"Dave" wrote in message
I picked up a pair of NHT Super Zeroes about six months
ago for a very reasonable price.
I've owned a pair for at least a decade. I don't think their price ever was
unreasonable, even when new and bought for MRP. I think you can still pay
more for less, despite the tremendous improvements in speaker
price/performance in the past 15 years.
My SZs get trotted in and out of my speaker closet, as the need comes and
goes. I also have a pair of S1s, a pair of 2.5is, and an A10 system. So yes,
I went through a NHT phase for about 5 years, ending about 5 years ago.
But I'm not soured on them.
I had read the glowing
stereophile review of these tiny 5" x 9" micro-speakers
which likened their sound to loudspeakers costing upwards
of eight thousand dollars,
Can we all say hyperbole? ;-)
and was pleased with the
prospect of bringing something into the livingroom which
a) cost next to nothing and b) sounded good and which was
c) unobtrusive enough to please my aesthetically-minded
significant other.
I would characterize SZs as being interesting and potentially still useful
artifacts of a by-gone era.
On the up side SZs are pretty smooth, and obviously very tiny. Their
impedance is pretty high and relatively consistent so they are easy on amps,
and tend to protect themselves from excess power by not accepting it.
On the down side SZs have no real bass. They do have a mild peak in the
upper bass which is apparently there to try to add the perception of sonic
balance.
Because SZs are so physically small, they have almost no directivity
control. Therefore, they are very, very dependent on room placement and the
room in general. They are inefficient, and don't seem to have a lot of
actual power handling capacity.
In fact she was ecstatic as I lugged
the Klipsch Cornwalls down the hallway even going so far
as to offer to help.
Cornwalls and SZs are so different as comparing them is almost like an
excluded-middle discussion.
The speakers are being driven with
an old beast of an amp, a Technics SU-8099 rated at
120wpc RMS. I've been very pleased with the amplifier
with other speakers, it's very neutral sounding and (I
thought) drove the horn speakers quite well, not sounding
excessively bright or edgy as horn speakers are wont to
do.
Well, you're judging horns by Cornwalls, right? Just about any speaker from
that era has one sonic failing or another, either dull or edgy. A real
ear-opener would be a comparison with a modern SOTA horn-loaded system.
There has been about a half-century of technical progress since the
Cornwalls were first sold. BTW, it has been a very interesting half-century.
;-)
When I first hooked up the speakers (with a powered
Velodyne subwoofer), I was astounded at the absolute
clarity of the upper midrange, especially on piano.
Well, SZs compared to Cornwalls...
From these little computer-speaker-looking boxes!
The SZ drivers were pretty good in their day. Euro tweeter and Japanese
clone of a Euro mid-bass driver, if memory serves. Clever, non-trivial
crossover.
I listen to
a lot of female vocalists and piano and these speakers
are designed to reproduce this range admirably.
Well yes, female vocalist means you want smooth midrange but no real bass
required.
However,
now that the honeymoon is over, I am finding them
extremely bright.
(1) Look at speaker placement. SZ's are very dependent on the room because
they have about as little directivity control as any serious audio speaker
on the market not made by Bose.
(2) Look relative placement w/r/t to the subwoofer and also at the crossover
with the subwoofer. Close is good. Very close.
I've never owned a pair of speakers
I'd describe as bright although I've read about it enough
on this forum and others.
The SZ's are pretty smooth, but they have no real bass. There are actually
2 ways for a speaker to be bright, A is to have raised treble, and B is to
have dropping bass. SZs are more B than A. BTW, did I mention the room?
The SZ's and the Cornwalls are just about as extremely different as serious
Hi Fi speakers can get. The Cornwalls have very well-defined directivity
due to the large bass driver and the horns. The SZ's are the exact opposite.
The small drivers in the small cabinet guarantee that they are about as
omnidirectional as speakers can get without being specifically designed to
be omnidirectional.
Extended listening periods are
"fatiguing", another term I've thankfully avoided
personal experience with. I've read that this excessive
brightness is a trademark of Ken Kantor and NHT, and I
wonder about others' experiences.
IMO Ken knows how to design speakers, and NHT's are as rule good-sounding
speakers. But SZs are children of the mid-90s, which means that they ave
solid response in the upper ranges.
A really small speaker has no choice - it either has good response at higher
frequencies or it has no response at all because it can't possibly do deep
bass without heroics.
There's no way that you can separate speakers from the rooms they are in,
and there is no way that the wrong speaker for the room is going to sound
good right out of the box.
I recently parted with a relatively low-power tube amp,
in part because these speakers are only 86 dB/w/m and 20
wpc just wasn't going to do anything for them, but I am
wondering about whether or not pairing a "warm" amp with
these speakers is going to help.
To me, tubed amps are often random equalizers. Random, because their actual
equalization effect is not engineered for the specific application.
Because of their typically high output impedance, tube amp frequency
response is strongly altered by the impedance curve of the speakers they
drive. This means that speakers with low and variable impedance curves will
have a stronger "tube amp warmth" effect than speakers with high and less
variable impedance curves.
The bad news for tubed amp fans is that the SZ impedance curve is neither
very low nor extremely variable.
http://www.stereophile.com/loudspeak...04/index9.html
Or is it that the
bright sound is just something you like or you don't
like?
It's about the speaker-room interface. If you told me about hardwood floors
and sparse furnishings, I would not be the least bit surprised. But that's
not the only way to get yourself into trouble with SZs. Put them at the
junction of the ceiling and the wall, or worse yet in a ceiling corner, and
they probably won't be bright, they may even be boomy and/or have tubby
bass.
I have tried running the NHT's full-range, using
the integrated crossover of a Velodyne sub, and with an
active analog crossover. None of these options changed
the sound appreciably.
SZ's are good speakers to feed through an appropriate high pass filter,
because of their non-existent deep bass response and their obvious
power-handling limitations. Appropriate = 140 Hz.