I would always recommend listening to the sound tests through headphones. If you listen through your own systems speakers, you will hear reflections points from my room and your room, potentially causing an inaccurate interpretation of the test.
Ah those catalogues where you could buy something for £3.23 per week for the next 20 years and pay double the original item's price! Still, they did have a significant section on ladies lingerie which were very much appreciated by us teenaged boys at the time 😉
A lot of brands have entry-level equipment. I would assume that these were made for people who just wanted some music in their lives. Pioneer definitely made better speakers than this, I think you just got ahold of a pair of their budget speakers.
nah hmm maybe the hpm 100 but else nah the thing is that you should very rarely buy speakers from a company that is not specialised in making speakers. most middle of the road stereo manufactors back then did have an speaker offering to go with the set you was looking at buying and ordinary people just thought ahh it is made for the system so it must be better than other options and it seemed a good thing to have a complete set from the same maker. but most of it was utter faeces and sounded thereafter. sad but the customers wanted these , im in a lack of words i can utter in public. so please do not fall into this trap however cool i would look with pioneer speakers to your pioneer reciever - or at least be very sceptical.
yes , i have pioneer speakers that are considered, some of the best ever made like the twin 2401 from Pioneer exclusive series, the same engenier who left JBL to work for Pioneer and creating the so good HPM-150 that i have four. And restored drivers, if quality is the goal , what about the late 80´s to early 90´s towers, they sound amazing good, the prologue ones, some at the time said with the same money we can buy much better from other brands , and what all had ibn mynd were the now chinese join adventure in the land of Democratic Replublic of China, the speakers were the Concerto , and one if fan of KEF would ask for the KEF Concerto and the fans of Celestion(a great brand in the past as KEF) but it was like ,to resume inside where they keep the material available in the store they had stickers , if kef it is ,PAH!!! Here´s the KEF concerto or if wanting the new Celestion , PAH!!!Celestion sticker ,it is and all were happy discussing which was the best, but all in all said which seemed the more valuable, well Celestion had a larger sticker so a litle more expensier for the same price, but the proplogue towers were without a doubt better built and real wood with amazing sound, and the diference in price well if it was today would be 30 to 50€ depending on the store you had bought them all around a litle more than 1.000€ at the time but in 1998 they had still prologue towers to sell and the concerto that were good ( even made like if it were disposable dipers, were already getting wrotten due to countries with more humidity ,compressed wood panels built and the grills , what about the grills in the prologue, i found this has i have a friend that was sonambulo(sleepwaliking), he walked sleeping, and he pissed directelly into the tower´s grills but next day ,he couldn´t believe what he had done, and runned to the bathroom with the grills ,where he felt relaxed as the grills not even with high pressure water could drop a single drop of water on the otherside so, the haute-parleurs were unpissed , the grills that looked and today still look amazing nice and done with the best materials, also the speakers ,even today they release much better sound than any chinese KEF or Celestion, no wonder Marshal stoped using celestion speakers on their amplifiers, as it were the best for sound like in guitars ,electric six string ones, where are the concerto ,of so good they were they fall apart still in the late 90´s, i choose neither ,went for the Cerwin-vega AT-100, Mission Argonaut MK II still in the 80´s or 89, wharfedale Diamond, who are now also in china ,i only wish of so good they were already in the 2000´s as monitors and speakers for indoors concerts made the instruments sound clean and perfect like they are supposed to, only hope that isn´t one more brand destroyd as we are losing all the still good american and european brands by the day, as klipsch ,hope they aren´t manufactured in China, the land of democracy, well at least they stoped murdering litle girls or babies with less than 1 to 4 years old left to die ´till they stop crying of not having movement as they are atatched to litle chairs with strong ropes , as without food or even water they will pass out and die, the chinese aproach to excessive population allthough they kill them by the thousands a year, still 1/3 of human earthlings, sorry for the excessive truth, i was told to never lie
for sure they´ll erase this, like when i refer to my adiction to heroin and cocaine ´till i was 50, all other drugs were taken only in weekends or even holidays or music festivals with hundreds camping, normally with more girls than boys as at the time it happened, girls that grew up in my home as i have a sister with a litle diference in years so never felt ok to touch any of tem as i saw them growing up and when young i would feel irritaded as i left my bedroom, a group of seven or eight girls in their first 15 years of life almost not letting me arrive to the toylet, but later some become the young more beautifull women in my town and when they put a hoffman stamp in my mouth, i wouldn´t spit it out but took it with pleasure and only remenber being laughing for more than 10 hours with them 25 year old girls while i was already in my early 30´s, this in a summer festival whle camping to which when they saw me they all put their just released iglos next to my canadian tent, and they say the 80´s were bad? well on tv it looks like it , i don´t even recall listening to the horrible music they play on MTV80´s or Now That´s What I Call, 80´s, when there were more sucessfull alternative bands than mainstream, allthough they don´t play any, well maybe pretty in pink, original version not the recorded to that silly movie about teenagers on mars as on earth it wasn´t like that, believe me, all of this earlier in time ,to the sound of real good music playing in my cs speakers as big as they could be with Yamaha horizontal STUDIO monitors with white woofer , in my Pioneer SX-1050 with a CT-F1000 cassette deck, both Pioneer , a SL-1310 technics turntable and later a cd player from Pioneer ,the PD-7300, the hallways were filled with 12 year old girls dancing to the sound of my excessive loud system as my parents weren´t home, while outside were 45 degrees celsius, the airconditioned at the time was so big that filled my T shaped living room in the farest wall of the ---- of the T part, ancient airconditioned but already in mid 80´s or late 70´s, well i think my ezitation is explained in the first setencies, and this girls were poor as in the beach they had nothing to wear after buying LSD drops or a jar, the stamps were more easy to carry on those litle round boxes for ...what substitute seeing glasses as i can´t recall the word for those litle solution emerged contact lenses(i remenbered), i´m not that Senil, or whatever they call to old and odd people today
The CS-444 speakers are really bad, but the lack of quality should not be proven by expressing prejudices. There are plenty of excellent drivers that have paper cones, and more than a few are built into legendary speakers. Of the many excellent older loudspeakers, I will only mention Acoustic Research, and as proof that a paper cone can sound great, I will mention Scan Speak drivers that still use paper today. A bad speaker is the result of poor design, not the use of paper, which when properly applied results in a very fast response without coloration. Listening to your presentation, one would think that most Scan Speak woofers and many midranges are terrible because their cones are made of paper. That couldn't be further from the truth.
Buy your sound system from a good audio equipment company (marantz, pioneer, sansui, kenwood, etc ) but buy your speaker from a speaker company (KEF, Tannoy, B&W, JBL, etc) the only exception is the Technics sb 7000/8000/9000 and sb10000 which are very good speakers. If you want pioneer, you should buy HPM-100/150 They're also excellent speaker. Obviously these are more expensive. Keep in mind that the speakers are the most important part of your sound system. A cheap stereo will sound decent with very good speakers, but an expensive stereo will sound bad with bad speakers.
I never rated Pioneers stuff when I was younger as I always looked at them as over priced budget audio (mass produced), when you looked further up their line the price jumps were significant and that's the stuff we would aspire to get our hands on as youngens, the prices of some of their top tier gear from the old days can now sell for an astonishing amount of money, which keeps some of it to this day still out of reach for most of us 😞, The advances in technology and design have come a long way since the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's, if we never had computers aided technology we would probably still be listening to these old Pio's.
Wharfedale can produce some pretty impressive sound from small bookshelf speakers. Each speaker has its own character - I noticed a lot of detail from the Pioneers, although maybe a bit bright. You might find the rubber on the bass speaker is quite old and doesn't have the rigidity it used to have.
My fisrt system a Pioneer stack in a cabinet. It was just over half black, quarter silver from top to bottom.. The speakers sounded really good, plent of good quality deep bass, with good detail.
I was using an Echo Dot with its tiny 1.6" woofer and the difference was apparent as soon as the first bass note hit, or didn't hit in the case of the Pioneers (08:16). How can they stick a graph on the speaker showing it to be 20dB down at 50Hz and then claim a frequency response from 45Hz? That said, the Wharfedale's sounded bass heavy. If your recording sounds bass heavy on an Echo Dot, I'm pretty sure there's some excessive bloat somewhere. Are they too close to the rear walls?
Pretty much any speakers that were part of a rack system are going to be pretty trashy. They had to sell the whole rack system at a low enough price point to attract buyers, and so they cut corners wherever they could. Fisher was probably the worst
All speaker/room configurations need equalization. I always equalize based upon the room characteristics. While, I agree the cs444s are crap, they can be made to sound a lot better.
have you looked at the crossover frequencies? the "midrange" doesn't take over from the woofer until 3KHz, so it's more like a tweeter, and the "tweeter" doesn't take over from the "midrange" until 12KHz, so it's more like a super tweeter (or at least crossed over like one).
Maybe it's the room they were playing in, but I didn't like the sound of either speaker. The Pioneer sounded boxy; the other one had a big resonant bump in the bass, maybe centered somewhere between 70 and 100 hZ. Hard to do sound things over the internet. But thanks for the effort.
My very first music system was an ITT KA 1026 which had the big single driver speakers, and it sounded fantastic to me . Lasted well into my twenty's .
A speakers frequency response means zilch unless it has a bass half loudness rating. A speaker should have a +/-3dB notation. A speaker rated at say, 45Hz to 20kHz doesn't tell you much about how deep the bass goes nor how clean the highs are. It should read 45Hz to 20kHz +/-3dB's. Another thing I've learned is to buy speakers from "Speaker Only" companies. Pioneer, Kenwood, Technics, Marantz, Sansui, etc. tend to build inferior speakers though their other components can be first class. My recommendations for boss speaker companies (at least in the good ol' US of A) are; Advent, EPI, Genesis, Infinity, Ohm, Polk, C/V, Electro Voice or ADS, to name a few. Across the pond, KEF, Warfdale, Celestion/Ditton or Heco are swell choices. Regardless the quality of your other hifi equipment, it all comes out in the speakers so buy accurate models and live happily ever after.
Maybe I'm wrong, but the sound of B, eg. the Pioneers, is much more open and refined than A, the Wharfedales, which are restricted at least to my ears.
Great soundtrack (can you tell us the name?) I really enjoyed this test. Speaker B lacked low end presence, but did render some instruments clearer. Bit harsh in the high end. 😊
The sound test was pretty instructive, both A and B were hurting my ears, so, thanks, but no, thanks. By the way, I also have a story to share - I've finally found my all time favorite bookshelf speakers (brand new German Heco Aurora 200) on black friday sale for 185 euros instead of the original 400 (54 percent discount), so I couldn't resist the temptation and went for it. They were delivered today.....life can be so beautiful...
@@UTILITARIANTVUK Exactly. Huge sound-stage. They are not high-end speakers, but they are very forgiving and universal, meaning, they make terrible recordings sound bearable, and good recordings sound brilliant...
Well, on my 3cm laptop speakers and by the way this video was recorded, the CS-444s sounded better to me, but I am not doubting for one minute that in person, hearing the speakers live would be a very different listening experience.
The big old speakers will have no Theile Small calculations to determine the port size and length. So the port in them will be totally worthless. It is not just a hole in a box. It is a calculable part of the design. So the big box is useless as that needs to be calculated too and won't have been. The mid and treble is going to be worthless. The crossover will be no more than 2 capacitors and will probably not have a choke for the bass driver cut off so the bass driver will only have its upper registers limited by the lack of decoupling rings on the cone. The bass driver will be no more than 20 watts and will run out of excursion of the cone. I have been working on speakers for over 50 years and have seen lots of these. The white van man speakers are a typical example. It makes no difference what the box is made of if it is damped and the correct size for the bass driver so chip or MDF makes a difference only if you get the box size wrong.
Chipboard is the better material for speakers. But we need minimum 3/4inch thick or thicker chipboard for the "different layer effect" the chipboard has in it. But then the difference is truly hearable....
It's a nice idea to think 'well but of the speakers' the system I had then would have been better. It's fun to stick these old budget separates in to modern higher end speakers but in the end the result is the speakers just show up the lack of finesse budget stuff usually had, all very work a like but no soul as you could say.
Actually... I seem to somewhat like the mid forward cs-444's over the 12.2's. You can tell they are more "room-filling" even over youtube. Maybe fun for a garage or to fiddle around with for a bit (brace them, extra dampening material, replace the capacitors etc.) if you find them on the (very) cheap.
These Pioneer speakers were super entry-level. They were by no means a serious shot at speaker manufacturing. Pioneer built some very serious speakers, and still to this day, manufacture very high-end speakers. The comparison is very lop sided. Those Pioneer's sold for around $140 pair in Australia.
Those Pioneer "rack" speakers were made to fit a certain price point, and it shows. I'll bet that if you open it up, there's not much to the x-over either. And that vent is way too small, especially for a speaker that the manufacturer says goes down to 45 Hz (LOL). BTW, notice that the frequency response graph on the baffle shows a response that starts rolling off below 100 Hz and is a good 20+dB down by 40 Hz?
Thank you for the video. K,s catalogue 😀. I remember looking at pictures of HiFi and dreaming. In the 80,s I had a pair of ,Realistic Mach 2. They were a blast. I also loved Musical Fidelity MC1's
Haven't seen a paper tweeter in decades. Unfortunately my first stereo in the late 60's had one , paper tweeters aren't up to much or at least I've never heard any that were, but the rest of the system was less than up to much anyway. Common problem for teens was crap hi-fi for the usual. Though today I think you can buy a budget system that sounds really good compared to back in my days. On the other hand I think midrange or decent gear, especially speakers, are more expensive then inflation would account for.
i have them but with the top size ,only had to put some yamaha STUDIO ,monitors ,horizontal ones for my SX-1050, Pioneer receiver(70´s 0ne) in 1984 with a PLC-590 from the 20 series and a nakamichi 700ZXL, it had excelent sound still doing it with some CS that i bought new for next to nothing that were 220watts DIN(93 model)with a A-91D i´m still using but now i have it with some CDM 7 from B&W and some JBL AS50, for my common living room to watch also movies or concerts with a GR-777 equalizer, it sounds amazing , as i don´t have amplifiers with subwoofer output or VSX receivers also Pioneer, they sound so bad
Though I completely understand that the 80's was full of sh*t speakers... Sansui, Pioneer, Fisher, Marantz, Yamaha were all guilty of this - thin cabinets, full range drivers with only a filter cap if that and not a true crossover... but that was the period of cheap hifi and at the time, they were ok but definitely a step back from their 70's siblings. I've often wondered if those drivers went into another enclosure, what would be their performance. However, it's not quite a fair comparison to a newer speaker because the technology has evolved so much. You're right in that if you can pick them up cheap, you can make a night speaker wall (decorative) because they do look nice with the covers off.
I had my friends Spektor 2's on loan for a couple of weeks, fantastic - just loved them. My only gripe, from memory, was that the covers were on pegs rather than magnetic. At the current Amazon price they are a real bargain.
Ok, you've just compared cheap apples to expensive oranges. If you switch to cars, the next video could be comparing a 1974 Lada to a modern Honda Accord.
Here's an idea-change the speaker drivers with new better quality ones,change the ports with new better quality one,brace the cabinet and stuff it with some damping material,and i think you will transform these into completely new,much better sounding speakers and preserve the retro looking at the same time.
As someone who has designed speakers, and used to have a side business of upgrading speakers, I can honestly say, the vast majority of speakers from the 70's and early 80's, were pretty bad. While I have not opened a pair of these specific speakers, I can be almost certain, that the enclosures have almost no bracing, the crossovers are most likely only comprised of cheap electrolytic caps just to protect the mid and tweeter, there is a single iron core inductor on the woofer, and those cheap paper cone drivers suck. Even many highly sought after speakers from the 70's and 80's were designed and executed very poorly. Don't even get me started on the Pioneer HPM series. People are paying premiums for those, and they are crap. I love vintage audio, quite a bit can hold to some pretty high end modern gear. But not speakers. We have learned so much more about speaker design, speaker measurement, enclosure design, driver materials, the importance of good crossover components, etc.
The Pioneers have very colored mids and weak bass. The Warfedale has a boomy bass and no mids. Hights are okay at both boxes. What is better: Colored mids or no mids? What ist better: A fat bass or a tight one? Overall the Warfedale sounds better. The colored mids of the Pioneer can't be overheared or compensated by the brain IQ.
Never ever get speakers from a stack system from 70s or 80s or even 90s. They were always the weakest point in those systems. I do remember Kays Catalogue. We had Freemans Catalogue in our house. Sometimes they had some alright hifi in them but not often.
No matter what those dude says. Music reproduction is in the ears of the beholder.. Most of Pioneer's stuff is pretty well liked by millions.. Everybody has different levels of hearing ability.. One person's junk is another's golden challis.. So you're opinion mostly matters to your own tastes. In a way you might as well be talking to yourself looking in a mirror.. The speakers in general may be loved by another who does not hear music reproduction in exactly the same way you do.. So reviews like this on speakers and amplifiers and such are kind of redundant and to me a waste of time to look at..
If I owned those cheaper speakers and if the cabinets and grill's were still in good shape, I'd replace the woofers, mid-range and treeter speakers in each cabinet with higher quality drivers and put a good cross-over network inside of each of them.
Yeah, those early / mid 80's pioneer speakers were absolutely awful. Total junk. The amplifiers were a different story though. Sources, tape deck and tt were fine by the standards of the day. But yeah, the speakers, a tea chest would have better wood.
I would always recommend listening to the sound tests through headphones. If you listen through your own systems speakers, you will hear reflections points from my room and your room, potentially causing an inaccurate interpretation of the test.
Headphones will only provide hearing on your room's refelctions points? Interesting. I never thought of it❤
Ah those catalogues where you could buy something for £3.23 per week for the next 20 years and pay double the original item's price! Still, they did have a significant section on ladies lingerie which were very much appreciated by us teenaged boys at the time 😉
What we had to do before the internet! 😄
Lmao
Indeed!
A lot of brands have entry-level equipment. I would assume that these were made for people who just wanted some music in their lives. Pioneer definitely made better speakers than this, I think you just got ahold of a pair of their budget speakers.
nah hmm maybe the hpm 100 but else nah the thing is that you should very rarely buy speakers from a company that is not specialised in making speakers. most middle of the road stereo manufactors back then did have an speaker offering to go with the set you was looking at buying and ordinary people just thought ahh it is made for the system so it must be better than other options and it seemed a good thing to have a complete set from the same maker. but most of it was utter faeces and sounded thereafter. sad but the customers wanted these , im in a lack of words i can utter in public. so please do not fall into this trap however cool i would look with pioneer speakers to your pioneer reciever - or at least be very sceptical.
yes , i have pioneer speakers that are considered, some of the best ever made like the twin 2401 from Pioneer exclusive series, the same engenier who left JBL to work for Pioneer and creating the so good HPM-150 that i have four. And restored drivers, if quality is the goal , what about the late 80´s to early 90´s towers, they sound amazing good, the prologue ones, some at the time said with the same money we can buy much better from other brands , and what all had ibn mynd were the now chinese join adventure in the land of Democratic Replublic of China, the speakers were the Concerto , and one if fan of KEF would ask for the KEF Concerto and the fans of Celestion(a great brand in the past as KEF) but it was like ,to resume inside where they keep the material available in the store they had stickers , if kef it is ,PAH!!! Here´s the KEF concerto or if wanting the new Celestion , PAH!!!Celestion sticker ,it is and all were happy discussing which was the best, but all in all said which seemed the more valuable, well Celestion had a larger sticker so a litle more expensier for the same price, but the proplogue towers were without a doubt better built and real wood with amazing sound, and the diference in price well if it was today would be 30 to 50€ depending on the store you had bought them all around a litle more than 1.000€ at the time but in 1998 they had still prologue towers to sell and the concerto that were good ( even made like if it were disposable dipers, were already getting wrotten due to countries with more humidity ,compressed wood panels built and the grills , what about the grills in the prologue, i found this has i have a friend that was sonambulo(sleepwaliking), he walked sleeping, and he pissed directelly into the tower´s grills but next day ,he couldn´t believe what he had done, and runned to the bathroom with the grills ,where he felt relaxed as the grills not even with high pressure water could drop a single drop of water on the otherside so, the haute-parleurs were unpissed , the grills that looked and today still look amazing nice and done with the best materials, also the speakers ,even today they release much better sound than any chinese KEF or Celestion, no wonder Marshal stoped using celestion speakers on their amplifiers, as it were the best for sound like in guitars ,electric six string ones, where are the concerto ,of so good they were they fall apart still in the late 90´s, i choose neither ,went for the Cerwin-vega AT-100, Mission Argonaut MK II still in the 80´s or 89, wharfedale Diamond, who are now also in china ,i only wish of so good they were already in the 2000´s as monitors and speakers for indoors concerts made the instruments sound clean and perfect like they are supposed to, only hope that isn´t one more brand destroyd as we are losing all the still good american and european brands by the day, as klipsch ,hope they aren´t manufactured in China, the land of democracy, well at least they stoped murdering litle girls or babies with less than 1 to 4 years old left to die ´till they stop crying of not having movement as they are atatched to litle chairs with strong ropes , as without food or even water they will pass out and die, the chinese aproach to excessive population allthough they kill them by the thousands a year, still 1/3 of human earthlings, sorry for the excessive truth, i was told to never lie
for sure they´ll erase this, like when i refer to my adiction to heroin and cocaine ´till i was 50, all other drugs were taken only in weekends or even holidays or music festivals with hundreds camping, normally with more girls than boys as at the time it happened, girls that grew up in my home as i have a sister with a litle diference in years so never felt ok to touch any of tem as i saw them growing up and when young i would feel irritaded as i left my bedroom, a group of seven or eight girls in their first 15 years of life almost not letting me arrive to the toylet, but later some become the young more beautifull women in my town and when they put a hoffman stamp in my mouth, i wouldn´t spit it out but took it with pleasure and only remenber being laughing for more than 10 hours with them 25 year old girls while i was already in my early 30´s, this in a summer festival whle camping to which when they saw me they all put their just released iglos next to my canadian tent, and they say the 80´s were bad? well on tv it looks like it , i don´t even recall listening to the horrible music they play on MTV80´s or Now That´s What I Call, 80´s, when there were more sucessfull alternative bands than mainstream, allthough they don´t play any, well maybe pretty in pink, original version not the recorded to that silly movie about teenagers on mars as on earth it wasn´t like that, believe me, all of this earlier in time ,to the sound of real good music playing in my cs speakers as big as they could be with Yamaha horizontal STUDIO monitors with white woofer , in my Pioneer SX-1050 with a CT-F1000 cassette deck, both Pioneer , a SL-1310 technics turntable and later a cd player from Pioneer ,the PD-7300, the hallways were filled with 12 year old girls dancing to the sound of my excessive loud system as my parents weren´t home, while outside were 45 degrees celsius, the airconditioned at the time was so big that filled my T shaped living room in the farest wall of the ---- of the T part, ancient airconditioned but already in mid 80´s or late 70´s, well i think my ezitation is explained in the first setencies, and this girls were poor as in the beach they had nothing to wear after buying LSD drops or a jar, the stamps were more easy to carry on those litle round boxes for ...what substitute seeing glasses as i can´t recall the word for those litle solution emerged contact lenses(i remenbered), i´m not that Senil, or whatever they call to old and odd people today
The CS-444 speakers are really bad, but the lack of quality should not be proven by expressing prejudices. There are plenty of excellent drivers that have paper cones, and more than a few are built into legendary speakers. Of the many excellent older loudspeakers, I will only mention Acoustic Research, and as proof that a paper cone can sound great, I will mention Scan Speak drivers that still use paper today. A bad speaker is the result of poor design, not the use of paper, which when properly applied results in a very fast response without coloration. Listening to your presentation, one would think that most Scan Speak woofers and many midranges are terrible because their cones are made of paper. That couldn't be further from the truth.
12.2's are a little boomy
Buy your sound system from a good audio equipment company (marantz, pioneer, sansui, kenwood, etc ) but buy your speaker from a speaker company (KEF, Tannoy, B&W, JBL, etc) the only exception is the Technics sb 7000/8000/9000 and sb10000 which are very good speakers. If you want pioneer, you should buy HPM-100/150 They're also excellent speaker. Obviously these are more expensive. Keep in mind that the speakers are the most important part of your sound system. A cheap stereo will sound decent with very good speakers, but an expensive stereo will sound bad with bad speakers.
I never rated Pioneers stuff when I was younger as I always looked at them as over priced budget audio (mass produced), when you looked further up their line the price jumps were significant and that's the stuff we would aspire to get our hands on as youngens, the prices of some of their top tier gear from the old days can now sell for an astonishing amount of money, which keeps some of it to this day still out of reach for most of us 😞,
The advances in technology and design have come a long way since the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's, if we never had computers aided technology we would probably still be listening to these old Pio's.
Wharfedale can produce some pretty impressive sound from small bookshelf speakers. Each speaker has its own character - I noticed a lot of detail from the Pioneers, although maybe a bit bright. You might find the rubber on the bass speaker is quite old and doesn't have the rigidity it used to have.
That 8-inch woofer on the left was actually designed to be mounted on the back of the baffle.
My fisrt system a Pioneer stack in a cabinet. It was just over half black, quarter silver from top to bottom.. The speakers sounded really good, plent of good quality deep bass, with good detail.
I was using an Echo Dot with its tiny 1.6" woofer and the difference was apparent as soon as the first bass note hit, or didn't hit in the case of the Pioneers (08:16).
How can they stick a graph on the speaker showing it to be 20dB down at 50Hz and then claim a frequency response from 45Hz?
That said, the Wharfedale's sounded bass heavy. If your recording sounds bass heavy on an Echo Dot, I'm pretty sure there's some excessive bloat somewhere. Are they too close to the rear walls?
Pretty much any speakers that were part of a rack system are going to be pretty trashy. They had to sell the whole rack system at a low enough price point to attract buyers, and so they cut corners wherever they could. Fisher was probably the worst
All speaker/room configurations need equalization. I always equalize based upon the room characteristics. While, I agree the cs444s are crap, they can be made to sound a lot better.
have you looked at the crossover frequencies? the "midrange" doesn't take over from the woofer until 3KHz, so it's more like a tweeter, and the "tweeter" doesn't take over from the "midrange" until 12KHz, so it's more like a super tweeter (or at least crossed over like one).
Maybe it's the room they were playing in, but I didn't like the sound of either speaker. The Pioneer sounded boxy; the other one had a big resonant bump in the bass, maybe centered somewhere between 70 and 100 hZ. Hard to do sound things over the internet. But thanks for the effort.
My very first music system was an ITT KA 1026 which had the big single driver speakers, and it sounded fantastic to me . Lasted well into my twenty's .
Lol, the dripping faucet at the end. Nice touch
In the US, we had Fingerhut catalogs.
There's an innuendo in there somewhere! 😄
CS444 may be an upgrade for a Sanyo system from a supermarket ;-) I did notice their own scale shows a steep drop below 100hz.
You can tell the Pioneer's are the B speakers, they have that boxy, hollow sound cheap speakers have.
A speakers frequency response means zilch unless it has a bass half loudness rating. A speaker should have a +/-3dB notation. A speaker rated at say, 45Hz to 20kHz doesn't tell you much about how deep the bass goes nor how clean the highs are. It should read 45Hz to 20kHz +/-3dB's. Another thing I've learned is to buy speakers from "Speaker Only" companies. Pioneer, Kenwood, Technics, Marantz, Sansui, etc. tend to build inferior speakers though their other components can be first class. My recommendations for boss speaker companies (at least in the good ol' US of A) are; Advent, EPI, Genesis, Infinity, Ohm, Polk, C/V, Electro Voice or ADS, to name a few. Across the pond, KEF, Warfdale, Celestion/Ditton or Heco are swell choices. Regardless the quality of your other hifi equipment, it all comes out in the speakers so buy accurate models and live happily ever after.
Any reason the hyper links provided sent me to many other videos with varying Pioneer models?
Check out the retro styled Speakers coming out of China
Maybe I'm wrong, but the sound of B, eg. the Pioneers, is much more open and refined than A, the Wharfedales, which are restricted at least to my ears.
2:04 Lucky boy! Boing......😂
Great soundtrack (can you tell us the name?) I really enjoyed this test. Speaker B lacked low end presence, but did render some instruments clearer. Bit harsh in the high end. 😊
th-cam.com/video/MyKL1raqeCc/w-d-xo.html
The sound test was pretty instructive, both A and B were hurting my ears, so, thanks, but no, thanks. By the way, I also have a story to share - I've finally found my all time favorite bookshelf speakers (brand new German Heco Aurora 200) on black friday sale for 185 euros instead of the original 400 (54 percent discount), so I couldn't resist the temptation and went for it. They were delivered today.....life can be so beautiful...
I've heard they sound a lot bigger than they look?
@@UTILITARIANTVUK Exactly. Huge sound-stage. They are not high-end speakers, but they are very forgiving and universal, meaning, they make terrible recordings sound bearable, and good recordings sound brilliant...
I am suprised they had insulation. A lot of thoese Fisher, Pioneer and Technicss rack systems did not have the insulation in side.
Well, on my 3cm laptop speakers and by the way this video was recorded, the CS-444s sounded better to me, but I am not doubting for one minute that in person, hearing the speakers live would be a very different listening experience.
The big old speakers will have no Theile Small calculations to determine the port size and length. So the port in them will be totally worthless. It is not just a hole in a box. It is a calculable part of the design. So the big box is useless as that needs to be calculated too and won't have been. The mid and treble is going to be worthless. The crossover will be no more than 2 capacitors and will probably not have a choke for the bass driver cut off so the bass driver will only have its upper registers limited by the lack of decoupling rings on the cone. The bass driver will be no more than 20 watts and will run out of excursion of the cone. I have been working on speakers for over 50 years and have seen lots of these. The white van man speakers are a typical example. It makes no difference what the box is made of if it is damped and the correct size for the bass driver so chip or MDF makes a difference only if you get the box size wrong.
Does Tom Evans make speakers??
I don't think so, all the parts still had their part numbers on! 😄
@UTILITARIANTVUK 😂😂😂😂
Chipboard is the better material for speakers. But we need minimum 3/4inch thick or thicker chipboard for the "different layer effect" the chipboard has in it. But then the difference is truly hearable....
It's a nice idea to think 'well but of the speakers' the system I had then would have been better. It's fun to stick these old budget separates in to modern higher end speakers but in the end the result is the speakers just show up the lack of finesse budget stuff usually had, all very work a like but no soul as you could say.
Actually... I seem to somewhat like the mid forward cs-444's over the 12.2's. You can tell they are more "room-filling" even over youtube. Maybe fun for a garage or to fiddle around with for a bit (brace them, extra dampening material, replace the capacitors etc.) if you find them on the (very) cheap.
I had a Bose 501 series 4 ,speakers and I think they had one of the best paper twitters and they had two on each speaker
The 501s were cool, I also liked the 301 bookshelves - surprisingly nice sounding speakers
There are various (Low Frequency) sound videos on TH-cam - to test (old) speakers with.
These Pioneer speakers were super entry-level. They were by no means a serious shot at speaker manufacturing. Pioneer built some very serious speakers, and still to this day, manufacture very high-end speakers. The comparison is very lop sided. Those Pioneer's sold for around $140 pair in Australia.
I think it's a fair comparison. When adjusted for inflation the pioneer speakers and the Wharfdale's are about the same price.
Strange to have some Volkano headphones as ads here.
Get a decent little system from richer sounds shop
You can see the sound quality by the looks.... But nice that you try them.
Those Pioneer "rack" speakers were made to fit a certain price point, and it shows. I'll bet that if you open it up, there's not much to the x-over either. And that vent is way too small, especially for a speaker that the manufacturer says goes down to 45 Hz (LOL). BTW, notice that the frequency response graph on the baffle shows a response that starts rolling off below 100 Hz and is a good 20+dB down by 40 Hz?
Thank you for the video. K,s catalogue 😀. I remember looking at pictures of HiFi and dreaming. In the 80,s I had a pair of ,Realistic Mach 2. They were a blast. I also loved Musical Fidelity MC1's
MDF and chipbord are the same thing
um nope! 😄
@@UTILITARIANTVUK LMAO
I've still got my Bose 901's from the 80's,
Awsome then and still good now but I had to rebuild the foam cone surrounds ⚠️
You mentioned it...that's a lot of foam surrounds to replace!
@@TexTom1981 and a lot "broken" speakers to choose from in the classifieds.
@@TexTom1981 18 of the buggers 😊
7:00 Did I just hear a sound-track clip from Captain Scarlet?
👍
This sound test even made Mojo2 and Arya Organics sound sad!😢
Haven't seen a paper tweeter in decades. Unfortunately my first stereo in the late 60's had one , paper tweeters aren't up to much or at least I've never heard any that were, but the rest of the system was less than up to much anyway. Common problem for teens was crap hi-fi for the usual. Though today I think you can buy a budget system that sounds really good compared to back in my days. On the other hand I think midrange or decent gear, especially speakers, are more expensive then inflation would account for.
i have them but with the top size ,only had to put some yamaha STUDIO ,monitors ,horizontal ones for my SX-1050, Pioneer receiver(70´s 0ne) in 1984 with a PLC-590 from the 20 series and a nakamichi 700ZXL, it had excelent sound still doing it with some CS that i bought new for next to nothing that were 220watts DIN(93 model)with a A-91D i´m still using but now i have it with some CDM 7 from B&W and some JBL AS50, for my common living room to watch also movies or concerts with a GR-777 equalizer, it sounds amazing , as i don´t have amplifiers with subwoofer output or VSX receivers also Pioneer, they sound so bad
Though I completely understand that the 80's was full of sh*t speakers... Sansui, Pioneer, Fisher, Marantz, Yamaha were all guilty of this - thin cabinets, full range drivers with only a filter cap if that and not a true crossover... but that was the period of cheap hifi and at the time, they were ok but definitely a step back from their 70's siblings. I've often wondered if those drivers went into another enclosure, what would be their performance. However, it's not quite a fair comparison to a newer speaker because the technology has evolved so much. You're right in that if you can pick them up cheap, you can make a night speaker wall (decorative) because they do look nice with the covers off.
Huge difference in quality.....Almost as big as the chasm between Rangers and Celtic! 😅...'Mon the hoops! 🍀
Was there any 80s speakers good 😂
The A set , smoked the B
Try a psb gold.... or goldi.... or cerwin vega D9 depending on your wants & needs.... i mostly use my studio lab sl-550.... legendary... 😂
Try Dali Spektor 2's , compare against the 12.2's. £100 less on Amazon in UK right now, imho, as good as.
I had my friends Spektor 2's on loan for a couple of weeks, fantastic - just loved them. My only gripe, from memory, was that the covers were on pegs rather than magnetic. At the current Amazon price they are a real bargain.
I much prefer my 12.1s to my spector 2s.
Yipee, my hearing is not that bad then. First time ive ever been able discern a real
l sound difference
according to the diagram 40hz is 20db down. Not existing...
A time ago I had Pioneer CS 980 speakers. Were quite ok.
iPhone in an empty Baked Bean can doesn’t sound too bad….what?
least you played both
Your kitchen tap is dripping.
Thanks for letting me know, I thought my nose was running! 😄
@UTILITARIANTVUK
No bother 👍
Ok, you've just compared cheap apples to expensive oranges. If you switch to cars, the next video could be comparing a 1974 Lada to a modern Honda Accord.
The 1974 Lada Vs a Honda Accord is a great idea for a video! 😄
nice, it´s subscribed
The low end.
Here's an idea-change the speaker drivers with new better quality ones,change the ports with new better quality one,brace the cabinet and stuff it with some damping material,and i think you will transform these into completely new,much better sounding speakers and preserve the retro looking at the same time.
And... not worth the investment of time and money.
As someone who has designed speakers, and used to have a side business of upgrading speakers, I can honestly say, the vast majority of speakers from the 70's and early 80's, were pretty bad.
While I have not opened a pair of these specific speakers, I can be almost certain, that the enclosures have almost no bracing, the crossovers are most likely only comprised of cheap electrolytic caps just to protect the mid and tweeter, there is a single iron core inductor on the woofer, and those cheap paper cone drivers suck.
Even many highly sought after speakers from the 70's and 80's were designed and executed very poorly. Don't even get me started on the Pioneer HPM series. People are paying premiums for those, and they are crap.
I love vintage audio, quite a bit can hold to some pretty high end modern gear. But not speakers.
We have learned so much more about speaker design, speaker measurement, enclosure design, driver materials, the importance of good crossover components, etc.
Thx.
The Pioneers have very colored mids and weak bass. The Warfedale has a boomy bass and no mids. Hights are okay at both boxes. What is better: Colored mids or no mids? What ist better: A fat bass or a tight one?
Overall the Warfedale sounds better. The colored mids of the Pioneer can't be overheared or compensated by the brain IQ.
45Hz at -16dB lol
Nothing to do with music...call my attention your kitchen stove. Can you do a mention of it on the next one? Saludos from Puerto Rico.
Review Radiotechnica and you'll think these Pioneers are high-end lol
See, you had the 3 way speakers the wrong way around and that is why they sounded so bad. lol
Never ever get speakers from a stack system from 70s or 80s or even 90s. They were always the weakest point in those systems.
I do remember Kays Catalogue. We had Freemans Catalogue in our house. Sometimes they had some alright hifi in them but not often.
"A pile of poop" 😂
Para mi gusto mejor el A
No matter what those dude says. Music reproduction is in the ears of the beholder.. Most of Pioneer's stuff is pretty well liked by millions.. Everybody has different levels of hearing ability.. One person's junk is another's golden challis.. So you're opinion mostly matters to your own tastes. In a way you might as well be talking to yourself looking in a mirror.. The speakers in general may be loved by another who does not hear music reproduction in exactly the same way you do.. So reviews like this on speakers and amplifiers and such are kind of redundant and to me a waste of time to look at..
Sound nasal AF
If I owned those cheaper speakers and if the cabinets and grill's were still in good shape, I'd replace the woofers, mid-range and treeter speakers in each cabinet with higher quality drivers and put a good cross-over network inside of each of them.
Rubbish faulty review.
The Wharfedale 12s definitely sounds better. However, it may be that the Pioneers' technology was not as advanced back then.
B ) cs-444 best sound
You gotta love these clueless audiophiles playing stuff and expecting to demonstrate sound quality on a TH-cam video.
th-cam.com/video/ipLo6_8Jhy0/w-d-xo.html
Yeah, those early / mid 80's pioneer speakers were absolutely awful. Total junk. The amplifiers were a different story though. Sources, tape deck and tt were fine by the standards of the day. But yeah, the speakers, a tea chest would have better wood.
To be fair, the Wharfedales could do with some of the Pioneers top end.
A sounds better to me
Mejores bajos los warfedale, mejor agudos los pioneer, no son tan basura como dices!!!
In person the treble sounds like nails on a chalk board,
The only good speakers Pioneer made are the HPM series. All the CS speakers are garbage!
Dozed off 3 times ..
It happens as you get older, bless.