If the speakers aren’t too near the sidewalls, they can be placed this close to the front wall without exaggerating the low midrange and bass response.
It might be helpful to send some pictures of your room (4-6 pictures showing your room in a 360 as viewed from the listening position is a good start). You can send these to our audio consultants and we can give general placement recommendation (if you need additional suggestions beyond what is in the aspen setup guide booklet).
thanks Chris.
What will be the size of the FR5’s? (if that can be revealed at this point? Are they standmounts?)
Yes, the FR5 is stand-mounted speaker. We are still in the prototype phase of things and so it’s not all set in stone though we will have some machined samples for listening and final tweaks here in the next month.
It’s a medium sized 2-way using our planar ribbon tweeter and a 6.5" midwoofer (based on the same design as what we have used in the FR10). The cabinet is the same 8" width as the FR10 but it is 14.5" tall and 12.5" deep and has a single rear-firing 6x9" carbon fiber/rohacell/fiberglass flat-piston passive radiator (like we use on the FR10).
Currently, they are tuned in the low 30 Hz range and so dig pretty darn deep for a bookshelf. This means that they are somewhat lower sensitivity than other similarly sized options that don’t reach as deep, but this follows the design of it’s larger siblings. In smaller to medium sized rooms and with closer listening distances, these should still sound quite satisfying.
You guys can start a new thread on these as we have some more information and pictures or get closer to launch.
Chris, the picture of the inputs on the back of FR10 suggest that it is designed to allow bi-wiring. Does this mean that the FR10 will require jumper cables or plates to allow it to work with a single speaker cable for each speaker?
These FR10’s look fantastic Paul! Did you take these photo’s yourself, because I know that your a very good photographer. These speakers should work very well in most living rooms & listening spaces.
Yes! We include the same jumper wires with the FR10 as we do with the larger models.
The spacing of the connectors looks similar to my FR20’s. For my speakers, I ordered bi-wire Cardas Clear Cygnus speaker cables with a custom 12" long extension at the speaker end of the cable.
Hi Chris. Can you please describe or share a picture of the included jumper cables? I would like to know how long they are and whether they are spades or bananas or other style?
Thanks
adifferentpaul, could you explain your custom Cardas extension for your speaker cables? Is it simply internally bi-wired or some other configuration?
No, all the amps (2xMonos each with their P20s) preamp, streamer, turntable and another P20 are in a large groove cut into the floor under the rug. The people in the flat / apartment below weren’t to pleased about it though.
Bi-wire (4 connectors) at the speaker end and 2 connectors at the amp end. Cardas bi-wires them internally.
Thanks for the photo of your bi-wire set-up. Very neat and clean. I’m currently exploring several speakers that can use bi-wiring, including PS Audio, Sonus Faber, and Vandersteen. I have Cardas Clear Reflection speaker cables, which can be internally bi-wired by Cardas, but the cost of re-termination at the speaker ends would probably cost almost as much as buying a set of Cardas Clear jumper cables. I don’t know which would sound better.
@SDL. I currently have Sonus Fabers and yes they require biwire. I use jumpers provided by Acoustic Zen since I use their Hologram II cables. Both are pretty stiff and so it’s not elegant looking like adifferentpaul shows in his photo. Since the Aspens are also biwire and I am considering a new set of speaker cables to go along with them (Shunyata Alpha v2 or Venom-X? AQ Hero? any other suggestions?) then I’ll also need to figure that setup out - biwire cables or regular cables with jumpers.
I would keep the speaker cables you have and just use the supplied jumpers that will come with the FR10. Am adding an old photo before the Cardas cables arrived…
adifferentpaul, thanks for the great photos! Did you notice any difference in sound when comparing the original jumpers to the internally bi-wired Cardas Cygnus cables? (Of course, maybe you can’t directly compare the internal bi-wire to the stock jumpers if you didn’t already have the Cygnus cables in your system.)
The non-bi-wired cables were $100/pair just for temporary use, so I really cannot comment on the sound quality of the jumpers themselves. But I can say the jumpers appear to be of high quality. Even with the $100 speaker cables connected to my FR20, and the FR20 not being broken in back then, they still completely blew away my fully broken in previous speakers, which I really did like.
@rocket89, you mentioned above that you may be moving from your Sonus Faber speakers to a speaker in the Aspen line. Which Sonus Faber do you have currently, and why are you considering an FR10 as a possible replacement?
FR 10 is out!
The web page does not properly list the dimensions, it lists the frequency response from the line above.
Hi there. How far from the back wall do these need to be placed for good performance. I don’t have a lot of space… And how deep are the speakers themselves?
