Recording - April 2013 - 48

Eve Audio SC205 Monitors

While we mention the manual, it behooves us to salute Eve Audio
for going the extra mile with helpful suggestions and diagrams, to
make sure that users will get optimal results from their monitors.
Sound
I took a moment to set all filters to zero and positioned the cabinets on freestanding monitor stands in the middle of a fairly large
room, about ten feet from the rear wall and about five feet from each
side wall. With the tweeters at ear level and the recommended equilateral triangle complete (equal distance between speakers and from
speakers to my ears), I turned on the power and put up some music.
The speakers had been broken in, so I immediately engaged the
services of Mr. Ray Brown, arguably the best player of the upright
bass ever, in this case heard on his CD Some Of My Best Friends

Are...The Piano Players. I think
Ray would have liked the way
his bass came across. I certainly
did. Within the limitations of a
5" woofer in a cabinet fascia
that’s smaller than an 8.5 x 11"
letter, this was excellent bass
reproduction. It’s not about
brawn and heft but about depth
with subtleties, and Ray Brown’s
playing has oodles of those—I heard them all.
I was glad to hear bass with clarity, neither wimpy and thin
nor boomy and pillowy, just well defined and balanced. The
same goes for the low end of many other tracks I put up, from
bass guitar to orchestral bass sections (famous low-end passages like the intros to Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite and Bartok’s
Concerto for Orchestra), to electronic basses and New
Orleans tuba basses like that of the gregarious Soul Rebels.
All were a success, although a dedicated hip-hopper trying to
blow away a client or producer may want to shop for a sub—
the SC205 isn’t built for such exaggerated demands.
I couldn’t detect anything about the bass port—and not just
because it fires towards the rear, it was as if it weren’t there,
even when I goosed the bass with the Low filter and the Desk filter (not recommended for accuracy, but if it floats your boat...).
The midrange spoke very well; singers stood out when
they were mixed to stand out, and the many piano recordings I put up showed their different tonalities and nuances
effortlessly. The same was the case with bowed strings,
where subtleties of attack and resonance can easily get
smeared on lesser equipment. Ditto with acoustic guitars
and with woodwinds.
The highs were silky only when that was the intent of the
recording—if you need to hear a harsh track, the accurate
ribbon tweeters will deliver it harshly, there is no tendency
towards “prettying up” the sound. I have some unfortunate
cymbal samples from a library that long ago faded away,
and the badly edited spitty and phasing cymbals came
across as just that—spitty and phasing. But the glorious
drums and cymbals of many a well-recorded acoustic jazz
project, like those of Dave Tull from AIX’s Steve Hufstetter
Big Band disc? They sounded, well, glorious.
All in all
The SC205 is only one of a line of 2-way speakers from
Eve Audio that offer identical functions and different-sized
woofers; based on my experiences with the SC205, you’d
be well served simply by balancing price with the amount
of low end you’d like from your woofers.
The Eve Audio SC205 delivers sound in quality and quantity that belies the cabinet’s and woofer’s modest size. Small
enough to find a home in any room, it sounds big enough to
fill sizable rooms with accurate and balanced sound. The
thoughtful inclusion of on-board filter options lets a user compensate for flawed rooms, and that means that the SC205
can do a fine job just about anywhere you set it up.
Price: $579 each/$1158 per pair (MAP)
More from: Eve Audio, www.eve-audio.com; dist. in USA
by TruNorth Music and Sound, www.trunorthmusicand
sound.com.

RECORDING April 2013

http://www.eve-audio.com http://www.trunorthmusicandsound.com http://www.trunorthmusicandsound.com

Recording - April 2013

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