Impressions of Coincident Speakers

@bradf, I bought a pair of Super Victory II speakers used about 6 years ago. I am going to make an assumption that the SVIII is not a radical redesign. As Charles1dad mentioned, I drive the SV’s with Atma-sphere M-60’s. The M-60’s don’t break a sweat, however, these speakers were not happy driven by my Coincident Frankenstein 300Bs.

The tweeter and midrange (i think) used in the SVII are no longer available, which may have been the motivation behind launching the SVIII. Also, the coincident website indicates that the SVII did not have an aluminum woofer, but this is not correct. So the woofer may be a different woofer, but my guess is that it is fairly similar. The coincident website indicates some adjustments were made to the crossover to accommodate the new drivers. I suspect the crossover design is similar, perhaps with some adjustments to cap and resistor values.

You ask some excellent questions. I own both the Super Victory II's and a pair of the old retired Triumph Extreme II monitors. I had the opportunity to extensively audition (about 5 hours) a pair of PREs. Tonal accuracy and coherence is a strong suit in all the coincident speakers I’ve heard. I would say my SVIIs as they are currently set up give a nice, tuneful, articulate bass.

Again, as they are currently set up, imaging is quite good. Not the strongest center fill I would say, but superb outside the center. They image convincingly outside the speakers in my 15 ft wide room, giving the impression of an image of 25-30 ft wide on some recordings.

Both bass response and imaging benefited from an enormous effort in optimizing speaker and listening position placement as well as room treatment. In the absence of this, speaker performance in those areas was disappointing. These will not be speakers that will work in any room, and might not be the best in a room where you don’t have freedom to add extensive treatment due to esthetics considerations. The side firing woofers allow for a narrow baffle, which is a plus with respect to imaging, but the side firing woofers can be a bit more demanding when it comes to placement.

If I were to offer a performance criticism on my speakers, it would be that the midrange is not the loveliest or most refined I’ve every heard. The new drivers in the SVIIIs may be an improvement in this area, but I suspect this is going to be problem when using any 7" as a midrange driver.

I have no experience with the Super 9s, so I can’t be of help on those.

Now then, I need to tell you that I rebuilt the crossovers using about $1200 in parts. This work utterly transformed the SVIIs. Before the crossover rebuilt, the speakers were laid back to the point of being boring. You are only going to get so much out of $3 Solens fast caps. On the other hand, the inductors are pretty good, so I didn’t replace those. The transformation was significant enough that I suspect my modified speakers will out perform anything in the 10-15K price range.

Would I spend this kind of money on this speaker with no return option? No. I can justify buying used if the price is right, because if I can’t make the speaker work in my room and my system, I can resell without loosing my shirt.

@bradf @hilde45 ​​​​@charles1dad, thanks for your kind words!  Now then, my room is a second floor bonus room that has been appropriated as a dedicated listening room and is roughly 14-15 wide, 20 ft long, and with 8 ft ceilings.  I'm using a short wall orientation, and my rack is behind the listening position.  Amps are on the floor right next to the speakers, keeping the speaker wire as short as possible per Ralph K's instruction. The room is nicely symmetrical forward of the listening position.  The flooring is a really nice Luxury Vinyl Plank over OSB, and the ceiling is fairly heavily treated above the listening position.  I have a clever arrangement along my side walls that deflects sound from the first reflection zone back towards the front of the room, so that I have suppressed most of the reflections in the 8- 20 millisecond range that is most responsible for compromising image.  This is a much better solution, in my opinion, than using absorption at first reflection points.

I have the woofers facing outward, with the outer edge of the speaker about 32 " from the side wall, and with the speaker about 30" out from the front wall as measured to the back of the cabinet.  I found, on my flooring, that the speakers performed MUCH better using Herbie's footers that using the Coincident supplied spikes. 

Outward firing was much better in this room than inward firing.  I suspect that having the woofers firing towards each other in a narrow room gives too much cancelation due to out of phase waveforms

If one is not careful to dial in speaker position and the main listening position, these speakers are capable of inarticulate bass.  If one is careful, they are capable of nice articulate bass.  This just isn't a speaker that you can plop down anywhere and get it to workup to its potential.

The Auricaps are a nice improvement over the Solens caps. I've used them in other crossover rebuilds, and they offer a nice performance at reasonable cost. The tweeter cap in the SVII is an 8.2 mF cap, so they aren't going to be cheap.  I went with Jupiter coppers and have Duelund Silver in parallel.  The Jupiters are humongous and went for about $550 a pair.  The Duelund Silver parallels added another $200.  If I were doing this again, I might try the VCap ODAMs for the tweeter. 

This is a tough call for you.  If you don't have the luxury of a dedicated room, you are pretty much playing Russian Roulette with any speaker you can't return.  Every speaker, regardless of design, is going to have an optimal placement and relationship to the main listening position in a given room, or said in another way, no speaker is going to reach its potential in a given room if you can't accommodate the optimal position.   So you will be wanting to find a speaker that is happy with what you can give it.  It is essentially impossible to predict that a priori.  

Brad,  No problem!  

Recent Coincident designs are anything but colored.  I avoided box speakers like the plague until I bought my Triumph Extreme II monitors.  I listen to a lot of live music, or at least I did until I moved to the middle of nowhere, and I could not find a box speaker I could live with at any kind of reasonable price until the Coincidents.  I might question the designer's business model but never his ears.  There is not a single piece of Coincident gear that I have heard that is not true to tone.  That includes the electronics.  At best, coincident gear is capable of sublime beauty. 

If I were in the market for new speakers, which I am not, I think Audiokinesis and NSMT 100 speakers would be on my short list.   I'd travel to audition, and have long conversations with both designers before purchasing.  I've talked to both of them in the past, and trust both of them to give me a straight answer on room requirements and compatibility of ancillaries. The AK speakers are nice to look at.  High WAF, I would think. 

I've really just put too much effort into optimizing the SVIIs and optimizing the room around them.  You get to a certain point and the chance that a change is going to make things worse gets pretty high.  But you know how it is, we are all perfectionists, so on occasion I long for more refinement in the midrange. 

@bradf, one final comment.  I encourage you to use the free Room Equalization Wizard software for optimizing speaker placement and establishing the best listening position.  It takes some effort to get up to speed on using the software, but it really isn't all that difficult.  There is a forum where you can go to ask questions, and there are a number of people on this forum that can also offer assistance in getting started including me and @hilde45.  I can tell you that I would never have gotten my room to where it is now had I not used REW.  None of the various guidelines, including the Cardas method, are able to really able to anticipate the peculiarities of side firing woofers.  REW can also help if your room is anything less than perfectly symmetrical.  

I've helped others set up a room optimally in as little as 3 hours.  My own room took a good bit longer, because I was still learning about room acoustics and how to get the most out of REW while I was optimizing.  

One problem is that when trying to optimize using critical listening, at least for me, is that my ability to listen critically wanes after an hour or two.  Memory between sessions isn't exact.  Any change in one position will offer improvement at one frequency and compromise another.  REW allows you to study in depth the impact a given change in position has on the entire frequency range, as well as issues with  excessive decay times,  You can even use it to locate points that may be compromising imaging.  

Well worth the effort, regardless of which speaker you ultimately end up buying. 

@bradf, I might also mention that I was not able to get the SVIIs work near field.  My listening position is about 13 ft from the front baffle.  At that distance, the SVIIs presentation is pretty much like a single driver.  At 7-8 ft, you can, as I recall, discern between the sound coming from the mid and the tweeter.   

@bradf I think the SVIIIs will be fine out 10-12 ft.  If your listening position is fixed, that certainly makes the speaker placement protocol easier because it reduces the multivariate problem by one element, and a very important one at that.  In my room, the optimal speaker position was a little closer to the front wall, which if it holds true in your case, could get you another foot of breathing room between you and the baffles.  I'm a bit more optimistic about you getting a satisfactory sound with the SVIIIs if you are willing to use REW measurement.