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[Scott Carneval]

and a Danley OS80 thrown in just for good measure (no pun intended).

A few weeks ago Debbie posted about the perceived difference between the SRX812 vs the SRX815. She and Chris could clearly hear a difference, but according to the JBL specs the boxes are almost identical. She also has the Yamaha DSR and DXR, which I've never heard, so we decided to get together and measure them all. We weren't going for sheer output, but rather comparing for sound quality at 'moderate to loud' volumes, and more importantly measuring the differences between each box. Somehow we still managed to get a noise complaint. My office is directly across from an all-girls college, and while it has it's perks, being able to make noise on a Sunday afternoon is not one of them.

All measurements were taken outdoors. There was a building about 25' behind the speakers, but I don't think it had much affect on the frequencies of interest. We played a variety of music spanning funk, soul, rock, and country, but no hip-hop.

First things first, ALL of the boxes sounded really good. I think I was most impressed by the DXR10 simply because of the bang for the buck/size. I mean really it sounded almost as good as the SRX12 and is less than half the price. Below I will post a separate reply with SMAART captures from each box, and my observations about each.

[Scott Carneval]

Debbie was having an issue with one of her SRX15's at her last gig, so we set the pair up side-by-side to A/B them, but weren't able to duplicate the issue. But we did notice this nasty dip around 6k. Even though Debbie had the console panned to one side, for some reason we were still getting sound out of both speakers. After a bit of troubleshooting she loaded a blank preset and finally regained control. The speakers were just a few inches from each other, much like one would do if deploying two boxes side-by-side but not splaying them with respect to the coverage pattern. The comb filter was truly remarkable. In fact I've never measured a comb filter so bad.

[Scott Carneval]

Once we got that sorted out we were able to measure a single SRX815. The pink trace is the 'Main' preset, the green trace is the 'Monitor' preset. Notice that the phase is much flatter in the 'Main' preset. I also observed about 4-5ms more delay in the 'Main' preset, and this was true in both the 812 and 815. It seems that JBL sacrificed some delay in order to flatten the phase and magnitude response in 'Main', but applied less processing in 'Mon' to achieve less delay. We both found this to be pretty interesting. There is slightly more LF extension in the Main preset, and a little flatter through 2-4k, which is a critical range for intelligibility. If you can live with the extra delay I would definitely use the Main preset.

[Scott Carneval]

Next is the SRX812. The blue trace is Main and the red trace is Monitor. Again, the phase and magnitude are both much flatter in Main, but at the expense of delay. There is a pretty bad dip around 2k in the Monitor preset. Changing the mic position didn't affect the dip, plus we were outdoors, so I don't believe it was a reflection. The SMAART captures don't record the delay compensation setting, but again we observed about 5ms difference between Main and Monitor presets.

[Scott Carneval]

Next up is the SRX815 vs. SRX812, both in the 'Main' preset. The 815 is in pink, the 812 is in blue. As you can see, they are nearly identical in magnitude response. I can't describe it in objective terms, but the 815 definitely sounded 'bigger' and 'fuller' than the 812. It seems as if JBL added some LF boost to the 812 to match the 815, but they just sound different. We both preferred the sound of the 815 for instruments, but also both preferred the 812 for vocals.

[Scott Carneval]

SRX 815 'Mon' in the green trunks vs. SRX812 'Mon' in the orange trunks

[Scott Carneval]

SRX812 (green) vs. Yamaha DSR12 (pink)

This one was too close to call. If I closed my eyes I could TELL that she panned from one to the other, but I couldn't say with any certainty which speaker was actually playing, and I couldn't tell you which one I liked better. Both sounded really good. The JBL had slightly more LF extension, but if you're using these over subs that doesn't really matter. We did NOT crank these to compare max output, but at moderate volumes it's a toss-up.

[Scott Carneval]

Yamaha DSR12 (pink) vs. Yamaha DXR10 (green)

As I said earlier, I think I was most impressed by the DXR. It didn't sound the best, and probably doesn't play the loudest, but for a speaker with a MAP of $699 and would fit in the trunk of most cars, this is an amazing little box. To be fair, we did have the 'D-Contour' switched on, which provides a LF boost, but the low end was actually louder/lower than the DSR12. I'm seriously considering a pair of these for small gigs.

[Scott Carneval]

I had an OS80 (weatherized version of the SM80) ready to go out on an install this week, so just for kicks we threw it up. This is with NO DSP, connected straight to an old toroidal QSC ISA800 amp. The traces aren't as pretty as all of the FIR processed speakers, but even without so much as an EQ it sounded as good as, if not better than the rest of the group. We panned between the SRX812 and the OS80 several times, and of course the OS80 didn't have the LF extension, but I thought it had better clarity than the SRX.

[Scott Carneval]

Finally we walked back about 150' from the speakers and compared the OS80 to the SRX12. I think this is what got campus security called haha.

It was night and day. The OS80 sounded about the same at 150' as it did at 50', but the SRX sounded like someone turned the speaker around. Ok, it wasn't quite THAT bad, but the difference was huge. What's funny though is that the traces at 150' looked almost identical. I suspect it was because at that distance the reflections had a much greater affect than any differences at the source. But maybe someone SMAARTER than me can elaborate...

Danley is green, SRX is purple.

[ProSoundWeb Community]