New MOFI speaker (Andrew Jones)

To be clear, the hardness or sibilance I heard was mild and could be attributable to the other components, or the room or the music sample.  What I did note was that the speaker has no controls.  This is somewhat of a disappointment—an L-Pad makes it far easier to integrate a speaker into a particular system/room.  I know manufacturers are reluctant to include them because customers often don’t know how to use them and complain about the sound, but, I think it is better include controls.

I heard them at Capital Audiofest and they sounded quite good to me, particularly considering the price.  It delivered reasonably deep and tight bass, a nice, warm upper bass, and smooth and natural midrange.  My only negative was a touch of sibilance in the upper midrange.  This negative is common to many modern speakers, as well as some old-school concentric driver systems like those of Tannoy.  I don’t know how well they play at lower volume because they were only played at higher volume levels.  Still, a very good sounding system.

I liked how they look.  The faceted baffle looked good (functionally, they are designed to minimize diffraction issues).  The picture frame edging around the front baffle gave the speaker a nice old school touch to go with the modern look of the faceted baffle.  

I would also like to add how much I appreciated Andrew Jones' representation of the Mo-Fi speaker at Capital Audiofest.  He does a terrific job of explaining the design, including engineering challenges and the compromises that are made in implementing the particular design.  He has been my favorite representative from when I first heard him at CES talking about TAD speakers about 20 years ago.  

It is a small wonder how he manages to keep his very friendly and engaging demeanor over the entirety of a long show.  He is an extraordinary trooper.

I’ve heard both too at shows and I like both.  The Razz is more like horn-based system—it sounds lively and grabs your attention—but it has its own, to me, minor problems with the bass not sounding integrated with the rest of the range.  Still it is a competitor to the likes of Cornwalls.  The SP 10 sounds more like a good conventional speaker.

At Capital Audiofest, Mr. Jones mentioned how he interacts with the MoFi crew and said that they like to exchange friendly barbs.  i thought of suggesting that he should tell them that he got a lot of offers to trade One-Step collections for the new speaker but never brought that up.

The stand has four square tubular steel uprights and a top and bottom metal plate (the uprights can be filled with sand or kitty litter, etc.) and look a bit like Sound Anchor stands.  I think they look pretty good.  The overall look is, in my opinion, prnice, but, it really is a fairly big speaker (hard to appreciate how big it is just from pictures).  The faceted front baffle is, to me, more interesting to look at than a plain, flat baffle, and it serves the sonic purpose of reducing diffraction effects.  

My only quibble with the speaker is one that I have with the vast majority of speakers on the market--it needs a tweeter level control (L-pad) so that one can make minor changes in the frequency response balance of the speaker; for my taste, I would at least want to try turning down the tweeter just a tad.

This is not an expensive speaker so there has to be some compromises on parts quality.  But, I heard the speaker and it sounds quite good to me and I think it is quite nice looking to boot. Unless one has heard it and seen it, I don’t see how one can be very critical.

With most of the research cost already sunk in the Source 10, a smaller and cheaper version is something that makes sense.  I've seen and heard the Source 10 (pretty nice sounding speaker), and while I liked how it looked, it struck me as being a bit too large for a lot of rooms as far as aesthetics are concerned.  The Source 8 should find favor in most domestic settings.  If bass extension and high volume capability are the primary areas of compromise vis-a-vis the Source 10, that won't be too bad because it struck me that the Source 10 had plenty to spare in these areas.  If it is efficiency that suffers the most, that would be a bigger deal as the best sounding amps (to me) are somewhat low in power.

One of the big challenges in designing the speaker was to have a 10” woofer respond high enough for the 1.6 khz crossover point (the speaker must have a bandwidth much higher than this point even with a 12 db/octave slope).  That makes it quite impressive that some vintage 18” drivers can operate way up beyond this point.