EPI Speaker Makes Its Debut
THE EQUIPMENT: EPI Model 100, a compact, full-range speaker system in enclosure. Dimensions: 11 by 9 by 21 inches. Price: $89.
Manufacturer: Epicure Products, Inc., 539 Centre St., Boston, Mass. 02130.
COMMENT: It takes some courage and design know-how to enter the well-populated speaker market these days, especially in the highly competitive "under $100" price class. Happy to say, the EPI Model 100--first in what will be a series of products from this company-shows ample evidence of what it takes.
An air-suspension system, the Model 100 consists of an 8-inch woofer, a small dome tweeter, and a dividing network installed in a sealed walnut enclosure fronted with a neutral-tint grille cloth. Hookup at the rear is made via press-to-connect color-coded binding posts. There are no level controls. Input impedance is 8 ohms and efficiency is high enough to permit driving an EPI with 15 watts rms, although it is rugged enough to handle 50 watts rms.
The courage we mentioned earlier in regard to this speaker has to do with the manufacturer's frank, honest description and rating of the unit. For instance, the "dividing network" (which provides crossover at 1,800 Hz) is admitted to be a simple capacitor-which, in this system, does the job economically and effectively. Response, to take another example, is not claimed-as in so many speakers--to cover the "20-Hz to 20-kHz" range, but is acknowledged to roll off below 40 Hz and above 18 kHz, with directive effects becoming noticeable at 13 kHz. And so on.
The speaker, in other words, is not touted as being the "ultimate" or "all things to all listeners," but is more realistically being offered as a worthy contender in its size and price class. Which it is--and then some.
Actually, what this comes to is something that the audio-sophisticated long have known, but which it has become fashionable not to say too often or too openly: speaker systems do have design limits, closely related to their cost; the trick is not to gloss over those realistic limits or to obscure them from the buyer by means of tricky promotion but rather to work within those admitted limits to produce the best possible speaker system. And then to tell it like it is.
The manufacturer, in fact, encloses an individual response curve with each EPI-100. So much for courage. As for design know-how, it doesn't take long, listening to the Epicure, to recognize it as a superior reproducer for its size and cost.
It has a natural, well-balanced, musical quality; its response was smooth, uncolored, and amply dispersed into the listening area. In our tests, the bass end did indeed hold up nicely to 40 Hz. Some doubling (less than average, by the way) was discernible at about 70 Hz, but it hardly increased, as frequency was lowered, until just below 50 Hz. It decreased again and remained surprisingly clean to 40 Hz, below which frequency the response just seemed to bow out quietly, with no audible resonances or cone breakup.
Upward from the bass, the response remained extremely linear and smooth, with no audible dips or peaks, and with excellent dispersion characteristics.
Up through 10 kHz, the sound was spread over a very wide angle, and tones above 10 kHz could still be heard off-axis. At about 13 kHz, the response became "thinner" and from about 14 kHz it began its slope toward inaudibility. White noise sounded smooth, with no apparent coloration effects and with very good dispersion characteristics.
Handling normal program material, the EPI speaker proved very easy to listen to for long periods of time.
It was only by direct comparison with much costlier speakers that we could tell the deepest bottom bass (on some program material) was missing. On all other critical counts, however, the Model 100 proved its mettle as a clean-sounding speaker. At a list price of less than $90, that's a pretty worthy accomplishment.
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(High Fidelity)
Also see:
Stanton Model 881S phono cartridge (Equip. Report, Nov. 1977)