Assistance in speaker decision...

[Fuzzybear]

Hi All

I'm hoping you might be able to help me in my decision... I've recently purchased a new Clarion head unit (CX609) which will be mated to my trusty Pheonix Gold QX300.4 amp. My quandry however is to do with speaker choices... I enjoy music from the likes of Ray Lamontagne, to Lourde, from Kings of Leon to Led Zepplin. My local stereo store only has Hertz to listen to in store but in car, Audison... The Audison 6.5 components he has are £370 a pop and sound simply awesome. But my budget just doesn't stretch to that. Back in 2001 I heard Focal speakers that I thought sounded great too... in listening to as many examples as possible on youtube... (not overly useful as it seams) only a couple of videos appear to play musical music rather than the 'bass I love you' which for my listening tastes is not helpful at all...

Basically I've narrowed my choices down to three options given my upper budget of £180 for the front set...

Hertz ESK165L.5 at £169.00

Focal PS165 at £129.00

JBL MS-62C at £149.00

So my questions I'm hoping you might be able to help me answer are:

1 - from what I read the Hertz speaker will go to lower bass frequencies... but given my listening choices above, is that really relevant?

2 - as no one near me in Cambridge, UK appears to have focals or JBL's that I can listen to.. is there anyone on this forum who could provide some guidance on the musicality of these options compared with the hertz?

3 - rather than stumping our more for the Hertz, would it be a wiser option to pay less for the speakers and more on the sound deadening/installation?

I'm particularly interested in musicality of the speakers rather than bass and was blown away with the Audison demo that was provided to me, but the instore demo of the ESK was too bass light whereas the instore demo of the HSK was richer in depth but the vocals were far more muddy in comparison which left me truly undecided and considering other options such as those above.

All help will be greatly appreciated.

regards

FB

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[calebkhill 10+ year member]

What's your budget man

 

[Fuzzybear]

I listed my budget in the post!

 

[calebkhill 10+ year member]

O I'm sorry.

So 6.5 in door, 1" tweet in dash?

 

[Fuzzybear]

Thanks for getting back to me. Yes 6 1/2 in door 1" tweeter in dash... I ended up buying yesterday the Focal's based on store recommendation, a store that sold all three options. They said for sound quality they'd suggest the Focals, then Hertz then JBLs. As the Focal's were the least expensive of the three I thought why not give it a go! And, even though I ordered from them at 3pm yesterday, they were delivered this morning around 10am... so a pretty decent turnaround I thought. Plus they gave for free the new JBL Procoustic's MS-2 which I thought was decent of them.

Question I have though is this... I notice that Hertz had a 3.5khz crossover point and Focal have a 4.5khz crossover point. What does this mean? Does it mean the tweeter in the Hertz can play lower frequencies and thus have more depth than the focal tweeter??

 

[bbeljefe]

It really doesn't matter which speakers you put in your doors, the most important thing is that they're properly deadened.

As for the crossover point, it could be that the Focal mids have higher frequency response or if could mean that the Hertz tweets have lower. But regardless, each company chose the crossover point they chose because that's the best point for that specific set of drivers.

 

[bbeljefe]

It really doesn't matter which speakers you put in your doors, the most important thing is that they're properly deadened.

As for the crossover point, it could be that the Focal mids have higher frequency response or if could mean that the Hertz tweets have lower. But regardless, each company chose the crossover point they chose because that's the best point for that specific set of drivers.