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.
The ELX115P's 1,000W, Class-D amplifier drives an EVS-15K 15-inch LF driver, and a DH-1K 1.5-inch HF driver, which is a titanium diaphragm compression unit. It's delivered by a waveguide with a 90-by-50-degree dispersion pattern (which has pretty clear-cut edges). The crossover between the two is parked at 1.7 kHz, which works very well for this complement of drivers. Electro-Voice publishes the frequency response as 56 Hz-18,000 Hz (down 3 dB) and 44 Hz-20,000 Hz (down 10 dB), and I've found that usually any exaggeration of frequency response by manufacturers is in the low end, but in the case of these speakers, there is no exaggeration whatsoever. The bass is very solid, and not just a bunch of air moving—it's tight, controlled, and very full, particularly when the speakers are acoustically coupled to the floor. The response is quite flat, which can bother me. I like to scoop the mids a bit for two reasons: it creates a psychoacoustic perception of loudness, since our ears suppress the highs and lows by comparison, so boosting them (or cutting mids in this case) further flattens the actual way we hear the sound. Electro-Voice is smart about this—they built a circuit right into the speaker that not only scoops mids, but even boosts lows and highs just a bit, which makes it sound louder. The other reason I like to scoop mids a bit, particularly with horn-loaded compression drivers like this, is to eliminate the brashness of the high mids.
TWEAKS AND
IMPRESSIONS
Once I did engage that “boost mode” switch (and micro-tweak the EQ of my mixer output just a bit) I found myself very impressed with the sound of these speakers. The response is consistent from top to bottom, with no obvious seam at the crossover point. High highs are clean and smooth and, below that, getting all the way down to the high mids, there is some of the brashness expected from a metal compression driver, but with the built in EQ circuit and the tiny touch-up I added, it all but disappears. Mids are not honky in the least, which can be another issue with this type of driver. The low mids are not super warm or punchy, but they sounded very accurate to my ear. And as I said before, the lows from these speakers are very impressive. Full, solid, and musical.
And that brings us back to what Electro-Voice claims about these speakers—that they're “clean, powerful, and musical.” We can obviously interpret “clean” to mean “noise and distortion-free” but I would also add “accurate,” and indeed these speakers deliver a signal fitting that description. As to “powerful,” we expect high SPLs, and when driving these speakers with enough gain, I got a huge amount of SPL—not as high as other models I've heard this year, but these speakers had even less distortion at higher SPLs than the louder low-distortion speakers I've heard. The documentation claims 134 dB, and it's all there. And as to “musical”—the most subjective of these measures—I would say that Electro-Voice is right; they do sound musical, owing to a consistent frequency response across the spectrum, as well as quality components that deliver a clean amplifier's output.
You can definitely count me impressed with the Electro-Voice ELX115P speakers, particularly considering the street price. They'd be very useful for a portable church, or for a church that needs speakers for a remote setup, or as floor wedges in a more permanent location. I'd recommend giving them a listen.
