Insignia $50 Speakers Look And Sound Good! - Page 3

I just picked up a pair of these Insignias today. Really nice cabinets for the price. Sound-wise, they're not as detailed and don't have as much low-end as my Monitor Audio B2s, but then they don't cost $300 either. These Insignias will look kind of huge next to my 17" PC monitor, but at least they'll match in color.

wow, quite a price difference there!

Anybody else replacing more expensive speakers with these Insignias?

LOL Pete so you got yourself a pair of these as well!

Yeah, I need some serious help. My 1br apt is full of speakers and my g/f is beginning to give me strange looks...

Tell her yeah you need many speakers but you will always only have 1 g/f

Hi,

Someone asked how the Insignia's compared to the Onkyo HTIB speakers. From my listening, there are pretty much the same. I had to take the Onkyo's out of retirement for this comparision. This is not a review.

My Onkyo set is the SKS-HT500 (5.1 speaker set) that I purchased for ~ $100.00 on sale @ Fry's. These are 2-way bass reflex with 2 - 5.25 woofers and a 1" tweeter. Dimensions are approx 7.5 x 16.5 x 10 (WxHxD).

My current setup uses an Ascend 170/340/170 setup (all se's) and they were added into the comparision just for giggles.


Size:
The Insignia's are large and deep. Not sure how you could mount them to a wall or ceiling. So, from largest to smallest is Insignia, Onkyo, Ascend.
I must say that the 170's are an excellent size and are easily mounted.


Fit & Finish:
The fit and finish on the Insignia ranges from good to excellent. The front is very well done with a nice piano black finish. The rest of the cabinet is good but not great veneer. The 170 appears to have a better veneer but does not have piano black front while the Onkyo's have a slightly lower quality veneer. The Insignia looks great with the grill off.
From a looks perspective its a tie between the Insignia and Ascend followed by a distant Onkyo. The Insignia does have more flash than the Ascend's but I like the Ascend's understated look.


Sound:
As for sound, there is no comparision to the 170. Its is light years ahead.

Between the Insignia and Onkyo, my nod currently goes to the Onkyo's. They are smoother and have less of a mid-bass loss. YMMV.

All listening was conducted with a Pioneer 1014 and identical positioning for the speakers with same source material. The Insignia's had about 30 hours of break-in prior.

/// Motu

Can you be more specific? You haven't said a thing here.

heh, for those of us who've heard or owned the Ascends, he's said plenty. It's like saying a Lexus is light years ahead of a Kia...not real specific but very self-explanatory.

Ascends have been so over-hyped on this forum that if I ever hear a pair and they are merely excellent, rather than mind-blowingly jaw-droppingly awesome, I will be quite disappointed.

As someone asked me when I posted a lame budget blind test, did you use a SPL meter? You were sure they were playing at the same decibel level? It made a difference when I did it. If the test is not blind, you think you hear things different. Of course that is just my opinion.

Ditto with Onix, Axiom and *particularly* SVS.

haha, so very true...they'd better be THAT good

I'd be interested if these were available in canada. The coax thing intrigues me: as I appreciate the benefits on my old tannoy dual concentrics. Very few speakers are concentric and I have no idea why: I don't really see a big downside and if the industry pushed it into mass production, drivers would be cheap. Clearly it can be done affordably. Of course, I have absolutely no need for more speakers, but that often goes without saying on this forum

The concentric design is often used in car speakers. Not sure why it's rarely used in home speakers... would it have something to do with magnet placement (often very large magnets of the woofer somehow negatively affecting the tweeter's)?

What are the benefits of concentric design in home speakers? In traditional design (non-concentric), assuming you're sitting a decent distance from the speakers, you probably still can't tell that the very high frequencies are reproduced several inches above/below the rest.

well I've never owned any concentric home speakers, but I do have concentric car speakers in one car and non-concentric (component) speakers in another, both systems run off identical amps---and there is absolutely no comparison, the non-concentric design has light years better clarity and soundstage while the concentric design has everything smeared together.

That may be the case with your car speakers, it is not the case with these Insignia bookshelf speakers. Clarity and soundstage are there in spades.

But this is mostly due to limited placement options inside a car. If you put a tweeter in the bottom of your door, what reaches your ears will sound worse than if you put a tweeter closer to your ear level (in the A pillar). So, if you took your component speakers and put the tweeter down below it'd probably sound as bad as the concentrics.

If it was possible to put the entire concentric speaker (tweeter + woofer) in the A pillar, maybe it would have sounded as good as component.

These speakers don't offer near the level of cost put into the tannoy drivers, but if they sound good, then they sound good. My coax pioneer car speakers are nothing spectacular, but doesn't mean the concept is bad. I'm curious why the coax design was chosen for these cheap speakers???

Some info on tannoy dual concentrics.

http://www.hi-fiworld.co.uk/hfw/olde...yspeakers.html

They sound great from almost any listening position it seems (one of them would make a perfect center channel IMHO). The crossover design is supposed to be simple given the way they are designed, which is a nice advantage.

side note: I had no idea there was a horn in my speakers when I got them for free: it took a while to figure out what was going on, because they sounded so good with only a single visible 12" driver - I was young and knew little at the time. I always liked them, then I found out from the internet that they actually are quite good.

i saw where someone asked about a matching center and couldn't find an answer,anyone have any ideas?

Try contacting Radiient at radieent.com. Someone there said they bought a few pieces out of a set, so maybe they will just sell the center for around a $100. I am guessing, but I may try that at some point. Apparently they will not confirm these are the same (insignia/radiient) but it looks fairly obvious they are.

Do what I and many others do....use the same speaker for the center as the fronts, especially given the price. Hard to match speakers much better then identical, and centers are often a compromise for space so they are wide and not tall (MTM), which means they are often inferior AND more expensive then the matching bookshelf. Given the somewhat unusual coax arrangement, these speakers should not be noticeably compromised when used on their side, unlike normal tweeter-woofer 2 way arrangements.

So, do you guys think I went overboard with these?

I don't care! They sound awesome! I'm not returning them! And the little Onkyo receiver I picked up, which I was worried whether it would have enough juice to power these speakers, is doing a great job, too!

Funny, until your post I didn't even realize that these Insignias were a concentric design.

ANOTHER reason for me to go pick up a pair!

Interesting point.

The component speakers I have, the tweeter is not in the A-pillar but in the stock spot near the top of the doors close to the side view mirrors. It must be expensive to install tweeters in the A-pillars in that case!

well, they ARE a little oversized next to your monitor but I'll bet they sound much better than any computer speakers!

I'd be sorely tempted to do the same except I don't know what to do with the single-RCA plug connection that my Logitech Z-2200 sats have...have never seen an adapter to turn +/- speaker wire into single RCA.

btw, I found this on coaxial ("concentric") vs. component speakers:

http://www.caraudiohelp.com/newslett...components.htm

So it looks like Pete might be right.

LOL, at least the color is matching!

edster don't you have a Sonic T-amp with you?

Hmm, more reading up at the Radiient website... So these speakers claim to be "time-aligned" and "phase coherent!" LOL I wonder if my crappy Infinity Kappa coaxials are TA/PC too?

http://www.radiient.com/s.nl;jsessio...=40&it=I&id=19

and are used in both their entry-level Elara and top-of-the-line Helios speaker systems:

http://www.radiient.com/s.nl;jsessio...=30&it=A&id=23

nope, I borrowed one for several weeks and never got around to hooking it up, silly me...

Would something like this work for you?
http://www.radioshack.com/product/in...tId=2102955&cp

Some more discussion here:
http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/5/6251.html