Are The Speakers We Purchase Really What They Are Cracked Up To Be?

Once upon a time I would have never considered a DIY speaker, how in the heck could I design something that would maximize all the correct design parameters to achieve a great frequency response, what parts would I use for crossover networks, how could I possibly design a cutting edge network? I think the answer to the question for most of us is, we probably couldn't, we need to leave this to the loudspeaker designers.

Well, those were my thoughts over the years, until Danny Richie of GR Research shows up on the YouTube scene. Finally someone that seems to have the back of us folks that trust the speaker manufacturers to design a speaker "correctly". Danny specializes in measuring these finished products and he then literally shoots large holes in the manufacturer's designs. One of the things that really grabs my attention, with just a small amount more invested in many of these designs Danny has looked at, a simple parts upgrade could improve these loudspeakers tremendously. With an additional $70 or so (cost) invested by the manufacturers, their finished product would be so much better, but it does not look like that is happening.

Here is but one of Danny's project upgrades and we are not talking about a $200.00 speaker, we are talking about a $3,500.00 monitor loudspeaker built by Dynaudio, their Special 40 Monitor loudspeaker. At $3,500.00 you would think, within reason, all stops would be pulled out to insure the finest of everything in parts and design, but that does not seem to be the case. This was such a surprise to me, I asked the US sales manager of Dynaudio to address the comments in the video shown below, which he did. In a nutshell, here were the comments made about the Special 40 Monitor.

1. Less than desirable Sand Cast resistors are used in the crossover network
2. Low quality push on connectors are used in the design
3. The Woofer has not 1 but 3 terrible peaks in the response curve
4. The cabinet requires some heavy duty resonance reduction added to be acceptable at all.
5. Low quality Poly Cap capacitors are used in the crossover network
6. Low quality electrolytic capacitors are used in the cross over network
7. Inferior coated wiring is used to the drivers

Here is the reply from the US Sales Manager from Dynaudio. What do you think of his response? I expected some substantive, detailed answers, but I did not receive that. You will note he defends one aspect of the speaker design, the choice of wire for the drivers, and finishes with a voided warranty statement, if the improvement modifications were made. This is enough to shake anyone's confidence in such an expensive product. I really did not know what to make of the modification impacting longevity comment?

Recently we have received numerous comments regarding a Youtube video shared by a person trying to sell “upgrade” kits for Special Forty. In the video, the person makes dubious claims regarding the build quality of the Special Forty, obviously to make his own product sound like a good investment. For instance, claiming that the cable we use is low quality (it is in fact Van den Hul Snowline, a well regarded product). Making different choices in terms of tuning and material choices does not inherently make the product better, in fact the suggestions made are likely to negatively impact longevity. Obviously, following the suggestions made will void the 8 year warranty that we provide for our speakers.


There are other examples of same exact scenario with several different loudspeaker brands in all price ranges, and it's enough to shake my confidence in several different brands of loudspeakers, what about you? How could the issues provided here not be solved to begin with? If these changes cost a fortune, I could see not investing in higher quality parts, however the improvements (cost wise) are just not that out of reach, as GR Research clearly shows in their videos. I commend Danny for bringing these issues out in the open.

 

It's a business and they are there to make money. The market determines how a company structures it's ROI. The company's history and expertise will determine how successful they will be with any one product. Absolutely nothing new here.

This is not a defence of capitalism, just an observation. You may will be at the point in your audiophile career where you need the increased value of a DIY design, or product from a SME company fighting for unique market share, or a company on the ascendant deliberately launching a high-value loss-leader product to upset the market. Or even a long-established company able to leverage its installed technology base and overachieve with reference products at a fraction of boutique costs. But at some point, a company will need to claw back some of the earlier value it over-invested. Just time your purchase right!

 

I would like to see before and after modification sound samples. However small bookshelfs that cost £3.5K are BS. Most of the budget goes into finishes because people buy with their eyes and not ears. So often I see these speakers taken apart and it's just a pretty basic box with drivers that are in most cases not very expensive. Not surprising that a £600 speaker can come close. Probably a less rigid cabinet and likely similar component quality. You can get some pretty large 3 ways for similar money and I'm sure they are also sub optimal in terms of parts used. Remember £300 extra on parts means £1500+ more on the retail price. I'm sure Dynaudio reserve the better parts for their new £5500 Heritage Special of about the same size. Dumbing down on components leaves space to charge even more for models up the range.

 

I have heard a fair number of kits and DIY speakers over the years. I state this upfront.

So there are a few things here for consideration. For a successful speaker business, the standard is roughly a 10-1 mark-up from manufacturing costs to retail - the dealer gets a cut as well. Labour is the most expensive cost of building loudspeakers. A DIYer never factors in his own time. As an English teacher in Hong Kong my fee if I were to do some side teaching would be $100US per hour minimum. If a speaker takes ten hours to build that's $1,000. Plus all the equipment I need to buy to make the speakers. Also never factored in by a DIYer.

Now to the parts. Manufacturers who buy their parts or manufacturer in-house can get those parts far cheaper than a DIYer because they are buying in bulk.

The most expensive fanciest tweeter that people blab about may not actually sound the best - or for that matter even remotely good. All drivers are made out of material - if the materials are not a sonic match then your result may not be all that great - a crossover can NOT fix this. When a metal tweeter reproduces a 4khz sound at 90dB it does NOT sound the same as a Silk Dome or Ribbon or AMT at the same note/frequency. The Ribbon or BE tweeter may measure the best on its own but the silk dome may sound more natural when both the woofer and the tweeter are covering the same instrument at the same frequency. So the AMT itself and the Diamond itself may have all kinds of impressive specs that blow away any and all silk domes but when you sit in the chair and listen the AMT and the Diamond may very well be unlistenable next to the silk dome for 1/5th the price. Now the manufacturer needs to decide if he is going to sell quality sound or sell people the technology. And as my long-time dealer noted - 90% of everyone who walks into his shop is presold by reviews and looks as the poster above noted.

Measurements - any idiot can design and build a speaker that measures flat or has impeccable waterfall plots. Don't kid yourself. All any manufacturer needs to do to impress Stereophile or Soundstage or other measurement freaks is to look up which speaker got "raves" for their measurements - buy the speakers - reverse engineer them. Build their own with a different look and bring it to market and poof you win. it is literally a "textbook" design. The reason manufacturers don't do this is because they listened to them and said "uggh what an unlistenable pile of caca" and said screw it, we're going to listen and go by whether it sounds good or not. Sound trumps the graph.

Some speaker makers have parts only built for them or they build their own parts/drivers. A DIYer can't unless they're loaded, do that. They are stuck with kits and making a speaker around whatever drivers are available to the DIY market.

Parts can and do matter of course and there are plenty of companies that perform upgrades for various loudspeakers. My system is mostly Audio Note which has its roots as DIY and Kits from way back. There are 17 versions of the AN E and a couple of kit version of the speakers. Essentially, they are what the guy in your video is doing - taking a basic model and using better caps, more sophisticated drivers etc to get better sound from the platform.

Very few companies do that. I can think of exactly no other company. At best you can buy something like PureAudio Project and they will sell you a different full range tweeter like a Voxative or Horn but the rest of the speaker is the same.

If you think about it it always struck me odd that people will spend $3,000 on Speaker cables but the cable inside their speaker and the wiring in the crossover is cheap $0.05 cent rubbish. Whatever supposed goodness the cable has been choked off by the internal speaker cable and the wiring on the speaker voice coils and in the crossover.

Moreover, the cabinet is important - just as important if not more so than the actual drivers.

Lastly, I would not jump on the guy in the video for running a business improving speakers. I wish more speaker companies would sell suped-up versions - a deluxe model. You see it now a fair bit with amplifiers. You can select the amp and then add better connectors or a beefier power supply etc.

To me, it has to be a speaker worth putting in the effort like a Tannoy where you can buy them with a superior driver (I forget the names but GR or SE versions something like that). The Dynaudio 40 really isn't that sort of speaker.

 

it is easy to take pot shots of a design after the fact. in the end it is the sound that matters.
many woofers have peaks for example but it is the job of the crossover, frequency, slope, impedance flattening, notch filters, etc. to get the sound right.
as mentioned by Richard the sound is not all about measurements, a great manufacturer will employ voicing experts that iterate the crossover design by ear, until the sound is validated to be ready for sale. that is where the magic happens in the best of the best.
there are companies and individuals that make speakers solely according to measurements. they have their market. some are good, some ok and some plain awful. the point is that voicing a great sounding speaker is equal parts science and art. DIY can be done for sure but it is a learning process and you need to know what the target sound is and how to validate it.
in other words a speaker can sound excellent if it is tuned with low cost parts. a speaker made with expensive parts can easily sound terrible.

 

It's the reason I like vintage speakers like my Altec's. Extremely high quality components that would cost a fortune today compared to most of the components found in today's speakers. Plus I haven't heard a new speaker system that sounds so life like and dynamic. Small boxes will never compete in that arena.

BillWojo

 

Years ago I purchased a pair of speakers on the used market that retailed for $14G's. That particular model also had "known crossover issues" but I took a chance anyways. Sure enough it did. Why a manufacturer would let an expensive product like that out with known issues still doesn't make any sense to me. The end result was a pair of $500 speakers I had here spanked them badly. I decided it wasn't worth the risk to take a chance on the $1G crossover fix and instead sent them on their way. Yes there are gross oversights on quality control even from reputable companies.

 

I became pretty friendly with a former speaker designer that now has a repair shop and he seems to have the same attitude as the guy in this video and I tend to believe him for the most part. It was his opinion that a lot (not all) of audiophile stuff was overpriced garbage, and not just speakers either. He showed me some pro audio products which were far cheaper, used higher quality parts, and were designed far better in terms of reliability and performance. I guess the rub is they didn't look as pretty on the outside. It was a bit eye opening and definitely caused me to question some of my beliefs with respect to certain manufacturer claims and pricing. He did do some custom mods to some speakers like the guy in the video and did a pretty good business with that. He said it didn't take much money or effort to transform many audiophile products from garbage as he called it to pretty well performing, reliable products.

 

I agree, not long ago I watched a video where someone did a tear down on a pair of £2000 speakers and the workmanship was so poor.

The sad thing is, the average person will have saved up thinking they’re getting a real piece of craftsmanship for their 2 grand, when in reality the manufacturer has just inflated the price to give the impression of quality.

I’m sure there must be manufacturers out there that do provide genuine value for money.

 

When I was a kid we played with speakers, i.e. tore them down, did different things with them, broke them and repaired them. Some speakers totally amazed me at how cheaply the components were under the hood compared to how the overall sound was. To make speakers sound good on a budget is a skillful thing, but it's what you have to do to make a decent living building/selling speakers.

DIY allows one to buy and assemble much better components at any given price range, no doubt about it, and still save money, i.e. as was mentioned I never count my hours in these builds. The challenge is putting them all together to sound better as they should. For me I definitely farm out the crossover design. I'm no pro at this but I can build to print and then tweak to RTA and finally my ears. My advantage is the level of build of the cabinets. No manufacturer could afford the level of materials I have in it nor the solid construction I can put forth, unless maybe you are Wilson.

As seen in the YouTube videos you can take apart any speaker and find areas that you can improve with some diy. You can also screw it up!

 

Danny touts his No-Rez material as a fix-all for cabinet resonance and a worthy upgrade for almost any speaker. Well, having used the product multiple times I can assert that it definitely doesn’t justify the hype. I can imagine many cases in which the material would ruin the voicing of a speaker, and in the case of my Seas A26 speakers, there is little doubt it hinders the speaker’s bass extension in exchange for cleaner midrange. There are always trade-offs, pretty much until you get into creative DIY designs (which require labor for which you’re not compensated, as RA pointed out) or you enter the realm of cost-no-object retail designs.

However, I agree with DR that the stand-alone performance of the Special 40s woofer, and Dynaudio drivers in general, do not live up to the hype. To be fair though, I find that most in-house manufactured drivers I’ve heard from various brands don’t live up to the marketing claims. In most cases a mid-level Seas or Scanspeak driver will outperform them.

 

Hopefully, if you're buying a $3,500 speaker you have listened to it and like the sound. It makes no sense to pay that kind of money for a speaker you don't like. You can change the sound of any speaker on the market by swapping parts to suit your taste. But why? It makes more sense to just buy a speaker you like straight from the manufacturer. Also, the value of the speaker on the used market will suffer if modded.

Speakers are designed, and built, to have a specific sound. I'm sure the Special 40 sounds exactly the way Dynaudio's design team wanted it to sound. If you want a different sound, buy a different speaker.

Years ago I swapped in some boutique components for the pedestrian parts in a pair of speaker crossovers. Yep, the difference was noticeable. Unfortunately, the difference was detrimental to the sound. Money wasted, and lesson learned on that DIY project.

 

One example below of a recent diy cabinet I put together. This kind of mass and strength would be hard pressed to find unless you spent a lot of dough. All walls 1.5" thick except for baffle, it's 2.25" thick. Two materials (birch ply and mdf) glued together to help with resonance, and braced well with 2 x 4's and 2 by 2's. 1/2 gallon of glue in each, clamped and screwed. Hard to find this in a purchased item, but their veneering skill I haven't tried to compete with!

On a dolly, and for good reason.

 

The better publications - HiFi News and Stereophile - publish bench test data for the speakers they review. Ears are the best judge in the end.

As a rule I am suspicious of any posts on here that include a YouTube video.

 

Nice work! There was no bracing whatsoever in those 2K speakers i mentioned above.

 

Heavy, no doubt, and the sides, top and bottom ply/MDF laminations are dimensionally stable. Your braces seem to be planed lumber though, glued and screwed at various points to the box. As the braces expand and contract with the change of seasons because they're not as dimensionally stable as the box, the screw beds may loosen and the glue joints may weaken, and the corner joints may open up. Those changes will reduce any benefit that the bracing may provide when brand new.

 

No.

I've been doing this for awhile and what you are saying does not occur with this type of consruction. I have seen unbraced mdf cabinets begin to deteriorate at the seams. But not construction like this. Maybe if I left them outside? As with most speakers they are kept in a climate controlled house, not happening.

 

I’ve been happy with my Klipschorns since the 80’s. Why, they are exactly what they’re purported to be. Good materials superb practical construction and absolutely no “pie in the sky” promises. Klipschorns do what they’re supposed to do, Music.

 

I listened to those with a Mcintosh set up. It was really nice, I don't have the space for it though.

 

Unfortunately I sold my McIntosh amps before buying Klipschorns back then. It would have been interesting hearing the combination. I’m hoping my new electronics are finally going to do them the justice they deserve.

 

I'm sure it's still great.

 

My experience was very much the opposite. I started with a really nice Troels'-designed 3-way ScanSpeak DIY speaker. My buddy and his father built the cabinets and they were perfection. Well-braced, rigid, and beautifully finished. We fitted very nice Jantzen Audio crossover parts per Troels' specs. I think the xovers alone were around $750 a pair in parts. Woofer, midrange, and tweeter were mid-level ScanSpeak units. Not high end per se, but all in I had about $2500 into these DIY units between cabinet build, crossover, and drivers. My feeling is that on paper, these should go toe to toe with any manufactured speaker up to 10k a pair.

I listened to them for about a year. They were really nice.

I then bought a pair of used Dynaudio Focus 260s which are a 2.5 way design. Retail on those was $5k. Used price I paid is basically irrelevant.

The Dynaudios completely embarrassed the DIY Troels Graveson ScanSpeak units.

Focused listening as a hobby is most certainly a thing where you just don't know what you don't know. You don't know what you're missing until you hear it.

Bass response - the Dyns were beefier down low, more tuneful, and more balanced into the 30 Hz region
Treble - Dyns were transparent and detailed. ScanSpeaks were, by comparison, analytical and harsh
Midrange - Dyns again showed balance and tonal consistency across the audible spectrum. The ScanSpeaks were shouty, to be nice about it.
Imaging and room placement - The ScanSpeaks were incredibly finicky and picky about room placement. They were damn near impossible to place in a way that provided appreciable bass output and phase correctness with the subwoofers I had, AND disappear into the room. I literally set the Dyns down in the room, plugged them in, and two of those three automatically happened. I just had to tweak them a little for the best and most accurate bass response.

DIY and DIY tweaks absolutely have their place. But as someone who loves to experiment with as many aspects of this hobby as I can, I'm glad I tried it for myself and left it behind. It's very much not a free lunch. It is still very costly, very time consuming, you have to do every step perfectly or its back to the drawing board, and getting them together and making sound is actually the easy part. I spent countless hours with those DIY speakers and REW, trying to get everything to "line up." It was literally a waste of a year.

I've since moved up to even better Dynaudios, and I do believe unless I hit the lottery and purchase a new home with a massive, dedicated listening space, I have achieved my goal for endgame speakers.

 

The physical interaction of the cabinet is part of the speaker design. What effect it has is part of the design and the speaker can very well be voiced for the effects of the cabinet. You can change that, and there may be real benefits in one area, but do consider the unintended consequences in other areas. You may or may not like those either. Same goes for the wire, the sub-components are selected for an overall outcome, you can change that outcome and you may like what it becomes. But at this time you are the speaker designer now, and the name on the cabinet is no longer representative of the final sound.

 

I have always said that if cars and airplanes were priced like hifi speakers, all hifi customers will be walking or riding donkeys everywhere.
A speaker is a rather simple device (couple of drivers and a crossover in a box!) and rarely should it cost more than a car or a house. But, many scoundrels out there with no engineering aptitude have realized that it is a rather easy way to make money and they come up with all kinds of vulture priced junk in fancy boxes.

Stick with larger brands that have been around forever (have had decades to accumulate knowledge) and have the engineering clout behind them (Yamaha, Sony, TAD, Technics, JBL, Revel, KEF, Luxman, Elac, etc). Look at how much they spend on R&D for instance. Yamaha, for instance, just built another 100 million dollar R&D facility for just hifi. That should give you an idea. At least, you won't be getting scammed by a guy in his garage with 3 employees building fancy looking boxes and selling them for 100k. You wouldn't buy a car from a guy cranking out cars with 3 employees in his garage just because it had a good paint job. You shouldn't buy a speaker from dudes like that either.

To be fair, there are some smaller outfits that have genuine aptitude, but, they are reinventing the wheel and don't have the advantage of the bigger outfits (decades of accrued knowledge to fall back on and not having to reinvent the wheel, resulting in lower prices). So, you will be paying a much higher price for those small outfits since they had to reinvent the wheel, in terms of R&D. Also, bigger outfits have the advantage of having access to the top grade manufacturing facilities (lower QC rejects, lower prices, etc), which smaller outfits simply won't have (more QC rejects resulting in higher prices, etc)

Chifi is another option, but, it is new to the west and you gotta know what to buy. Not everything Chifi is good, but, some of it can rival or get better than the top names mentioned above and yet be affordable.

 

The first question I always ask is, why does anyone accept Danny Richie's word (or my word, or the word of any other SHF member for that matter, or the word of any other YouTube guy) just because any of us expresses an opinion about some audio thing online?? Danny Richie is in the business of selling what he terms upgrade kits for various popular and well-known brands of speakers, and selling speaker kits and flat pack cabinets of (partly) his own design. That should be your first clue about his motivation for criticizing other people's/maker's designs.

The second question to always ask is, where are the independent measurement and listening comparisons between the Dynaudio Special 40 used in the linked YouTube video and one of Danny Richie's competing speakers? Until someone actually hears one of the GR Research speakers in comparison to any speaker that Richie's baleful approach seems to disparage, don't believe anything you see and hear on YouTube.

I state for the record that I've never, ever heard any speakers made by GR Research. I have definitely heard, owned, or had the opportunity to do extended auditions and comparisons with/of a few hundred pairs of speakers over the decades. Some facts that arise from that are, I think, noteworthy.

- Occasionally, a driver failed to work because a push-on connector oxidized. I can't go back through my notes for this sort of detail, but I seriously doubt it was more than half a dozen times over 40 years across a few hundred pairs of speakers. So why should this be a factor in anyone's considerations about the quality of a particular speaker design?

- Occasionally, a driver failed to work because of a soldered connection that went cold. I can't go back through my notes for this sort of detail, but I again seriously doubt it was more than half a dozen times over 40 years across a few hundred pairs of speakers. So why should this be a factor in anyone's considerations about the quality of a particular speaker design?

- Occasionally, a crossover failed because of a dead capacitor, but in those rare situations, cap failure occurred variously in poly, metal film, oil, electrolytic, and other cap types, and resistors of all types also (again rarely) failed. While there is no doubt that some caps and resistors are rated for greater longevity and tolerance stability over time, the percentage of audiophiles who actually keep and listen to a particular pair of speakers long enough to exceed the rated stable lifetime of even the cheapest caps is so low as to be almost unmeasurable. It is the overall design of a crossover - how all the chosen components are used to not only work to provide a specific sound, but also to remain a stable circuit for frequency distribution - that matters most.

- Hookup wire, its gauge, insulation (its dielectric measurement, if you prefer that approach), copper vs silver, whether exposed leads are coated and how they're coated, and so on, is an audiophile technical discussion subject, not a sound quality subject. Anyone who thinks that sound quality is affected in any audible way, much less a measurable way, by few inches of wire used for internal hookup is simply conjuring up errant intuitive analysis in a situation that plainly calls for technical analysis. Just because some audiophile thinks up all sorts of assertions about how he thinks a few inches of wire can change something, doesn't mean it's true (even if he finds a YouTube guy who agrees). My advice is to stop conferring little bits of wire with all sorts of affective audio properties that they cannot in any way possess.

- Cabinet resonance reduction is a foolishly inappropriate term. All cabinets resonate. Wilson Audio cabinets and Magico with their thick metal castings resonate. Harbeth cabinets resonate as part of their design. Dynaudio cabinets resonate. All speaker cabinets resonate to one degree or another. What speaker designers work hard to do is control cabinet resonances in a way that supports the overall design of their speaker. The many different designers of the most highly regarded speaker designs over the years have expressed and successfully implemented a wide variety of views on the subject. So, simply taking some other manufacturer's speaker and declaring that it has cabinet resonance of some sort and thereafter adding home-brewed bracing to it (hand-cut, CNC cut, or cut into the Golden Ratio by magic audio fairies) will effectively ruin part of the speaker's sound.

- The Dynaudio speaker in the GR Research YouTube video did not have "...terrible peaks" but rather only some small technically detectable issues in the frequency response in the test rooms (GR Research's room and Stereophile's/John Atkinson's room) and with the different test equipment that was used. That's not a revelation about any particular speaker, but rather, again, the result of deliberate design choices made by the speaker designer. What GR Research states as a flaw doesn't jive with the loudly approving uptake of quite a lot of audiophiles who wholeheartedly approve of the Dynaudio Special 40 speakers and are highly satisfied users. No speaker satisfies all audiophiles.

- It should be instructive to all of us that so many very small operators are always the ones telling us about how, with just the swap-out of a few inexpensive parts (that they just happen to offer for sale in handy kits for only the low price of fill-in-the-blank), a relatively expensive pair of speakers (or amp or turntable or CD player or whatever) could have been made so much better. All of these small operators are implying that they know more about speaker and amp and CD player and turntable design than the manufacturers who've spent R&D money repeatedly over the years and put their products, at significant cost to themselves and their distributors and their retailers, into the competitive global marketplace repeatedly over the years to be heard by tens of thousands of prospective consumers and audiophiles. Note the GR Research hasn't been subjected to that kind of scrutiny or anything even close to it, and that provides a reason to be highly skeptical. For Danny Richie, then, one of the problems with YouTubing is that it can, in fact, end up exposing your products to a vastly larger audience than he possibly ever dreamed of. My advice to Danny is to be careful what he wishes for.

- Frankly, babbling about alleged 10-to-1 manufacturing-cost-to-retail-price ratios (that at least one SHF member has touted from time to time) is unfounded, pointless, and unsupported by anything other than hearsay. In some cases where major audio companies sell partially direct-to-consumer and partially to distributors while providing retailer support too (e.g., PS Audio most recently has embraced that mix, but other major and some smaller high-quality makers do that too), the cost-to-price ratio is different in each of the companies major markets. Audiophiles and most other audio consumers want technical support when problems occur from time to time. It seems clear that a lot of audiophiles (because studying this stuff and knowing about it really has nothing to do with being an audiophile) don't know anything about the costs required to run a large audio component manufacturing business. Depending on where the manufacturer is located, cost-to-retail-price ratios can be as low as 4:1 ranging up to as high as 20:1.

GR Research - and a small percentage of other YouTube guys, it should be noted - promote their own kits and methods and plans and designs and flatpacks and services while either obliquely or directly putting down, dissing, or criticizing other company's product(s). Danny Richie seems to be a nice guy - though it's just as big a mistake as anything else of that kind for me to infer that I know anything about the man just from watching a YouTube video - but, he seems to be currently making a bit of his living off audiophiles who think that their otherwise perfectly good products can be made better with the addition of an upgrade kit that they have to solder in place while replacing the perfectly good parts originally supplied by a reputable manufacturer.

My advice to SHF members and other audiophiles is to not let themselves be persuaded to purchase something to modify their speakers after purchasing perfectly good speakers in the first place. When somebody comes along - somebody other than Danny Richie, that is - and demonstrates over some significant listening period that one of GR Research's upgrade kits definitely improves on a Dynaudio (or any other major speaker) design, I'll check it out. In the meantime, I won't be butchering any driver complements or crossovers in a pair of perfectly good, highly rated speakers.