Recording - April 2012 - 22

BY SCOTT DORSEY

see an all-discrete amp in there, but with equipment that is designed to a price point like this I want to see as much of my dollar being spent on the drivers and cabinet as possible, and this speaker does exactly that, a sensible choice that leads to better audio. Front-panel controls include a volume pot and a power switch, and on the back you get XLR and TRS balanced inputs, IEC power cable, a ±6 dB gain trim, and four recessed DIP switches to fine-tune the speaker’s response to your room. You can set 2, 4, or 6 dB of “bass tilt” at 80 Hz, there is a separate 6 dB/octave bass rolloff, and a shelving 2 dB treble rolloff. To bench or not to bench For reviews in Recording, the speakers typically are evaluated for their sound and usefulness rather than bench-tested, which suits me fine since I don’t really have a way to do accurate waterfall plots or cabinet resonance tests (although I did knock on the cabinet with my knuckles and it seems pretty dead). I just did a quick and dirty swept sine test to verify that indeed it does more or less match the plot in the manual. I saw some narrowband stuff that isn’t on the smoothed “marketing department” plot, but that is normally the way things go in the real world.

Sonodyne SM100Ak and SM50Ak Active Monitors
A notable US debut for powered monitors from India
Sonodyne is an Indian firm that has been making speakers for many years; I heard a pair of their larger monitors in Hong Kong thirty years ago and sort of wondered what had happened to the firm. Well, now I know, and what happened is that Sonodyne got bigger and is now selling some of its powered monitors in the American market. Let’s begin by describing the SM100Ak. Opening the box The basic design is fairly simple, a 2-way speaker with a 26 mm soft-dome tweeter and a 6.5" Kevlar cone woofer in a solid cast-aluminum case that seems quite well-damped and has non-parallel surfaces to minimize standing-wave effects. The two drivers are biamplified by small TDA7296 monolithic amplifier chips and a fairly simple op-amp based active crossover, all driven by a conventional linear power supply based around a small toroidal transformer. The specs claim 80W for the woofer and 40W for the tweeter. Conventional, nothing exotic. The amplifier is about par for small powered monitors; it’s no Bryston but it’s inoffensive and well-matched to the drivers. Sure, I might like to
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RECORDING APRIL 2012

I didn’t see any big boost in the presence region on-axis, which leads me to think that all of the sense of “forwardness” I’ll mention in a minute has to do with the radiation pattern and the off-axis response. Rather than doing any more scientific bench tests, in keeping with what our readers need most to know, I listened and actually mixed on these monitors. Listening My first thought on listening to these was, “Wow, these are forward... they must have a real presence peak, maybe combined with a narrow angle of radiation in the upper midrange.” Vocals didn’t sound natural to me, they sounded kind of “electronic.” That forwardness isn’t a bad thing, especially for editing work; if you’re trying to listen for background noise or editing glitches, this sort of sound is a Godsend. If you have ever listened to Sony MDR-V6 headphones, you know what I mean. These monitors aren’t quite that dramatic, but the overall feeling of forwardness and presence was very much there. I did some quick comparisons with the NHT A-20 monitor system and the Magnepan MG-1.4s I use for field and studio mixing, which readers should note are both larger and more expensive speakers— so this is not an “apples to apples” comparison. Both test speaker sets

Recording - April 2012

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