JVC SX-WD10 Floor standing speakers
No need to explain what important role a material of speaker's diffusers plays in the sound of speaker system. This is a kind of philosophers' stone in audio alchemy. The comparison with the ancient doctrine is not a literary device: sometimes not quite logical decisions give a good result. Satoshi Imamura, the inventor of Wood Cone technology, tried to find the answer in wooden musical instruments with "singing" bodies, while well-established design school on the contrary tries at all cost to eliminate any bending vibrations of diffuser. It is believed that an ideal diffuser must be light and at the same time rigid - exactly these qualities allow it to work in the piston mode at any frequency of operating range. It emerged that it is impossible to give a conical form to veneer sheet without special actions: it shreds into fibers, breaks and returns to its original appearance. The solution turned out to be this: the material should be kept in a traditional Japanese drink - sake. There is no any romance - oils, which exist in rice vodka, soften the wood and make it more pliable. However, only shaping it is not enough - it is necessary to save the form, and for this reason the membrane is impregnated with resins at the final stage of manufacturing. The chic two-way floor monitors - SX-WD10 - spearhead the production line of Wood Cone - we will get acquainted with them now. So-called scheme D'Appolito is used in its construction: the tweeter is located between two similar MF/LF-speakers. The divider on the tweeter pays your attention on close scrutiny: this is an acoustic filter which fights with the resonance effects of the wooden dome. The speakers have several interesting decisions except diffuser's material: four-layer voice coil wounded with a lightweight aluminum cable with copper coating, hard cast basket, neodymium magnetic system (even in MF/LF-dynamics!). The measures are frankly crushing. Usually speaker systems with such characteristics have the highest sensitivity, but JVC SX-WD10 can't make boast of something like this - the meaning of 85 dB doesn't cause delight. However, it is worth worrying: low sensitivity does not hamper acoustics to sound good and only makes special demands to an amplifier.
The skeptical feeling was broken in pieces after the first chords in the performance of JVC SX-WD10. After taking a look to very unusual design of the pair we expected a significant coloration of the sound - for example, such as guitar deck gives. But no - the sound of the loudspeakers is academically clear; it attracts the hearing and makes you dive into the layering of musical images. Surely the appropriate material is needed for an adequate assessment of its thin faces. We put CD with the opera of Giuseppe Verdi "Macbeth" and were not mistaken: the composition is replete with dynamic nuances, which are very difficult for speaker systems. However, the difficulty didn't bother at all the Maestro of birch sound - the recording was played with lightness and quite truly. The dominance of the upper range seemed to be too obvious on the background of filigree elaboration of micro-dynamic details. It seems that the effects of HF-head's resonance isn't destroyed completely yet. Needless to say, that the speaker systems show themselves only with the best hand in the framework with home theatre, because the most difficult test is the check by pure stereo.
