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The speakers were reviewed in my relatively small living room: 17" by 10" by 8" high in the primary dimensions, although it's part of an "open plan" living room/dining room/kitchen layout. I placed them along the long wall, which means I listened more or less near-field. Both pairs benefited greatly from rigid, nonresonant stands—I used a pair of Cliff Stone's 24" Foundation stands, which are filled with aggregate and were spiked through the carpet to the concrete subfloor. Although the Coincident loudspeakers are quite efficient and can be driven by modestly…

With a calculated sensitivity of 91dB/W/m, the Troubador will play loud with only a few amplifier watts. Its impedance (fig.1) is also relatively benign. Fig.9 reveals the port tuning to lie at 55Hz, quite low for the enclosure size. Note the wrinkle in the impedance magnitude trace at 350Hz, a sign of some kind of cabinet resonance. And indeed, the cabinet vibrated strongly at that frequency. As the designer points out, the higher in frequency you can push a cabinet resonance, the smaller the effect it will have on music. And WP didn't remark on any midrange…

Editor: It is with more than a little embarrassment that I must advise you that you were sent a pair of Troubadors that were not intended for the North American market but were specifically manufactured for a customer in Europe. This version of the Troubador uses a second-order crossover with the tweeter being phase-inverted. The regular version that is sold in North America and the Far East utilizes a first-order slope with both drivers connected in-phase. This crossover not only eliminates the low-treble suckout, but time-aligns the drivers as well.

The…

Wes Phillips was unimpressed with the sound of the good-looking, $1495/pair, two-way Coincident Speaker Technology Troubador loudspeaker in January '96 (p.223). He found its tonal balance colored and the integration between its drive-units—a silk-dome tweeter coincidentally mounted within a polypropylene-cone woofer—severely flawed. Subsequent measurements revealed that the woofer and tweeter were connected with opposite acoustic polarities—which, once the phase shift due to the crossover and the time delay between the units was taken into…

Compared with the earlier sample (fig.1), the new Troubador's step response (fig.2) reveals that the tweeter and woofer are now connected with the same positive acoustic polarity. The tweeter output does lead that of the woofer by a fraction of a millisecond, however, meaning that the step response doesn't quite conform with the desired triangle shape that would indicate a true time-aligned design.

Editor: Thank you for your Follow-Up review of the Coincident Speaker Technology Troubador speakers. This follow-up raises some very serious questions which I would now like to address.

It has always been my impression that before a review appears in print in your magazine, that many weeks of auditioning will be undertaken. After all, a reviewer must meticulously set up the new speakers, taking into account all the vagaries of room interaction, component matching, break-in period, etc. This is a time-consuming and onerous task. That, however,…

Following publicaiton of the "Follow-Up" review of the Troubador, I performed a further set of measurements, as well as looking at the crossovers of both examples. Fig.7 shows the circuit diagram of the crossover for the first (rosewood) pair of Troubadors. No values are marked on this diagram as they had all been painted over on the components. Other than a Zobel, series-RC network connected in parallel with the woofer terminals, this appears to be an absolutely conventional parallel second-order design. As is usual with such a topology, the…

Description: Two-way stand-mounted loudspeaker with concentrically mounted drivers and rear-firing port. Drive-units: 1" fabric-coated dome tweeter with neodymium magnet, 6.5" polypropylene-cone woofer. Crossover frequency: 3.5kHz. Crossover slopes: unspecified. Frequency response: 45Hz–20kHz, –3dB. Sensitivity: 90dB/W/m (2.83V). Nominal impedance: 8 ohms (5–10 ohms). Amplifier requirements: 7–150W.
Dimensions: 11" W by 16" D by 9¾" H. Shipping weight: 52 lbs.
Finishes: black lacquer standard; wood veneers optional.
Serial numbers of review samples:…

Each December since 1992, Stereophile has named a few special components its "Products of the Year." These are products that not only define the present audio landscape, but that we hope will someday be seen as classics—products you'll want to pass on to future generations of audiophiles and music lovers. Traditionally, we've awarded this distinction to components in five primary categories: "Loudspeakers" (including subwoofers), "Analog Sources" (turntables, tonearms, phono cartridges), "Digital Sources" (transports, processors, music…

Vivid Audio Oval K1 ($24,990/pair; reviewed by John Marks, Vol.35 No.10 Review)

This race was tight. Of the 11 worthy contenders in our "Loudspeakers" category, seven—from the overachieving Joseph Audio Pulsar to the otherworldly MBL Radialstrahler 101E Mk.II—garnered first-place votes. But no loudspeaker impressed our writers more than Vivid Audio's Oval K1, an unusual-looking design with an unusually powerful and compelling sound.

Though it's been a while since I last heard the Oval K1, I'm very well acquainted with its little brother. Vivid's…