PMC vs. Salk Sound Speakers. Which is better?


PMC speakers out of England have come on like a freight train in recent years including being awarded an Emmy for outstanding performance as speakers in mixing sound tracks for top motion pictures. Their high end home line of speakers always get good reviews but their prices seem very high compared to other speakers. Salk appears to make great speakers at much lower prices. For example, the Salk Veracity HT3 costs $6K and the PMC PB1i cost $14K. Has anyone compared these brands and which do you think is better?
audiozen

Showing 2 responses by vapor1

Haha, no I'm not saying anything is snake oil or that anything isn't necessary. What I'm saying is that smart designers use as few parts as necessary to do the job perfectly, and no more. I was also saying that the majority of the parts on that PMC board are very inexpensive (and often frowned upon) parts.

Salk doesn't use high-end parts either (although better than what's on that PMC board), but with a Salk you know you're getting a flat frequency response and proper phase tracking ... all with a crossover that's only as complex as it needs to be. That may or may not be the case with PMC. I've seen some PMC's that measure relatively poorly, and how it measures is a testimony of how well the crossover is engineered.
Audiozen - seriously? This is a stunning piece of work?

http://www.avforums.com/forums/attachments/speakers/93494d1223327522-pmc-ob1i-crossover-ob1i-xo.jpg

Plenty of electrolytics, iron core inductors, and $.25 sand cast resistors. Those are not high end parts, and just because there's a lot of parts doesn't mean it's any more engineered ... in fact the inverse is often true. More parts are often an indicator that proper engineering wasn't done in the early parts of the design phase.

As a designer myself, there's no doubt in my mind the Salk is the better speaker ... and being less money is just icing on the cake.