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"...the lows from these speakers are very impressive. Full, solid, and musical."
I had the fortune to hear and dig into several pairs of 15-inch speaker-on-stick products from a handful of manufacturers this year, and it gave me a better frame of reference as I continue to hear more. Self-powered, pole-mounted speakers have been around for quite some time now, and some of them have matured into truly excellent loudspeakers. The appeal is obvious—they’re small, lightweight, self-contained, and simple. They’re used by countless DJs, AV companies, coffee shop guitar-and-vocal soloists, and many, many churches, including my own. The Electro-Voice Live X family of powered and passive speakers is new to the market, and includes dedicated subwoofers. I evaluated a pair of the ELX115P 15-inch self-powered models and enjoyed the time I spent with them.
MADE OF WOOD
Electro-Voice’s marketing pitch touts Live X as “clean, powerful, and musical” and I wanted to put that claim to the test. I unboxed the pair and gave them a once-over. My first impression—they’re solidly built, but surprisingly light for a wood speaker. I hadn’t realized prior that the rear of the cabinet has a 60-degree angled surface that makes the speaker usable as a floor wedge monitor—a nice touch, and better executed than I’ve seen with other pole-mounted speakers. Some of the plastic pole speakers feel kind of “roly-poly” to me in floor-wedge mode, where this speaker’s floor-wedge surface is perfectly flat, and that makes the speaker feel more stable to me. I’d like to see rubber feet too, but even lacking that, these speakers feel very stable to me as floor wedges. There are rubber feet on what is the bottom of the speaker in its upright orientation, however, should you want to stack these atop the 18-inch subwoofers that are available to accompany them. I’m a big fan of deeply recessed carry handles so I can get my chubby mitts in there to pick the speaker up, and these speakers fit that bill nicely.
I’m particularly pleased with the fact that Electro-Voice chose to build wood speakers; I know plastic speakers can save a lot of weight, but they feel cheaper and for lack of a better adjective, well ... “plasticky.” Seems that Electro-Voice managed to find a good compromise between solid construction and weight here, even considering the substantial 18-gauge black powder-coated grill.
THE BACK SIDE
The rear panel of the speaker takes up very little real estate—just the bottom half of the lesser angled side. It features two inputs, both with Neutrik balanced inputs that accept both ¼-inch TRS or XLR. Input one also features a stereo pair of RCA unbalanced inputs to accept signal from a CD player, cassette deck, iPod, laptop, or other devices. Input two has a push-button switch that toggles between mic and line level inputs. Both inputs have level knobs, as well.
Above the inputs is an output section with an XLR link output for daisy-chaining. It has a slider switch that determines what specifically is mirrored at the link output; either input one alone, or inputs one and two mixed together. The overall speaker output level is determined by a knob to the right of the link output, and there are also slider switches that insert a 100 Hz high-pass filter for use with a subwoofer, and a loudness boost EQ curve that cuts mids and increases lows and highs. A single LED on the rear panel indicates when the speaker’s limiter engages, and there is also a slider switch to turn on or off the illuminated Electro-Voice logo on the front of the speaker.
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John McJunkin is the CEO of Avalon Podcasting in Chandler, Arizona, which offers high quality podcast production and consultation services to a broad range of clients. He’s also the host of the Podcast Pro Tech & Tips Podcast at www.avalonpodcasting.com.
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