I had the good fortune to pick up a pair of brand new Sony SSMF750 speakers on TradeMe a couple of months ago as a result of the seller having picked them up without appropriate domestic consultation. Out they had to go, and I was happy to relieve the seller’s household of the burden.
They fit my preferences beautifully; I can’t claim to have huge experience with different speakers, or objective audio analysis skills up the wazoo, but I can say what I like about them: excellent seperation, especially on well recorded albums with a range of different instruments, like Old Crow Medicine Show’s O.C.M.S. This is probably the biggest difference between these speakers and the B&O bookshelves I was using before, closely followed by the excellent bass; very fast, with a nice, crisp character. This is not the wallowing bass of the hip-hop-in-my-car set.
They’re the main speakers in our lounge and, as such, have to do double duty for both music and home theatre applications; on the home theatre front, they work very, very well. They could do with a touch more power driving them than my NAD T743 amp provides when running 5 channels (since it drops from 80W when doing stereo to 55W - note that if that sounds low NAD’s ratings are [http://www.nadelectronics.com/power/index.htm](more honest) than most manufacturers - but they do excellent work across a range of movies, from musicals like Chicago through to more atmospheric pieces like Brotherhood of the Wolf.
The biggest endorsement, though, had to be from Maire. After listening to a few albums on them she noted that this is the first time she’s really noticed a difference in how pieces of music sound on different stereos.
There are a couple of drawbacks; one is size. They are over a metre tall, so they will be quite noticeable. If you want subtle, discrete speakers, these are not for you. Moreover - and this is more a backhanded complement than a drawback per se - the bass is good enough that they raise the bar, and hence price, on subwoofers for a system. With a good, powerful response going well down below 80Hz, a cheap sub seems likely to make things sound worse, not better.
It is dissapointing hearing how many of my albums are engineered down to the assumption of fairly standard bookshelf speakers, and don’t really improve on the Sonys; I supposed I’m not surprised that this afflicts a bunch of the pop/rock CDs, but I was surprised that it also afflicts some classical albums, which I would have thought would be less compromised. I now understand why audio engineering types fulminate against bad production techniques, and classical afficandos argue over the best recordings of particular pieces.
Product Features
- 3 way 4-speaker system
- Bass Reflex Enclosure
- 2 x 20cm Kevlar HOP Woofer
- 8cm Kevlar HOP Mid Range
- 2.5cm Nano Fine Dome Tweeter
- Rated Frequency Range 35-50kHz
- Impedance 8 ohms
- Maximum Power Handling 200W
- Sensitivity 90dB/W/m
- Dimensions (W x H x D)mm 240 x 1050 x 295 (per speaker)
- Weight 15Kg
Manual here.