Company Address: 950 Batte St., San Francisco, Cal. 94111
Small bookshelf monitors involve inevitable compromises. There are severe limits to the bass energy and extension they can deliver relative to floor-standing speakers, and this forces the designer to make trade-offs. Far too often, the speakers either lack bass or have an audible boost in the upper bass that colors all of the music reproduced through them. Although they seem like speakers that can conveniently on shelves or furniture, this often ruins their soundstage and presents still further problems in the bass response. Unless bookshelf speakers come with dedicated speaker stands, serious problems can occur in their effective frequency response be placed at the listening position. This is because the height and angle of the front of the speaker relative to the listener determines the timing and amount of reflected energy that reaches the listener's ear.
There are, however, small monitors that have a special magic. Ever since the coming of the BBC-designed LS3/5a, it has been clear that a really well-designed small speaker, placed on the proper stand and at the right height, can act as an apparent point source and produce an excellent soundstage. It has also been apparent that with the right set of design trade-offs, a speaker can apparently produce much more bass than is actually there, and that a really clean and musical midrange response can make up for a multitude of smaller technical evils.
The art of loudspeaker design has since moved far beyond the LS3/5a, and a few firms (such as Wilson Audio) have raised the design of small speakers to a level of musicality that once seemed unimaginable although not without a high price tag (the Wilson Watt costs at least $7,450 a pair). A number of other firms, like Spica, have been able to perform their own magic at a much more affordable level. The Spica TC 60, for example, sells for $795 a pair, although the real price tag should include another $250 per pair for the rigid Gravity stands necessary to help the TC-60 achieve its best bass response and ensure it is at the right height and angle to perform at its best.
Yet despite the TC-60's moderate price, this speaker does have some interesting design features and specifications. It is a bit larger than most small monitors are (11 1/2 inches wide x 21 1/4 inches high x 101/2 inches deep), and has a sloping front panel to ensure time coherence of the tweeter and woofer and to correct for delays created by the crossover. The TC-60 uses a ported enclosure with a QB3 alignment. The polarity of both drivers is positive, and the baffles are designed to extend the tweeter response smoothly down to lower frequencies while blending the output of the tweeter and midrange in the crossover region. A thick acoustic blanket around the drivers minimizes cabinet diffraction and the reflection of unwanted sounds into the listening area.
The TC-60's frequency response is specified as-3 dB from 48 Hz to 20 kHz, which is flatter than that of most small speakers, and it is specified to be consistent at inputs ranging from as little as 0.1 V to as much as 10 V. The vast majority of small speakers changes significantly in frequency response with changes in power, and many have their best response at some particular listening level. The frequency response of the TC-60 is exceptionally consistent, from the softest string passages to loud orchestral passages.
The crossover has a fourth-order Bessel acoustic response for the 61/2-inch poly propylene woofer and a computer-derived first-order crossover for the 1-inch cloth dome tweeter. The TC-60s are symmetrically mirror-imaged and matched in pairs to improve imaging and consistency.
I need to balance my praise for the TC 60 with some important qualifications, most of which apply to every speaker this size. This kind of speaker performs at its best in small- to medium-size listening rooms. Its bass and power-handling capabilities do not suit it for large listening rooms, any more than the characteristics of large monitors suit them for small listening rooms. As with all speakers, the performance of the TC-60 is sensitive to placement relative to rear and side walls. Like most speakers, it needs to be kept well away from the side walls. Careful experimentation is needed to place it at just the right distance from the rear wall in a given room to give it the best combination of bass and midrange response. The TC-60s are more sensitive to this than most speakers.
You have to pay the same attention to other aspects of setup that you do with virtually all small speakers. In the real world, you can't mount speakers in bookshelves or on furniture without a major sacrifice in performance. You need to use the TC-60 with a top-quality speaker stand, and you need to place the TC-60s well away from any furniture and with a clear line of sight from each speaker to the listening position. The TC-60 also performs best when positioned slightly lower than the listener's ear, and its ideal listening area is not all that wide. You need to experiment with speaker-to-listener distance and with the distance between speakers to find the triangle that gives you the best possible soundstage and listening position. Finally, you need a bit of patience. The TC-60 takes time to break in-a week of listening to reach its best, I found.
If this need for careful setup sounds a bit daunting, it should not. All speakers need this kind of care and attention, and I can promise you that the TC-60 will reward you for your efforts. Designer John Bau's previous speaker, the TC-50, won a considerable reputation for the quality of its midrange, its coherence, and its excellent soundstaging, but the TC-60 is better in every way. It has one of the most musical midranges I have ever heard in its price range (including its stand), and its dynamics are vastly improved over the TC-50. This is a small speaker that sounds "big" and "live" when played at anything like reasonable volume levels. Equally important, you do not need to raise the gain with very soft passages. They come through very clearly, as they do in a live performance.
The TC-60 does not have true deep bass (no speaker its size does), but it still does a good job of reproducing the bass viol and percussion. The TC-60 is not the speaker for organ fanatics or those who like the lower range of the synthesizer, but its frequency response extends low enough so that you do not hear an obtrusive bass bump. At the same time, this speaker does not have the artificial clarity of those small monitors that appear to have more treble and upper midrange detail simply because they are weak in terms of bass.
The overall timbre of the TC-60 was well balanced, with just enough warmth to avoid the leanness of some small speakers. Male and female voices were very good, al though soprano voice had some slight coloration in the upper registers (a coloration that was significantly reduced after break in). I also found the treble to be smooth and extended, though somewhat beamy, and the TC-60 required considerable experimentation in placement before the up per octaves integrated smoothly with the rest of the sound. You may find tilting the front of the speaker slightly up or down relative to your listening height will also help lock in best performance.
The TC-60s did a surprisingly good job of getting the best out of recent Sheffield, Mobile Fidelity, and Chesky LPs, even in comparison with Apogee Studio Grands, B & W 801 Matrix Series 3s, and Thiel CS5i's-and these are full-range reference speakers that are up to an order of magnitude more expensive. I was particularly pleased with the TC-60's ability to resolve complex choral passages, and to give solo percussion instruments, violin, acoustic guitar, and piano the illusion of the life, dynamics, and detail that you hear in live performances.
Transient response was very good, and percussion detail was quick and very well defined. The Spicas performed very well with the Chesky test CDs, easily revealing the differences in the comparisons between dirty and clean power, analog and digital tape, and digital sound techniques recorded on the Chesky JD 111 test disc. If you are a fan of the superior transient detail on Reference Recordings and Wilson Audio LPs and CDs, you will hear that detail on the TC-60s.
Soundstaging was very good. The imaging was very natural, and the soundstage "floated," rather than clustered, the imaging around the location and height of the speakers. You can get a surprisingly wide soundstage with careful placement of the TC-60s. Depth was very good, although I could not get the resolution of depth from the TC-60s that I have gotten from a number of reference speakers.
The real key to the TC-60's sound is that the sum of its parts has considerable synergy. No speaker made can realistically repro duce the sound of a full symphony orchestra, opera, or rock concert in the home, although some larger monitors give it a damn good try! An outstanding speaker can, however, go a long way toward giving you the illusion of live solo music, a live string quartet, or a live small jazz group. The TC-60s can create this kind of illusion; they are for serious listeners who know the sound of live music and give it the attention it deserves.
"Magic" in a speaker is always relative. No aspect of audio is more personal than choosing a loudspeaker, and no choice should be more dependent on your auditioning a product at length and making your own choice. I believe, however, that classical music fans, and fans of acoustic rock and jazz, are likely to find that the TC 60 does an exceptional job of creating the illusion of a live performance from a small enclosure. There are many good to very good small speakers on the market, but a properly set up Spica TC-60 is one of the rare exceptions that can make you forget its size and let you completely lose yourself in he music.
-Anthony H. Cordesman
(Source: Audio magazine, Jan. 1995)
Also see:
Spica Angelus Loudspeaker (Auricle, Sept. 1991)
Soundwave Point Source 3.0 Speaker (Jan. 1995)
Vandersteen 2Ci Speaker (Equip. Profile, Jun. 1992)
= = = =