Any opinions on the Realistic Mach One speakers?

I've got a pair of these and I've been trying to decide whether I like them or not. I bought a very nice pair about a year or so ago after reading about them on various forums. Many raved about them and how great they are for rock and their ability to crank at high volumes. That's great and all but I want music produced faithfully and as well as possible. It's got a 15" woofer and a horn tweeter. Other folks say they're good but not a great audiophile speaker. They were very affordable back in the day and I really don't care about the philosophical stuff about whether they were crap or a Radio Shack product, etc. I'm trying to make a non biased determination on their sound.

After about a year of on and off listening I still can't decide whether I like the way they sound or not. Yes, they will crank loudly and they sound ok to me. I tried some jazz and the bass is pretty good with clear definition. The highs have a graininess to them, however, and it's not very clear sounding. They also sound a bit congested to me overall. For classical, they sound good. For rock, they sound pretty good too. But something about them that I can't put a finger on. I've placed them on the carpet where they sound much better especially in the low end. I've also placed them on stands where they start to sound congested.

All the reviews at Audioreview were enthusiastically positive but it seems the owners of these are either 15 year olds who like speakers that have that high volume crankability factor or 50 year olds who were 15 when they originally bought them! My gut feeling and my ears tell me these are ok speakers but not superb or even fantastic sounding. I've used them with tubes and SS receivers.

The reason I'm asking is to decide whether to keep them or sell them. I'd hate to get rid of them and later regret that I did but I've got way too many speakers!

 

Personally I liked the Mach II better.

Quite a few Radio Shack speakers back in the day were killer on the price/performance scale. They sold a little metal bookshelf unit with an omnidirectional ribbon on top (I can't recall the model) that would often go on sale for $75 and it was excellent sounding in the right room. I think the price on that one was too low and actually scared some people off.

 

Yes, the Optimus 7 or something like that with the Linaeum tweeter.

 

I had a pair of Realistic Mach One's I got half price on sale, around $200.00. They were brutally horrible speakers. Clogged, harsh, crappy...no matter how you placed them, and set those useless output controls. Cool looking woofers, though. I think they survived over ten years on the market, though. After that, I had a set of 10" 3-way Optimus towers with dome tweeters on sale, they actually sounded really good. I miss those.

 

They were made to sell, not listen to, and they fulfilled that engineering goal very nicely. In spite of the 15" woofer, the bass was merely loud, not deep. Although I never tore a pair apart, I would imagine that inside would be typical Realistic crossovers, i.e. 10-cent caps and tiny chokes. A few dollars spent at Parts Express on decent crossover components might make a world of difference, and you might want to try that before finally deciding to part with them.

 

Yeah, those little controls don't make much of a difference soundwise.

 

I have a pair of Realistic Optimus T-120s I received as a "bonus" when I bought a Pioneer Receiver recently.

The woofers and midrange drivers need re-foaming. Is it worth it for these speakers? They do look extremely cool....

 

As I recall they were a Consumer's Reports #1 rated speaker at the time.

WVK

 

Mach Ones make those Cerwin-Vega monsters with pink woofer surrounds sound amazing.

 

As with most RS products the Mach Ones seem to get the haters out...

I have a pair. While they aren't even in the same league as say, Klipschorns, A-25's or AR's, they are still very good sounding speakers, IMO. I have heard that the OEM drivers for the early Machs were made for RS by Altec (the later ones were made in Japan, but still are good robust drivers)...

-Aaron

 

Those were the ones I had after the Mach One's! They were a *very* good speaker. If you can get them redone inexpensively, it would definitely be worth it.

 

Rotted surrounds are a common problem. There is a special 15" surround available. The ones on the pair I have are still in fabulous shape.

Still can't decide. My ears tell me one thing, my heart another, and you guys still another.

 

Based on what I've read over the years, like most ARs these speakers need a potent amplifier to sound their best (cramming that 15" driver into that miniscule sealed enclosure is a clue to this).

Without thinking deeply about the answer: do you enjoy listening to them? As in, do you catch yourself involuntarily tapping your foot and singing along with Mr. Plant or Mr. Stipe?

Even when I finally owned a decent system, I still got a kick out of listening to my aunt's huge GE console stereo. While it didn't have lots of detail (despite using horn tweeters) imaging was mostly non-existant and the bass - while very powerful - was rather boomy, despite all that it was fun hearing my tunes through it and could listen for hours. Years later I read something in a magazine, Stereophile I think, that helped to explain that. A professional reviewer was questioned about his choice of personal system, IIRC which included a Scott receiver and small AR loudspeakers, and was asked why he chose such a simple/inexpensive set of gear when he was exposed to all the highly accurate hi-end equipment at work & which he could obtain at a discount. He replied that he enjoyed his little system more because he knew it had obvious flaws and being aware of that fact, he could pay more attention to the music vs. the pricey gear which was supposed to be free of audible flaws and so caused him to be much more analytical when listening, in turn causing him to pay less attention to the music.

While even I've got limits as a secondary listening rig, I would still like to own one of those big ol' consoles or other "just for the hell of it" type systems.

 

Those Mach One's were something I lusted after since my early childhood-I wanted *so* much to like them. Instead of foot tapping, I wanted to grab my Louisville Slugger and smash them. I tried 5 different combinations of amps and receivers, and nothing could make them sound better. They were highly efficient, IIRC.

 

The music makes me want to tap my feet, definitely. They're a good speaker for the money, just not that sure they are the ultimate, which, for a lot of people, is the never ending goal.

 

Well that settles it! They must not be very good if Consumer's Reports rated them so highly

 

At the time (and maybe now?) they compared the goes in with the goes out
in an anacohic chamber. They considered closer better.
WVK

 

Thanks to Steve and this forum "ruining" my ears, I probably wouldn't like them quite as much anymore, but I had a set in the early 80s that I ran with an NAD 2200 power amp and a Yamaha $600 CD player and I LOVED how they sounded. I don't think you are going to get an unbiased opinion here. If YOU like them, then they sound great. If not, then don't. I personally thought the little dial for the horn was handy and I used it a lot. But I would not consider the sound-- while much louder-- as good as my Klipsch speakers I own now. But if I had a set of Mach One's now, I wouldn't throw them out.

 

Maybe I'd try to like them more, now that I'm older. Maybe they'd sound good with a good tube amp.
I used the H/K 825/870 combo, Adcom seperates, an older Pioneer receiver, among a few other things. I just couldn't win. Maybe that Sony-CDP-101 was the problem.

I do remember what did sound good on the Mach One's though,

The "RL" LP of Yes-90125.

 

Were these the ones with the adjustable Mids & Highs? If so I had these not bad, but too much midrange for me IMO, not bad speakers for what I paid years ago.

 

Yes, the ones with knobs for adjusting the treble and midrange. You can't hear a drastic change when their adjusted up or down.

And what exactly is liquid cooled?

 

its kind of amazing that this thread was revived today.... i just ran across a pair of these. I put them on an adcom gfa-2 (100wpc @ 8ohm) and I have to say the speakers are rather strange. They have huge woofers, 15"?, yet the bass is terribly lacking... so I adjust the high/mid controls, and then the sound goes from bad to worse. Do these things require a lot of power to sound good? I mean, with a horn tweeter and such a big woofer, I expected these to be for playing music loud, but there must be a way to get them to sound ok... Any additional comments?

 

I'm not saying these speakers were ever SUPER-great sounding, but when listening to them now, there is one factor that many older speakers in any price range share and that can seriously alter their sound, particularly their mids and highs.

The capacitors in their crossover networks have an excellent chance of being out-of-spec, causing subtle-to-severe electrical changes.

This is caused by

1) age - their internal parts have changed chemically

and/or

2) since they are very probably electrolytic types, they are leaking, which can REALLY alter their performance characteristics.

In fact, its not uncommon for mids and tweeters to seemingly not work at all or only produce sound at whisper levels, when actually its because the fluid inside the cap is at severely reduced levels.

----> Bad caps can also change the sound of the woofer if its crossover uses them.

So its not surprising many people report much improved sound when such caps are replaced, keeping an otherwise quality loudspeaker from being tossed into the trash can.

Luckily caps are pretty easy to replace if you know how to solder and if you stick with what the speakers came with, don't cost much either (polypropylene or other modern versions cost much more).

 

They are purposely designed to not radically alter the sound, so the user can't accidently wipe out all the work that went into their sound (kind of a vaguely insulting "hold your hand" philosophy I guess) similar to many other speaker brands that used them like Advent, Altec-Lansing, Pioneer, Acoustic Research, etc etc.

That refers to the inclusion of ferrofluid in the voice coil gap, which helps to transfer heat away from the coil to the surrounding metal structure to increase longevity and power handling. It also has an effect on the sound by helping to lessen unwanted resonances of the voice coil/diaphragm assembly.

As far as the woofer, yes. Even though it uses a high compliance suspension system like ARs, earlier B&Ws and other acoustic-suspension loudspeakers, cramming that huge woofer in such a small enclosure results in low efficiency as far as the really low frequencies are concerned. I'm pretty sure this speaker was designed more for rock/pop music with bass notes hovvering around the 40-60Hz range rather than, say, classical music featuring church organs with (literally) house shaking <25Hz bass frequencies.

NOTE: if the original foam surround on models so equipped (IIRC earliest versions used rubber) was replaced with a new one that was stiffer - a not uncommon occurance with many surround repair kits for any type of woofer - its bass performance will be adversely affected.

The following is a scan of the spec page for my Pioneer CS99A '73-vintage speakers . It also uses a 15" driver (+ a horn tweeter and dual cone mids) in an enclosure practically the same size as the Mach-1, but its suspension doesn't seem as compliant which is evident in its frequency response: it's hard to make out but in the graph its response drops quickly below 100Hz which is backed up by extensive listening sessions and strange as it seems, my much smaller Boston Acoustic CR9s with an 8" ported woofer goes much lower - 42Hz +/- 3dB - before it starts dropping like a rock, which is a normal characteristic of a ported design.

But check out their very different efficiency ratings: CS99 = 95dB vs. the CR9 = 91dB. In other words the BAs trade off loudness for *depth* of bass but require more than twice as much power to reach the same level as the CS99s (fyi: the dB scale is not linear).

BUT.......in the range of bass frequencies it can reproduce well, with just a basic 50 watt/channel reciever the Pioneers can still shake the walls & with some help from the bass knob (on this particular receiver the center frequency is set way down at 50Hz) these speakers can get downright scary when playing a Madonna or Massive Attack album.

 

Nice info Taurus. I like your thoughts on the older parts making the sound worse due to age. But do you think the sound would improve substantially with new replacements as you suggested. Sounds very intriguing to see/hear how a "brand new" circa 1979 would/should sound like. I don't know if all of that work would be worth it though.

It appears to me that the surrounds are original. They aren't rubber. Any way to tell if they've been refoamed?