Usher X719, by Greg Weaver

At CES 2003, (yes, last year!) Steven Harris of Playhouse Audio in Atlanta, GA looked me up and asked me to take a walk with him. We ended up at the Usher exhibit room in the Alexis Park. While the large speakers in the main suite sporting Accuton-looking drivers were very nice, it was the smaller unassuming X-719s in the back room that really caught my attention while listening to some Beth Orton. When I learned that they sold for only $995, my jaw dropped. I asked for a closer look, and though Steven accommodated that request with a pair out of his own stock last summer, it has taken me until now to get to them.

Though Usher Audio is a Taiwanese speaker manufacturer, Dr. Joseph D'Appolito, a name well known in audio circles, is the man responsible for their design since early 2000. All the crossovers are designed and tested in his lab in Boulder, CO. That multi-national association seems to have had a very positive impact on their products.

The X-719 is at the pinnacle of the Usher X-700 series. The review models had a wonderful finish (see photo), consisting of a light oak side-panel (slightly bowed vertically) and a black piano lacquer-like finish on the top, bottom and front (around the grill) surfaces. Black cloth covered contoured grills, sporting a gold and black Usher name plaque, are easily removed to view the remarkable driver set.

Much has been made of these Taiwanese drivers, and detractors of the line pronounce that Usher attempts to "knock off" many more famous and successful raw drivers. The tweeter here is the Usher 9950-20, a 28mm coated silk dome that has been compared, and rightly so, it would seem, to the ScanSpeak D2905/9500. The woofer is their 7" 8945A, a treated paper cone that does remarkably well for its size and design. Knock-offs or not, these drivers work and work very well in this alignment and box.

This critical woofer-midrange is crossed over to the silk dome at 2 kHz, which means that the 7-inch driver is responsible for something like two-thirds of the entire audible spectrum. Though this is always the case with any "mini-monitor," I must say that Dr. D'Appolito's design is up to the task here, especially for the price.

Techno-Babble

Since I don't know if all our readers are aware of the way the musical spectrum is broken down for audio, let's take a second to address just that. It was recently pointed out to me by a good friend and fellow listener that I should not take such things for granted as even he was unsure of the details. So, if this is something you are familiar with, please feel free to skip the next few paragraphs.

The spectrum of human hearing is considered to have a lower threshold of about 20Hz (cycles per second) and an upper limit of about 20,000Hz. Musicians and engineers have broken that broad range down into octaves (eight notes apart), beginning at 20Hz. Each doubling of frequency is an octave higher musically. That octave scale looks like this.

Octave One - 20-40 Hz – Sub Bass
Octave Two – 41-80 Hz – Low Bass
Octave Three – 81-160 Hz – Mid Bass
Octave Four – 161-320 Hz – Upper Bass
Octave Five – 321-640 Hz – Lower Midrange
Octave Six – 641-1280 Hz – Midrange
Octave Seven – 1280-2560 Hz – Upper Midrange
Octave Eight – 2561-5120 Hz – Low Treble
Octave Nine – 5121-10240 Hz – Treble
Octave Ten – 10241-20480 Hz – Upper Treble

With this information in mind, it now may be more clear how a single driver (in this case, the 7-inch woofer) that is playing from 20Hz to 2000Hz is recreating roughly 66% of the ten octaves, leaving the final 34% to the tweeter. This places an enormous burden on that driver, as it is being asked to do deep bass, powerfully and accurately. At the same time that it is trying to pull off that difficult task, the driver needs to handle the all-critical midrange with aplomb and speed and without coloration. Tough job, no?

While we are at it, it may be of interest to note that it takes ten times as much power to play a frequency from the first octave at the same sound pressure level to the human ear (i.e., to be heard at the same volume) as a tone from the tenth octave. This means that you would need 100 watts to hear a 30 Hz note at the same volume to your ear as a 15,000 Hz note played with only 10 watts. That may give you a better understand of why subwoofers often include 1000-watt (or larger) amplifiers or why a 7-watt single-ended triode (SET) amplifier must be paired with terribly efficient speakers. OK, lesson over. Now let me get back to these inviting mini's from Usher.

Voice

My listening, after some extended weeks of run-in, was quite pleasurable and very much as I recalled the brief time I had in front of them during the Alexis Park demonstration. Bass is very good for such a small monitor, but that is expected from a well-designed and executed 7-inch driver such as this one. Though there is an absence of truly deep bass (the bottom octave), as with any speaker of this size, the low- and mid-bass were well-handled with remarkable delineation and pitch definition.

Shortly after I began my serious evaluation time with them, I started to be aware of a slight excess in energy in the second octave. It was there disc after disc, record after record and in any listening position. I moved the speakers quite a bit to optimize timbre, bass reinforcement, and imaging and to identify and counteract any room response effects as much as possible. As noticeable as this slight frequency accentuation was, it didn't seem to have any significant effect in the upper bass or midrange regions. Good news.

Midrange is warm, expressive, and just the slightest bit forward. These speakers are a sheer delight with pianos, brass, woodwinds, the human voice, and strings of any type. I found myself putting down my reviewer's pen on numerous occasions and being drawn into the message of whatever source was playing. The X-719s just sparkle in this part of the spectrum and offer a remarkably coherent voice.

As I got further into my auditioning with the X-719s, I came to discern a bit of a "spotlight" in the 500Hz to 1kHz region. It, like the slight bump around 50 – 60Hz, reappeared on every recording I played. It had a tendency to glamorize overtones in that frequency band. Listen to the saxophone solo in "Aja," from the Steely Dan album of the same title [Mobile Fidelity MFSL 1-033] to get a feel for what I am describing. While this is certainly something that can be seductive in the short term, when overdone, this "shimmer" can cause fatigue over extended listening. I did not find that to be the case, even though I was never completely able to ignore this element of their performance.

The smooth and extended tweeter takes over the last third of the musical spectrum and is a delight, with little aggression or edge noted on material that is so recorded. Struck triangles and ride and crash cymbal attack and decay, and piano string harmonics were as descriptive and individual as the recording permitted with little homogeny or confusion. They are possessed of that very distinct, smooth, and often-cherished "silk dome" sound. Go figure!

Though imaging and staging is very good (aren't all mini-monitors, dude?), they are not possessed of the most focused or precise attributes I can recall. Imaging is wide, with the stage easily exceeding the physical placement of the speakers with the right source. As is often the case with speakers this size, they exhibit a slight reduction of the vertical presentation, and in this case, with the depth as well. They layer instruments throughout the stage very well if a bit flatter (more two dimensionally) than the best mini's out there.

Resolution was quite good across the entire bandwidth, with higher frequency resolution slightly out-striping the lower and mid bands. Macro-dynamic contrasts were handled quite well for a speaker of this size, with micro-dynamic shadings only slightly constricted in comparison. The resultant musical contrasts, like the blat of a trumpet or the growl on a harmonica, were achieved very realistically, while subtle changes in the brushing of a cymbal or the fingering of a guitar string, though quite good, were less clearly delineated. Fine detail, especially down near the noise floor, was ever-so-slightly masked. Again, I hasten to mention that this is a sub-$1000 mini monitor, so these slight deficits are hardly damnation. In fact, I am only pointing them out as a matter of journalistic integrity, as the overall experience provided by the X-719 is far and above what one would expect from any speaker in this price range. They are a true pleasure to witness.

With the exception of the bump around 50 Hz and the slight rise in the 500-1000Hz region, they are outlandishly coherent and accurate. While it may seem that I am being very picayune in my criticism of a very affordable, good looking, and wonderfully engaging mini-monitor, I wish to be clear that I am in fact extraordinarily take with them.

Number Crunching

In an effort to affirm what I was hearing and to attempt to rule out room interaction, I did some measurements with a modified Radio Shack SPL meter. The modifications to this meter will be detailed in a DIY project that I will be sharing on these pages in the very near future. This modified test device affords me a fairly accurate tool for measuring in-room frequency response from something like 10 or 12 Hz to well above 20 kHz. The results of that testing repeatedly revealed a 3 to 4 dB rise between 500 and 1000 Hz. That is likely what affords them that "shimmer" coloration I noted. Fortunately for the listener, as I have already noted, this accentuation is not indelibly stamped across the rest of the audible spectrum.

Another audible attribute also borne out by my measurements was a very smooth in-room response, with particular respect to the 1000 to 8000Hz range, where there was no more than one dB of variation, octave to octave, when measured in one-third octave steps. This is an exceptional characteristic and one that gives the speaker a wonderful presence and allows for hour after hour of un-fatigued listening.

I was also able to confirm through measurement that bit of a peak in the 40-80Hz range, which coincides with the port tuning frequency. While I was at it, I used the meter to establish that the port offered its greatest productivity at roughly 40Hz, exhibiting an increase of about 10dB at that frequency. It starts a slow rise in output around 80Hz, reaches its peak output around 4Hz, then rolls off extremely rapidly. This is not enough to completely explain the low and mid bass bump I was hearing and subsequently measured, but I suspect that it was certainly contributory.

These types of "enhancements" in the mid and lower mid bass are hardly uncommon. In fact, most manufacturers "engineer" such slight gains into their design in the hopes of lulling the listener into believing that the speaker is actually playing deeper bass than it is truly capable of producing. Though I might prefer a more flat response at those frequencies, since this "bump" does not smear or otherwise affect the critical midrange (320-2.5 kHz or so), I cannot declare that it offers any serious devaluation of the speakers overall performance. A speaker like the $450 Buggtussel Circa (full review coming next month), while perhaps not quite as refined from the mid treble on up as the X-719, does however offer a less-editorialized low and mid bass before it gives up at roughly the same low frequency.

Reward

My time with the Usher X-719s was most enjoyable and only served to reinforced my long-standing belief that one need not spend a fortune to find a musical and engaging loudspeaker. As nearly all mini monitors are designed with the same "tricks" in the lower frequency band, these are easily one of the most graceful and rewarding speakers I've heard in the $1000 price range. And, combined with their elegant good looks, they are one speaker system that I can recommend with great enthusiasm to anyone looking for an overachieving, affordable mini monitor. They are an overachiever by any definition. Enjoy!