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Great fun speaker - Unity audio 'the rock'

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darrylfunk

Banned
Just had a nice week going back and forth from a friends project studio using these nice speakers....

http://www.unityaudio.co.uk/product.php?pid=396

about £1900 for active bi-amped 'sealed box' monitors.
great sounding, nice bass with very well judged scale , dramatic and dynamic and also go fairly loud for a compact box.

quite modern and stylish if you like corian and metal drivers....
i much preferred these to my mates old adam monitors and also the pmc compacts.

oh and the amps are designed by tim d-p of e.a.r. which i didn't know until just going on the unity website.

going to borrow these of him next month to try at home......although i'll have to sell some other gear to get them.

oh and they did sound a lot better than the avi nearfields but obviously don't have a built in dac pre amp......

smashing speakers.
 
I heard them for a good ten minutes at Whittlebury with my own demo CD. I could certainly live with them, well balanced all round.
 
i have a set on loan from a mate and i would describe them as imformative rather than clinical , pretty good when it comes to dynamics and excitement when required , easy to hear differences in recordings ...so transparent and revealing.
i had them on at the weekend for about 4 hours with no fatique or glaring colourations and with a good 'fun' factor on 'dancey' music and old 70's funk.
they are as good a small speaker as i have heard in my current room.

they are better than my old acoustic energy ae1's and as good as the totem model one with more bass control but perhaps less 'romance'.

well worth a try in a smallish room.
 
I'd really like to hear the current crop of studio actives like this in a home environment. The Event Opal would be on my list too, it looks like a lot of technology for not a huge amount of money (about £2.3k landed IIRC).

Tony.
 
hi greg,
must say i never got on with the adam speakers i have heard so yes i would say the unity rock has a fresher sound , i find adams very dark in tonality almost claustrophobic in nature with an odd whispy air not at all like i like!!!
 
Greg said:
Interesting Darryl. So in terms of something you could live with as an "accurate" domestic monitor (rather than an analytical tool) you'd rate The Rock above the ADAM s2x?
Click to expand...

You can tune this kind of thing quite successfully with upstream components IME. One of my friends has a big and spectacularly ugly pair of Spendor active monitors. I can't remember the model number, but IIRC they date from the early 1990s. They are a ported three-way with an 8" bass unit, cone mid and dome tweeter and are finished in a kind of light-grey structure coat. The cab is deeper than it is wide and has chamfered edges around the tweeter, i.e. nothing even remotely like the classic speaker aesthetic one associates with Spendor. They are in many ways very good indeed; hugely dynamic and very clean, but can be far too analytical to be an enjoyable listen. They have a tendency to pull stuff apart, which is often a trait of studio monitors.

Initially he was using them with a Densen CD player (the dearer one, can't remember the model) or a nice LP12 (my old one with the Zeta) and a Densen DM20 preamp. Very impressive in the way I've just described, but there was something about it that made both him and me not want to listen to it - it was too cold and detached. We tried my Audio Synthesis PAS 02 preamp, which would have been operating well outside of it's comfort zone driving the 4 meter long interconnects to the speakers. The PAS 02 brought a lot in the way of timing agility and lost a kind of glare / grain that had been present, but we'd not noticed until it went - the system still sounded cold, and now thinner too, but it really got the foot tapping. He's since bought himself a Croft tube preamp and that seems to have really hit the spot. I also suggested dialling the mid driver back a bit (there are adjustment pots on the back) to try for a bit of a 'BBC dip', this worked rather well too, they had previously been set flat. It was sounding very good indeed last time I heard it. Still ugly as f*** though. I have a feeling if I ever went down this road (very unlikely) I'd also use a nice tube preamp.

Tony.
 
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