Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

A recent high point in my career as a reviewer was writing about the MoFi Electronics SourcePoint 10 standmount loudspeaker for the February 2023 issue of Stereophile. Priced at $2999/pair, the two-way SourcePoint 10 featured an innovative 10" coaxial (HF/LF) drive unit and impressed me with its clean, superbly well-defined low frequencies, natural-sounding midrange, and the ability to play loudly without strain.

The SourcePoint 10 was the first MoFi speaker to be designed by Andrew Jones, whose earlier designs for KEF, Infinity, Pioneer, TAD, and ELAC had all taken up residence in Stereophile's Recommended Components listings over the years. The second of Andrew's designs for MoFi was the SourcePoint 8, which was favorably reviewed by Kalman Rubinson in September 2023. Priced at a competitive $1999/pair, the SourcePoint 8 also used a coaxial drive unit, but as the name suggests, the woofer diameter was 8" rather than 10". KR was also impressed by what he heard, writing that the SourcePoint 8 was a balanced, wide-range speaker that demonstrated how satisfying a small, relatively affordable loudspeaker can be.

Now we have Andrew Jones's third design for MoFi, the floorstanding SourcePoint 888, which costs $4999/pair.

The SourcePoint 888 ...
... uses an 8" coaxial driver for the midrange and treble, similar to that used in the SourcePoint 8. This driver is mounted near the top of the sculpted front baffle, accompanied farther down by two 8" woofers. The woofers use a paper cone and are reflex-loaded with two 3"-wide ports on the rear panel. The midrange and woofer cones are terminated with a corrugated surround rather than the usual half-roll rubber surround. With the midrange cone, the obstruction of the half-roll surround would disrupt the tweeter's radiated wavefront.

The crossover between the midrange and woofers is set to 130Hz; that between the midrange and the coaxially mounted 1.25" soft-dome tweeter is at 1.6kHz. The tweeter therefore operates over a wider passband than usual. When I interviewed Andrew Jones for my SourcePoint 10 review, he explained that the coaxial unit's lower-frequency cone acts as a waveguide for the tweeter. The waveguide reduces the tweeter's excursion requirement, so it can be operated down to a lower frequency than would be possible if it lacked a waveguide. With a waveguide, "the improvement in efficiency or sensitivity and the reduction in excursion more than make up for the fact that you're crossing over at 1.6k. It enables you to get a very good progressive, consistent off-axis performance," Jones told me, adding that using a dome with a slightly larger diameter, 1.25" rather than the usual 1", with a wide roll surround, provides extra dynamic range capability at the lower frequencies.

The 888's internally braced enclosure stands just over 42" high on its base and feet—cone feet for carpeted floors and flat-bottomed feet for wooden floors are both provided—and is made from thick MDF. Other than the gray base and the matte-black front baffle, the panels are finished in a Satin Walnut or Black Ash wood veneer. Electrical connection is via two pairs of binding posts close to the base of the rear panel.

Setting up
The main source of music was my Roon Nucleus+ server feeding audio data over my network to a Roon Ready MBL N31 CD player/DAC, which was connected directly to a pair of Parasound JCA100 Tribute monoblock amplifiers. Though the speakers can be biwired, I single-wired them with AudioQuest Robin Hood cable. I didn't use the MoFi SourcePoint 888s' magnetically attached grilles, and the review pair arrived with only the flat feet; the cones recommended for carpeted floors like mine were missing. (The review samples had previously been reviewed by another writer, who must have forgotten to pack the cones in the boxes; footnote 1.) Nevertheless, with a speaker weighing 96lb, coupling the enclosure to the floor should not be an issue.

The SourcePoint 888's manual recommends that the user start by placing the speakers approximately 1–3' away from the room boundaries. After much experimentation, I ended up with the SourcePoint 888s much farther away than that, in an effort to optimally balance the upper bass with the lower midrange. In their final configuration, the speaker's front baffles were 83" from the wall behind the speakers, the right speaker's woofers were 47" from the books that line that speaker's closest sidewall, and the left speaker's woofers were 35" from the LPs that line that speaker's sidewall.

Listening to the 1/3-octave warble tones on my Editor's Choice CD (STPH016-2; no longer available), the SourcePoint 888s in those positions cleanly reproduced the tones with full weight down to the 40Hz band. However, the 32Hz tone was much higher in level than those on either side. As you can read in the Measurements sidebar, the MoFi speaker's port-tuning frequency coincides with that of my room's lowest mode. While this bass boost added some magnificence to orchestral recordings, it was much too much with rock and jazz. I ended up blocking the two speakers' bottom ports with foam plugs. I kept them blocked for most of my listening. I kept the top ports open except as noted in the Listening section.

With the lower ports plugged, the warble tones sounded even down to 32Hz, the 25Hz tone was just audible, and I couldn't hear the 20Hz tone at my usual listening level. The half-step–spaced tonebursts on Editor's Choice spoke cleanly and evenly down to 32Hz. I heard no wind noise from the open ports with the lowest-frequency tones and the tonebursts, and warble tones sounded clean, with no "doubling" (second-harmonic distortion).

Listening
With the MoFi speakers toed-in to the listening position and the coaxially mounted tweeters level with the height of my ears at 36" from the floor, the dual-mono pink noise track on Editor's Choice was reproduced as a stable central image. The high frequencies sounded smooth and the midrange uncolored whether I sat up straight or slouched. I also heard very little "vertical Venetian blind" effect, or comb filtering, as I moved my head from side to side. A touch of emphasis was audible around 3kHz with pink noise, but this was only noticeable with overly bright rock recordings.

With all the SourcePoint 888s' ports open, the hammer-blow drums at the start of Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra conducted by Louis Lane (16/44.1 FLAC, Telarc/Qobuz), almost knocked me out of my chair. With the bottom ports blocked, the infamous Telarc bass drum was tamed but still had excellent weight and definition—the rolls on the drum at the end of the Fanfare were cleanly articulated.

---

Footnote 1: When I packed the speakers to be returned to MoFi Electronics, I found the small boxes with the cones hidden in the foam packaging. Mea culpa.