Fast forward – few months laterĮventually I reached a state of burn-out when I was listening no more to music but to defects of the reproduction and that was the point I had no other choice but to give the AX-Two a second chance. So my advice is – try not to be smarter than the designer but keep to the original concept. This sort of glare effect became even more pronounced after I decided to glue together the internal braces. So I am inclined to think that the aforementioned coloration could also be contributed to the choice of enclosure material. He also considers that the popularity of plywood within the DIY circles is due to the fact that it presents a finished surface requiring little effort to look good. I had a conversation on that topic with the loudspeaker designer David Haigner and his opinion is that especially because of the inconsistency of the wood quality, plywood as an ever changing target with strong and narrow resonances is harder to “tune” than the higher damping MDF.

It might sound counter-intuitive but in certain cases MDF or even chipboard is preferable to plywood. My advice to anyone who decides to build Micro Block is to keep to the origin and use MDF. The first one being the choice of enclosure material in favor of plywood instead of MDF. And I confess I made few mistakes by deviating from the original design proposed by Bernd Timmermanns. Another thing that bothered me was the inconsistency in the detail retrieval across the frequency spectrum, the bass was lacking resolution and sounded sort of a one-note, they were simply putting some sort of signature upon the music that was drawing my attention constantly. They might improve after some more hours of use but I doubt that they will ever reach near the level of performance of Micro Block MK2.īut however impressive Micro Block sounded I eventually grew dissatisfied with them, there was a sort of glare in the midrange region I was not able to tame. I gave them AX Two a try yesterday, but got rather unsatisfactory results, they sound pretty unspectacular and cheap, rather big step backwards in comparison to my current speakers. So I wrote to Peter that I am done with them and actually don’t like them: I realized that I don’t want to spend dozens of hours in front of these unimpressive speakers expecting them to improve with time when I have such an interesting project going. So after a short listening I put them back in their box, sealed it off with a tape and called it a day. I didn’t want to waste my time with them but to continue to experiment with stuffing, port and crossover adjustments of Micro Block. They were disappointment and didn’t come nowhere near Micro Block’s dynamics, bass extension and sense of gravity. And my expectations were confirmed on the first listen. “These are your new speakers, give them some time to properly break in,” were his words.Īt the time they arrived I was playing with the Micro Block DIY speakers and I really thought Whittle’s creations will have hard time against the Timmermanns’. It was a year ago when I climbed the stairs up to my apartment carrying the 15 kg heavy box that Andy Whittle handed me after a short stop at my place on his way to Copenhagen.

I have to confess that initially I was impressed neither by their look nor by their sound.

Where audionote 2 note save