Rbsarve
08-15-2006, 04:43 PM
So this might be a bit long in the end but this is the first part.
The fine people of Seas sent us a review kit to persuade us to pick up and promote the line here in Sweden.
The packageing is world class, donīt really see the need for the attached gloves, but it is one on the nice touches. It is quite complete with wires and Torx screws for the drivers. A solid box out of cardboard with a carrying handle and two layers of EP-foam that holds the stuff in place.
There is a bunch of stickers and a very good manual, complete with T/S values on both tweeter and mid.
The stuff inside the box isnīt half bad either.
Lets start with the passive crossovers. To start with they are totally separate, one per driver unit. Aluminum bottom plates proper traced boards and smoked transparent lids with embossed Seas logos they look the part. On the boards there is a careful selection of high quality parts. Tasty.
The nicest Iīve seen this side of the Alpine F1's
So I promply put them back in the box. Real men use active crossovers.
More interresting is the tweets.From the front side they look pretty conventional (boring) but they are about an inch deep with moulded aluminium backplate that has cooling fins.
The dome is suposedly made out of magnesium and there is not a sign of plastic anywhere on the tweets. Termination is made on gold plated spade terminals that are pretty well protected and solid. All in all very nice indeed, perfect craftmanship.
BUT then is comes to mounting them... They sent a lovely brass WINGNUT to bolt to the back of the driver to hold a steel plate bracket. Apart from electrocorrosion issues with this it adds about half an inch to the install depth!
So I press fitted them in baffles instead.
So to the mid drivers.
At the back you find a rubber gasket clad magnet assembly. The rubber gasket can be removed to gain 2 mm mounting depth, and the magnet system is still quite well finished, no visible glue on the drivers I have.
Termination is done on gold plated spade terminals and uses normal tinsel leads that has partly been dipped in rubber, probably to prevent cone slapping.
The drivers use a magnesium moulded basket with good design giving proper air flow and cooling outer diameter is 165 mm so that is standard 6,5" alright, but since it has a very narrow flange that only uses half holes at the edge of the outer diameter it wonīt fit a stock 6,5 location without modification. I ended up doing a pair of baffle rings out of MDF. The advantage of doing this is that the cone can be slightly bigger and hence able to push more air around. I like that.
And I like the cone quite a lot, it is a coated magnesium thing that is pretty stiff but still doesnīt seem prone to ringing effects and in the middle of this sticks out the now trademark like Seas phase plug. On these drivers the copper have been given a silver paint finish to match the basket and it does look very good.
Iīm adding some personal notes on the fixed phase plug here. Seas claims that the technology benefits includes better cooling, since the phase plug is a part of the pole piece sticking out and that is gives good air flow to the voice coil and reduces power compression issues. Iīm sure it does. It also leaves the most sensitive part of the driver open for dust entering.
The other benefit of a phase plug is the improved frequency responce, especially off-axis at small signal testing. To my ears this "impovement" usually returns an nasal character to the sound quality, and with a fixed plug like this, the effect (and hence the frequency responce) varies with volume levels.
So stellar build quality, nice package, a bit of extra effort needed on the install side, lets see what they can do.
They arrived just before my vacation and I got a new car the same week. So I had to do a bit of a rush job in fitting a system that would last me over the summer. The new family car is a Peugout 406 V6 SW that has 6,5" stock locations low in the door and tweeters on the dash.
The Seas manual prefers the drivers to have less separation then this, but this is probably how quite a few of the customers would have them, and I time aligned the speakers, so that helps out.
I did some basic damping to the doors , mostly bitumen mats to the panels, and itīs ok, but there should be more done to them for optimium conditions.
The rest of the system is:
Nakamichi CD400 ("Old Skippy")
Alpine PXA-H700, used only for time alingment and crossover, all eq is flat.
Phoenix Gold Xenon X100.4 powers the Seases and a X600.1 for the subs. These where chosen because Iīm very familliar to the SQ of these and to my ears they are very neutral sounding.
Subs used was a box with two PG ZR12īs, chosen more for the needed boot space and fun factor then outright SQ but they do a plausible job.
First impression... OUCH! These needs to be broken in properly. With normal usage it took about 3 weeks to get them to sound right. I recommend anyone who gets these to burn them in before putting them in.
But then it got a bit better
As those of you wha has dabbled with an active setup know, a small adjustment somewhere can make a big change, so I took some time finding the right frequencies for this system in my car.
The 6,5" mid has some exaggerated output at around 2,5 kHz which means it makes some very harsh coloration to voices. This mad me choose the crossover ponts with a bit of underlap, lowpassing the mid at 2.2 kHz and highpassing the tweet at 2.5 kHz. The Midbass was also highpassed at 56 Hz, all 30 db/octave. There is still a hint of sybliance left, which was cured with a -2 dB wide Q EQ at 2 kHz.
So after a couple of weeks listening while I have played Opera, Jazz, Metal, RnB, Rock HipHop, Blues, and Pop on them and come out pretty impressed on the other end.
Overall the frequency responce is percived as pretty flat. The above mentioned sybliant tendencies is still evident and Iīd like to have a bit more shimmer to the tweeter but that is the full length of my complaints.
Midbass is dry, fast, tactile and hard hitting if asked to be. It has actually managed to bring out higher resolution in some bass lines then Iīve heard before.
Midrange is also a bit dry, but reproduces individual instruments and voices with very good precision and localization. Especially good is the the rendition of space, the sense of beeing in the recording enviroment rather then listening to it.
And the tweeter is a jewel. As said before itīs not one that sparkles much, it seems to roll off in the top end, but it plays everything so good, so controlled and well tempered that it must be placed among the very best "compact" tweeters out there. It to picks out some details I havenīt heard in recordings very familiar to me.
So, there it is the perfect speakers then? Not really.
They are a very good choise for the "Hi-Fi" minded listener that needs all the details in the right spot and to get everything just right, but for me listening to music is as much about the emotion, the passion and how it makes me feel. And here they leave me feeling a bit cold.
I like what I hear but I donīt tap my foot.
My suspision is that this might be changed if I go for a bit warmer biased amp. So tomorrow Iīm changing to a set of Celestra RA amps instead
t.b.c
The fine people of Seas sent us a review kit to persuade us to pick up and promote the line here in Sweden.
The packageing is world class, donīt really see the need for the attached gloves, but it is one on the nice touches. It is quite complete with wires and Torx screws for the drivers. A solid box out of cardboard with a carrying handle and two layers of EP-foam that holds the stuff in place.
There is a bunch of stickers and a very good manual, complete with T/S values on both tweeter and mid.
The stuff inside the box isnīt half bad either.
Lets start with the passive crossovers. To start with they are totally separate, one per driver unit. Aluminum bottom plates proper traced boards and smoked transparent lids with embossed Seas logos they look the part. On the boards there is a careful selection of high quality parts. Tasty.
The nicest Iīve seen this side of the Alpine F1's
So I promply put them back in the box. Real men use active crossovers.
More interresting is the tweets.From the front side they look pretty conventional (boring) but they are about an inch deep with moulded aluminium backplate that has cooling fins.
The dome is suposedly made out of magnesium and there is not a sign of plastic anywhere on the tweets. Termination is made on gold plated spade terminals that are pretty well protected and solid. All in all very nice indeed, perfect craftmanship.
BUT then is comes to mounting them... They sent a lovely brass WINGNUT to bolt to the back of the driver to hold a steel plate bracket. Apart from electrocorrosion issues with this it adds about half an inch to the install depth!
So I press fitted them in baffles instead.
So to the mid drivers.
At the back you find a rubber gasket clad magnet assembly. The rubber gasket can be removed to gain 2 mm mounting depth, and the magnet system is still quite well finished, no visible glue on the drivers I have.
Termination is done on gold plated spade terminals and uses normal tinsel leads that has partly been dipped in rubber, probably to prevent cone slapping.
The drivers use a magnesium moulded basket with good design giving proper air flow and cooling outer diameter is 165 mm so that is standard 6,5" alright, but since it has a very narrow flange that only uses half holes at the edge of the outer diameter it wonīt fit a stock 6,5 location without modification. I ended up doing a pair of baffle rings out of MDF. The advantage of doing this is that the cone can be slightly bigger and hence able to push more air around. I like that.
And I like the cone quite a lot, it is a coated magnesium thing that is pretty stiff but still doesnīt seem prone to ringing effects and in the middle of this sticks out the now trademark like Seas phase plug. On these drivers the copper have been given a silver paint finish to match the basket and it does look very good.
Iīm adding some personal notes on the fixed phase plug here. Seas claims that the technology benefits includes better cooling, since the phase plug is a part of the pole piece sticking out and that is gives good air flow to the voice coil and reduces power compression issues. Iīm sure it does. It also leaves the most sensitive part of the driver open for dust entering.
The other benefit of a phase plug is the improved frequency responce, especially off-axis at small signal testing. To my ears this "impovement" usually returns an nasal character to the sound quality, and with a fixed plug like this, the effect (and hence the frequency responce) varies with volume levels.
So stellar build quality, nice package, a bit of extra effort needed on the install side, lets see what they can do.
They arrived just before my vacation and I got a new car the same week. So I had to do a bit of a rush job in fitting a system that would last me over the summer. The new family car is a Peugout 406 V6 SW that has 6,5" stock locations low in the door and tweeters on the dash.
The Seas manual prefers the drivers to have less separation then this, but this is probably how quite a few of the customers would have them, and I time aligned the speakers, so that helps out.
I did some basic damping to the doors , mostly bitumen mats to the panels, and itīs ok, but there should be more done to them for optimium conditions.
The rest of the system is:
Nakamichi CD400 ("Old Skippy")
Alpine PXA-H700, used only for time alingment and crossover, all eq is flat.
Phoenix Gold Xenon X100.4 powers the Seases and a X600.1 for the subs. These where chosen because Iīm very familliar to the SQ of these and to my ears they are very neutral sounding.
Subs used was a box with two PG ZR12īs, chosen more for the needed boot space and fun factor then outright SQ but they do a plausible job.
First impression... OUCH! These needs to be broken in properly. With normal usage it took about 3 weeks to get them to sound right. I recommend anyone who gets these to burn them in before putting them in.
But then it got a bit better
As those of you wha has dabbled with an active setup know, a small adjustment somewhere can make a big change, so I took some time finding the right frequencies for this system in my car.
The 6,5" mid has some exaggerated output at around 2,5 kHz which means it makes some very harsh coloration to voices. This mad me choose the crossover ponts with a bit of underlap, lowpassing the mid at 2.2 kHz and highpassing the tweet at 2.5 kHz. The Midbass was also highpassed at 56 Hz, all 30 db/octave. There is still a hint of sybliance left, which was cured with a -2 dB wide Q EQ at 2 kHz.
So after a couple of weeks listening while I have played Opera, Jazz, Metal, RnB, Rock HipHop, Blues, and Pop on them and come out pretty impressed on the other end.
Overall the frequency responce is percived as pretty flat. The above mentioned sybliant tendencies is still evident and Iīd like to have a bit more shimmer to the tweeter but that is the full length of my complaints.
Midbass is dry, fast, tactile and hard hitting if asked to be. It has actually managed to bring out higher resolution in some bass lines then Iīve heard before.
Midrange is also a bit dry, but reproduces individual instruments and voices with very good precision and localization. Especially good is the the rendition of space, the sense of beeing in the recording enviroment rather then listening to it.
And the tweeter is a jewel. As said before itīs not one that sparkles much, it seems to roll off in the top end, but it plays everything so good, so controlled and well tempered that it must be placed among the very best "compact" tweeters out there. It to picks out some details I havenīt heard in recordings very familiar to me.
So, there it is the perfect speakers then? Not really.
They are a very good choise for the "Hi-Fi" minded listener that needs all the details in the right spot and to get everything just right, but for me listening to music is as much about the emotion, the passion and how it makes me feel. And here they leave me feeling a bit cold.
I like what I hear but I donīt tap my foot.
My suspision is that this might be changed if I go for a bit warmer biased amp. So tomorrow Iīm changing to a set of Celestra RA amps instead
t.b.c