Polk db6501 or Cadence CWM6KIT

[barbaroja 10+ year member]

HERTZ Hi Energy HSK 165 6.5" 2Way CAR Component Speaker | eBay

They are cheaper in the classifieds sometimes.

 

[dontbeaprix 10+ year member]

Becarefull buying those , tons of fakes going around especially from overseas. There are entire threads about this on diyma. Also electromedia(hertz,aaudison) just shut down most sellers on ebay. There are no authorized sellers of hertz on ebay period.

 

[barbaroja 10+ year member]

wow scary story, cav. woofersetc has them for 450! that price diff cannot be justified. have to be counterfeit. checked all the threads on the subject. some people state that they are older models, however, I do not think so.

 

[zako 10+ year member]

One speaker that everyone likes to rave about and compare (favorably) to more expensive Hertz, JL Audio, etc components is the relatively new Hybrid Audio Imagine. It's sold online for $250 or through dealers. I got myself a set because of two reasons: (1) easily bi-amiable with a single capacitor low pass on the tweeter, by design. (2) Woofer that's designed to play very high into mid-range, preventing the tweeter interfering with the vocal frequency range too much (at least in active setup), hopefully resulting in superior imaging. I didn't mention these because it seems the OP was more interested in buying speakers that cost at least 2x less. I am not giving a full review of these because I just started messing around with these speakers. Another reason is that they seem to take their time to break in. They just run in passive mode (only one side actually) until I get around to buy all the parts necessary for bi-amp setup. In the meanwhile I am just concerned with breaking them in without listening too critically. Initial observations are cautiously optimistic. In passive mode the tweeter does seem to play a little louder than I like. The mid-range is nice and clear, open and more realistic than I heard before. Highs are fairly crisp and clear, but there is too much of the very upper end. -3dB at 14KHz seems to help it. I also feel like the tweet interfers with imaging a little by overplaying the mids. The mids can take serious beating in the low end before any signs of bottoming out. However, midbass sensitivity is lower than I like. It does seem to be slowly improving over time. I have played them for 5-6 hours only. (Recommended break in is 20-50 hours). Clearly, IMO, these speakers need a little break in and to run active to bring the best out of them. If with break-in the mid-bass sensitivity of these puppies matches say my older Alpine Type-Rs, I'd say we have a winner, because all other aspects of this speaker stands a head and shoulders above.

I do want to try out the SPR-60C woofers at some point as well (I heard their tweeters are nothing special though). They seem like very nice mids. According to Alpine engineer they utilize split gap motor and shorting rings, not to mention the new phase plug, neo magnet, and the surround. The former two were previously mostly limited to relatively high end subwoofer designs. Looking at crossover parts, it looks like their -6dB point is at 6KHz, which is to my liking. The inductor is on the woofer, so it doesn't need to use any band-pass crossovers, when not available.

 

[barbaroja 10+ year member]

thanks for the input. did read some about those, people seems to be over excited about them. whats your call on sound compared to the morels? lets say tempo since is the same price range.

Hey orangecavi, have you heard them both?

I was checking morels website about the differences between tempos and maximos, and they seem fairly similar, the tempos taking some more watts. Anyway, I would give them 100WRMS if in pasive mode.

 

[zako 10+ year member]

Well, I have never heard the Morels but they're getting good reviews. They were on my radar when they were recently on sale at amazon, but I decided to buy HATs for the reasons I have mentioned above. So far I like the tonality and frequency response of the speaker I have installed. The midrange and highs are more natural and clear than what I have hard before, but those clearly were not in the same league with HATs. The tweeter seems to get more tame with every day, or may be my ears are just slowly getting used to their sound. In any case, I think now they could sound fine even running in passive component mode.

 

[zako 10+ year member]

Some reviews and measurements:

Morel Maximo 6.5 Comps $85.32 shipped - Page 5 - DIYMA.com - Scientific Car Audio - Truth in Sound Quality

http://www.mobileelectronics.com.au/reviews/65_two_way_components_review_under_300/

http://www.avtozvuk.com/az/2011/04/040-morel.htm

 

[barbaroja 10+ year member]

thanks, zako. you have me really thinking now. morels seem good. HAT just seem better.

If that price point ($250) is the sweet spot for quality vs price (thats what bang for the buck is for me), it may weel be a choice between that or going active with individual drivers, wich as I stated before, I am not scared and also willing to spend the time tuning the system.

 

[zako 10+ year member]

This is a lot of subjective judgement involved here, so I don't really know what to say, except that I personally can't regret my choice to buy HATs based on what I know so far. I don't think you can rank these speaker systems by their price and except this ranking to be consistent with your subjective ranking. Besides, I suspect HATs also cost more because the HAT company has tighter control over who gets to sell their speakers, while say Massives and Morels are sold right and left on amazon and ebay, which helps to bring their online price down. For example, some people had preferred Massive Audio CK6 over HAT Imagine, even though Massives were cheaper, but reading the review that choice makes sense for that particular install (where Massives supposedly sounded better than HATs when installed in kick panel areas). If you go active, you probably can't go wrong with either one of the speaker sets mentioned.

I was driven by the desire to keep mid and tweeter in the stock locations, which are far from each other. I personally preferred to buy HATs because they were designed to provide decent imaging even when the tweeter is installed far away from the woofer. The mid woofer is designed to play to 5KHz and above. This is pretty a unique feature because pretty much all other speakers have much lower crossover points. This is what sold me on them, all other benefits of them were sort of nice bonus. I still think the tweeter plays a little more information than I like, but I think this will be fixed once I bi-amp them.

 

[dontbeaprix 10+ year member]

Hat is better , but they are more expensive obviously. I am going to try the image dynamics ctx componets next and see how they sound since they get alot of rave reveiws also. They are only $150 so it will be interesting to see how they stack up to the morels. I have heard the hat imagines and they sound really nice, but i plan on going to hear the new hertz hsk xl soon as they are supposed to be better than the hat clarus. If i was going to go hat though i would at least go with the unity not the imagines because the crossover and the tweets . Also if you read the manual to the imagines they highly recomend running them in coaxial mode for proper imaging contrary to what zako says. There manual is very informative and a good read about sq.

 

[zako 10+ year member]

HAT Unity is nothing but HAT Imagine woofer plus HAT Clarus crossover and tweeter. The HAT Unity and Clarus manuals say pretty much the same thing as HAT Imagine manual about the imaging issue. (e.g. put the tweeter next to woofer for best imaging). This is a great advice, except that I personally would hate to have speakers installed in kicks or in coaxial mode to follow this rule. While imaging will be decent, stage height will certainly suffer. The only thing that makes Imagines more suitable for coaxial use is that their tweeter is kind of louder than it needs to be. If you can go active or bi-amp this issue can be dealt with easily. However, if you don't like the way Unity's crossover attenuates the tweeter, then you're stuck with it unless you go active, in which case it was kind of a waste to buy the Unitys.. because you're paying $100 more for just a better tweeter, and that is debatable as some have said that Imagine tweeter sounded better in their install..

Regarding my comment about the imaging in component mode, while the manual may not say it, it is will known that ALL HAT woofers, starting with imagines through legatias, can play with ease into 6KHz region. This means that the entire midrange is handled by the woofers without tweeters interfering too much with their imaging which is a good thing. If you use a high enough crossover on the tweeters, then you can place them high to maintain a good stage height without interfering with imaging. With a lot of other speakers, tweeters _have_ to play pretty loudly down to 3KHz and even lower, since the woofer can't keep up, at which point you could have human voices wandering between tweeters and woofers. For me, this was the no1 reason I like the HAT speakers more than others.

All in all, I think Unity is good for people who just want to have nice speakers to run in either active or passive mode. Imagine will shine running in passive coaxial mode or in component mode when run active. Either speaker can be traded for 60% of its retail value back to HAT when buying higher end HAT speakers.. which seems pretty cool. I can see myself trading in my Imagines eventually and moving onto Clarus or Legatias.

 

[barbaroja 10+ year member]

Thanks. I am almost sold on the imagines. May as well open another thread that can Shed some light in the active department.