for now I will be disabling the EQ and it's a little hard to see here in the software but uh when the little uh ball underneath the manual EQ is enabled it's actually on together with the room EQ okay so for now we got the factory standard uh roomy queue applied and we did the measurement now we're GNA do the clips speakers using the linkof TDI 3400 to be honest I could also have grabbed the linkor 1120 and used that it would be the exact same procedure now this one was in the room and I didn't bother uh getting the 1120 but uh that it would be the same procedure the 3400 is a little more powerful but the clip speakers are very efficient so I doubt that it would mean a lot that we are using the 3400 in comparison with the 1120 in order to do the room measurement we will connect the uh included microphone that comes with the the linked off uh amps it's a professional looking uh measurement microphone using XLR uh plugs which are really rock solid and make it very easy to extend the wire you can say having a wireless microphone kind of introduces a lot of of possible um rooms for error using a cable like this it's pretty Rock Solid and used by professionals so this the lolf measurements is is much more advanced we will be measuring the power response in the room by first measuring the listening position which is where I'm sitting so I will place the microphone here inside my head then we will be doing some random measurements as well uh I think four in total to reach a certain degree of room knowledge that the system acquires and then we will be able to listen to the results afterwards and now we enter the room perfect guide in the web interface after setting up the microphone in the exact listening position it's a little hard to determine if that's really it it's exactly in the middle of our listening microphones up there so I'm going to start the measurement here and the first thing it will determine is the actual level that we will be measuring at we got a clean measurement and it's says turn up to minus5 that's quite loud but that will also excite the room in the right way and now we can start the first measurement the to so that was the first measurement and now we will repeat this process but with the microphone mve to different positions so since I am the focused kind of listener I'm not that particularly keen on measuring in all the corners of the room I will simply move this mic and put it in different heights and in uh in uh different U positions orientations uh this one is to the left of the listening position and pointing towards the uh left side and I simply run this series of measurements which will be pretty boring to look at so let's cue Benny [Music] Hill a little longer than a few minutes later and by the magic of Television we have now done all our measurements so I'm just pressing store and here it's actually a really good idea to use the manage software menu here and do a backup of what we just did so we can always recall our session here our measurements I will call this RP 600 the name of the speakers mark two um and usually I would also name the position they are in so I know how it was measured and so on but I'll put that on a piece of paper instead and we go start back up boom that was the measurement part let's listen I want to use Rune as a playback source and uh in order to do that uh it's not supported by the primar just yet they say it will be available in a future update we are waiting for that one still but um I have Simply Connected the output uh digital output of the TDI 3400 to a digital input on the primar and this way I can just use the streaming engine inside the uh 3400 uh delivering a signal to the primar and of course we'll start our journey on the Sonic snack playlist available to your streaming service of choice uh in the description below in the link tree Sonic snacks and then you can select your streaming service um and I'm using it through Title Here in run if I can find it of course Sonic Snacks by Journal reviews so uh let's do some runin and start by listening to the bookarts I'll say oh what but what a pressure selecting the first track I I'm I'm going to go for some classic stuff I'm sorry guys but uh this track is just amazing it was one of the guys in the uh making Hi-Fi great again Forum that suggested that one this recording it's amazing and here's an interesting Discovery using the primar as soon as I reach 75 on the remote uh reaching 7 then it doesn't get any louder it's a bit weird especially if you're in Rune here are using the uh loudness uh Target volume level which is a really cool feature of Rune uh that allows us to just listen through different types of music without uh the level going up and down but I have to remove that here because I'm simply not getting enough enough signal so uh I'm sorry guys no automatic loudness control here it's turned off now so it should sound louder and of course this is classic music we need Headroom in in order for the music to really shine it has a lovely bite this recording it's fantastic really a lot of Vitality in there and there's a couple of things with the Prima app that just makes it feel less like a appliance to be honest really annoying that you have to wait sometimes for it to reconnect every time you want to enter the the app here uh what I wanted to look for is this kind of hard to access EQ function to see if our room EQ still are engaged and try to turn it off and on while playing to see the difference uh the corrections that has been made I'm a little disappointed with the lack of of absolute volume here I'm not able to turn it up louder than that and that wasn't pretty loud in the average so I'm going to play some much more hardly compressed music in order to hear how loud those speakers are and also maybe judge the base uh a little better with the more more base pressure so I'm going to find a track that has good solid base how about the way of the world blind over by the Light [Music] maybe the way [Music] the words are [Music] [Music] to this is a way better more definitely more SPL here um what I'm hearing is a a a very nice pretty neutral Basse response it doesn't feel bloated in any way um but also I hear a kind of uh little bit retracted mid-range especially in the voices I'm going to do that by playing uh some really well recorded Jazz I really love this track uh Joy and Herby Hancock the man I love you get vocals along I love and he'll be big and the man I love and when he comes my we I'll do very nice the bookarts can have a tendency to have have a very very wide Sound Stage you see I towed in the speakers a little bit here pulled them out a little bit from the wall it's a bookshelf speaker maybe most people would have them up against the wall or in the bookshelf God forbid um but but I mean that's uh probably the the most normal way of using them bookart has these very very nice uh STS that we put them on here um that if put them up in a height that is really adequate for sitting down like I do here and listen to them ears are just in the same height as the do Tweeter the speakers can have a tendency as I said to sound very wide and also the wave guide is a bit tricky I'll say if I'm too close to the speaker it's getting messy and especially if I move my head up and down like this I I can hear the difference meaning that the the the off axis response is shifting in a way that that my ear is picking up sitting in this distance I also tried sitting further away like 4 M and and then it really Blends nicely I don't get any rear distractions moving my head but on the other hand this is a speaker that is designed for definitely for smaller rooms it's a small speaker it can only deliver that much pressure um so I don't know if that's a little annoying to me uh sitting here 2 and a half M away that I have to keep my head still in order not to get these artifacts from the very large wave guide that's that's how I feel it is that's that's just what I'm hearing here but I like the sound I really like the neutral very neutral very well [Music] balanced so let's see how much the room correction does because it sounds trustworthy and professional what I'm listening to here now I'm going to remove that EQ filter uh the room EQ filter here and see what happens let's [Music] listen [Music] maybe I on a Sunday maybe on a [Music] maybe still I'm sure I'm going to one day Tuesday will be [Music] my and no right [Music] I actually like what the room correction is doing here it's uh it it's uh restoring uh some of the clarity in the uh upper upper base range which is really nice on Joan's voice here that sounded a little bit muddy without the room correction otherwise it's uh it it seems calmer to me uh the sound with the room correction on so definitely a Improvement and I think people that have difficult speaker positions like in that bookshelf they will love having this uh room correction uh possibility built into the primar which is really cool you have to remember that all the DSP functionality here is built into the primar amp uh so if you use the bookart speakers with a wire um with a line signal you don't get the room correction unless you use a amp like the 3,400 which is possible as well so um there is some tuning capabilities in the speaker called Master tunings voicings that can be downloaded we are running these uh uh bookarts with the factory standard um setting that actually ended up like in the best I must say I also experimented with the nearfield voicing and the S400 emulation that cuts off some Bas this is the second pair of bookarts that I'm running right now the first one has extreme excessive base for some reason uh it doesn't seem to be the case here I haven't done any measurements but by ear I can determine that it's not bloated in any way or sounding weird so and you can probably hear that as well so let's let's find something really basic and try to pressure the hell out of them this is a Rapton track from the back home album called piece of my heart it's actually pretty bass heavy and and also pretty compressed but not too [Music] much my life was always draging all you showed me how to feel I realiz they are not that loud actually uh we were playing the loudest possible uh let me just grab the SPL meter here and take them to the edge of what's possible strong you help me up when I'm broken down I love everything about you baby never let I love fall away this is heaven I can hear they are being pressured in the mid-range a bit by the mid-range is is is really being uh challenged a bit here keeping that clean um but with this St standard tuning the base is actually working pretty hard so it might have something to do with us pulling the speaker out you know like one and 1 half 2 feet from the back wall in order to get a nice neutral balance so the speaker is actually putting in a little more work than it had to um on the other hand we are taking it to the maximum of the amp I don't know if that's really the maximum it depends on how out the sources I think but um we were able to achieve this a nice listing level of 82 85 Debs 2 and 1/2 M away that's plenty in a dorm room that's for sure you can use other voicings that will take off some of the base in order to give you more loudness and I'm sure that they will be louder if we use a line signal instead of that wireless thing here but this is how most people Envision using it with a wireless transmitter streaming something and and having the speakers wireless which is really practical the wireless connection have not given me any grief of any kind it works really nicely so um yeah up till now very decent very neutral sounding sounds longlasting let's just go for some more base here the earnest rankling below the [Music] [Music] Baseline [Music] here we are doing full power and we have no loudness correction engaged so for tracks with a a big dynamic range it's a bigger problem like this EV C [Music] track [Music] the [Music] okay let's just go for the super compressed Parallax track here which has a very big well controlled base great for taking any system to the max it's really loud really impressive this was one of the first experiences we had with the bot carts and that was impressive let's see if these new boot cards I got how loud it was [Music] [Music] get 92 de be Peak with the room correction on [Music] room correction [Music] [Music] off so with the room correction off we got 40 bees more peing at 96b and that's is using the bookarts wirelessly here so uh yeah I guess for most uh smaller rooms it is plenty uh plenty loud of course and we should never aim to destruct destroy our ears when I'm interested in in the maximum SPL of a speaker it's all about the available Headroom you see you don't go death from uh being subjected to uh L is very short term you know like listening to a classic orchestra that has big crescendos or you know powerful guitar sound that just snaps out being loud in a very short term like listening to a classic like Tin Pan Alley for instance the guitar playing there's really bluy and very loud and and pigy transient sometimes uh all that is fine but the speakers need to be able to deliver that kind of transion with no problem so when you listen at an average decent level you still need a lot of Headroom in order to be able to play dynamic tracks like that so that's just uh that that's the core of it all when we talk about SPL um personally I would go for a speaker that are able to produce like 105 DBS peak in my listening position so if I'm closer to the speaker the speaker doesn't have to play that loud in order to to get there um but that's kind of my reference it's the same reference you use for Cinema for instance so it's not totally nuts like 120 Debs it's uh I think it's it's pretty decent and it's a okay average to ask for with these speakers you're not getting uh that but they're pretty loud I mean 95 debes Peak that's that's cool and that's without any crazy Distortion or anything like that happening but you can hear the speakers are starting to get pressured and if we look at features uh from the two uh different systems there are streaming systems uh the the link off is even more capable of course in feature-wise uh and and with more connectivity and the clip speakers are actually pretty cheap they are way below a th000 e price on screen can't remember um so let's try to have a listen to the clips mute and unmute dynamically so we can really hear the difference between these two kind of speakers the BART being active hyper modern system with wireless connections and the link off being the uh Advanced Digital amplifier with room correction and all the the stuff uh driving a uh simple passive speaker so I'm really genuinely excited to hear the difference here so uh let's listen these guys sounds more powerful they they don't sound pressured the same way the bookarts did in the Peaks [Music] here I know we both won't say a [Music] word maybe I will meet him on a Sunday maybe on a [Music] Monday maybe not still I'm sure I'll meet him one [Music] day maybe Tuesday will be my good news day he'll build a little home [Music] for from the the clip speakers actually renders a very loud large Sound Stage which is a a surprise to me because yesterday when I was listening to them I felt that they were very narrow sounding in in comparison with the bookarts that's why they are placed like this because the bookarts has have that huge uh wave guide actually making them sound pretty wide and big almost too much for their own good sometimes if you're sitting too close to them um so I decided to move the clips out uh to be the furthest apart here and listening to this track you got a huge Sound Stage with the joany Mitchell track and even it it sounds tall it sounds like her voice is coming from up there pretty crazy um I must say but the bookart sounds a bit more focused in in a way um but also a little more nippy in the top end I'll say this is the [Music] bookarts maybe I will it gives us a little more air in the voice here's the [Music] clips to [Music] day I mean the image here is crazy it's a there's a big tall woman standing right there on the clip speakers I don't get that with the bookarts of course we can experiment moving the speakers around and I do that a lot when reviewing speakers of course because the perfect spot for giv speakers is not set in stone it's really really a process of trial and error sometimes to get the best from a pair of speak speakers in this room um but but this is a real surprise I must say Let's uh hear something more even more energetic um of course we need that Parallax track on the on the clip speakers as well of course we do that's that's a given let's see how far we can take them and check the uh it's a good SPL test this one because we have so much base that we are not getting our ears ripped apart or the base is so controlled would be [Music] exciting [Music] you see I'm really pressuring them here big time but they has are still not um they are still not meeting the uh end stops I'll just take the other meter here just to be sure we're using the exact same calibration and I'll reset this one [Music] [Music] so they haven't reached the end stops yet so we we're going to take them there just to be sure that we got everything thing there's plenty of power in the linkor to make that [Music] [Music] [Music] happen okay 102.6 Debs in the listening position here I mean and and we did not reach the end stops I didn't want to push them any further it seems ridiculous to my ears but uh that those speakers they they can Doo loud definitely wow keep surprising me those clip speakers I must say so let's uh find something a bit more sophisticated let's say that nice energetic um er Clapton track we heard previously piece of my heart it's called we on the clips my life was always draging all you show me how to feel I realize [Music] with at these levels they they sound totally unpressured pretty amazing spirit is so sweet and strong yeah help me up when I'm broken [Music] down base definition not that crazy uh vocals nice and warm nothing raspy nothing hot I can't I don't think they sound hard in any way or harsh really well tuned speaker okay and here you feel the difference we're on the bookarts [Music] now you're the staring all my dreams you keep me going all and no [Music] knows I everything about you baby never let our love fall away cuz this is [Music] heaven this is close to me I give aace a piece of my [Music] heart back on the PO it for your [Music] bab for [Music] your let [Music] fall things are a little bit more in order on the bookarts I think they have a completely different sound definitely but it's uh it's seems pretty precise it has uh definitely more detail where the clips is [Music] warmer doesn't feel as precise that's for sure but they are very enjoyable to listen to uh there's a lot of music music coming out of them that's for sure uh and they are definitely more powerful than the bookarts something I was not expecting to be honest that nice warm sound of the clips inspire me to check out some little more tinny music Good Old Black [Music] Sabbath [Music] [Music] yeah so you definitely have a more revealing speaker in the bookarts that's for sure I think if you were listening to acoustic instruments really stuff with the sensitive details of quiet I'm sure the bookarts will do a better job than the clips but when playing Black Sabbath as we do here the bookarts then will reveal that it's an old recording and it's a bit tinny and a bit hard sounding uh the clips will be more friendly in that regard uh it doesn't come as a surprise okay so tin sounding stuff better on the Clips absolute power there's more of it in the clip speaker precision and details definitely better on the botard now let's check this reference recording we often use trying to determine how wide the image is can can be this is a q sound recording oh my God I have a dog outside the house very very wide this is like listening to a surround system almost wow really impressive let's do the bot cards here full power this is the maximum yeah we don't have a dog out there but we have a dog out there somewhere what you're experiencing here is just a little snippit of a full day's work when uh comparing speakers and moving them around and testing systems and so on uh today we've been focusing on actually uh using two different speakers uh with the modern day amplifiers to find out how they perform um and compare them side by side uh of course a comparison like this will be different if I move the speakers around I'm sure in the comments uh there will be a lot of why didn't you do this why didn't you do that we did that we are moving the speakers to the other side of the room also uh which you will see in other videos um and we are experimenting with placement and so on and I must say the speaker that impressed me the most uh with things I didn't expect from it was the the clips that is a rather cheap speaker I must say I would conclude here that the the speaker you should take with you home if you're into that thinner sounding CL classic rock and uh uh you know thinner sounding stuff from the 80s and stuff like that the clips will do a better job at it than the bookarts if you're into more detail into more uh fine grained acoustic instruments cellos violins uh choir vocals stuff like that the bookarts would definitely be doing a better job at that and overall if you want to speaker that can also rock the house a bit the clips is louder it has more Headroom uh and I didn't expect that actually because the bookarts are active and really really powerful but the clips are even more powerful they're a bit bigger as well and they're ported there's a port in the back that probably also helps and they are kind of big in the base as well even though they are also pulled away even further out from the wall so we could get even more from them if we were just putting both speakers up against the wall and using room correction we would be able to get even more power out of them great speakers both of them for different needs and it just goes to show that it you need to hug and kiss a lot of speakers before you uh will find they perfect speaker for you they're very different even though these are both two-way speakers similar sized kind of similar in the layout as well but sounding very different the tuning is definitely different and um the performance is different both great yeah so I I can't tell you what is best here I would be an idiot trying to do that um but I can tell you that much that the primar is a buggy little bastard I can also tell you that the primar app is Hell on Earth uh in many regards slow and annoying and uh a mess and sometimes it doesn't connect and all that stuff that we see with a lot of software with the linked off not so much in terms of what I want to live with in daily life I would defin itely prefer the linkor that is much closer to my temper also uh with the primar I had some interesting box with the after the unit being turned off and turned on again uh all of a sudden I had the only mono sound because for some reason it used the same channel the Left Channel for both speakers even though in the setup of the primar it looked right we had a left speaker and a right speaker so I when I redid the setup oh all of a sudden I had stereo again things like that can be a little bit annoying with wireless uh visor systems like the primar here and the Barts so if you don't need Wireless connectivity as such and you can run a wire run a wire you know avoid the hassle and in that case you could combine a pair of of bookarts with a they I say it a link off 1120 use that as a preamp that's perfectly possible and then you can look at the price again it would be the same as uh using the primar there but not wireless oh all the choices good luck with that people and remember this is not a full review it's just uh the The Impressions in this session uh of these two pairs uh of speakers and these two systems side by side using their onboard room Corrections and what have you um that was a really interesting listen and you can learn a lot from that support me in doing more reviews like this by uh joining my patreon just a little amount of money every month makes a huge difference for me oh yeah sure why not tap that subscribe button if you like the content thank you so much for watching and remember you will know everything if you just listen see you soon please to help me with my home sir oh yeah sure why [Music] not
2024-02-19 04:07
