Recording - April 2012 - 54

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

A little speaker with a big voice Cerwin-Vega! XD3 Powered Desktop Speakers
Readers who have been in the industry for a while will know the name of CerwinVega!, and those who don’t will probably wonder why there’s an exclamation point in the company name. Well, if you’ve ever heard Cerwin-Vega! bass bins in a live venue PA system, you’d know. There’s a reason why the company refers to itself as “The LOUD Speaker Company®”. Cerwin-Vega! products have been known for decades as being among the biggest, baddest and boldest in the live sound arena, and there are entire markets where you’re not taken seriously if you don’t have Cerwin-Vega! handling the low end of your install. So when we learned at the recent NAMM Show that Cerwin-Vega! was selling a desktop powered monitor weighing in at a whopping 6.5 pounds per pair, we figured we should learn more. Small box The XD3 is a master/satellite system; the left channel is a powered monitor with amplification for both channels and all I/O and controls, and the right channel is a passive speaker connected to the left by a simple 2-conductor speaker wire. Each speaker has a 3/4" silk dome tweeter and a 3" polypropylene-coated paper cone woofer in a magnetically shielded MDF cabinet
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with a large rear-firing port, coated in black vinyl with a nonslip rubber base. The left channel has a front-panel volume knob with red power-on LED ring and two 1 /8" TRS jacks, a headphone output that switches out the speakers when plugged in, and a stereo Aux input for iPods and the like. The rear of the left speaker has a power cable jack and switch, RCA unbalanced inputs for both channels, outputs to the right channel, and a switch labeled Vega-Bass that provides a significant bass boost (no specs given), ostensibly to help out in placements where the rear port can’t fire properly but probably just as much to give the listener a hint of that famous Cerwin-Vega! kaboom in the low end. BIG roar! I had the XD3s at home for several days, burning them in to work the woofers and then listening to them on a variety of well-known reference material. When I brought them into the Recording offices to listen to as I wrote the final draft of this review, I fired them up on a track by Enigma from the album The Screen Behind The Mirror, and turned up the volume to a bit over halfway, only to have staffers running in from all over the office to see the new speakers I was reviewing up close. At least one person put his hand on the woofer of my

ADAM Audio monitors to convince himself that he wasn’t actually hearing the much larger speakers next to the XD3s! So what do these speakers sound like? Well, make no mistake—they can get loud. Really loud. Ear-busting loud. If you had asked me to imagine what a CerwinVega! mini-monitor would sound like, I would envision a tiny little black box rattling the walls of a listening room, and that is precisely what I got. Wow! But you don’t buy desktop speakers like this to give your clients a nosebleed—you might buy them to watch movies or play games on your computer, but if you’re reading this magazine you buy them to listen to, track, and mix music. How good are they at the task? Details It’s amazing how loud the XD3 can get, but audio quality starts to suffer at about the same time your eardrums do, so take it from Dr. Mike and keep the XD3 set to reasonable listening levels (80 to 85 dB SPL at the listening position) for results that are both safest and best-sounding. At said levels, by and large the surprises were pleasant ones, and the stuff I wasn’t satisfied with wasn’t a surprise at all—specifically, there is only so much at the low end that you can do with a small woofer (oh, those pesky laws of physics!).

Recording - April 2012

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