Martin Audio

Hey all
In my never ending personal task to examine the reasons for doing the same thing over and over comes also exploring new gear and how and if it can replace speakers I've spec'd till the cows come home.

Has anyone used any of the Martin Audio coaxial speakers or any of their subwoofers?
Anyone been able to compare Tannoy to Martin to Fulcrum?

Thanks!

Just before Christmas I commissioned a system with the Martin CDD15's as mains and CDD8's as delays with the horns rotated 90°. Force of habit more than anything but I paired them with Danley TH118 subs. Original tuning from the contractor would've had you thinking the speakers were trash, but after I blew their settings out and went through the whole system it was sounding great. What I liked about the CDD's is that they covered the raked seating well without throwing any stray lobes down on the stage that could've lowered the gain before feedback. I look at a lot of speaker polar data from EV, JBL, EAW, and such before I landed on those. Haven't used them but heard the CDDLive's in one of the InfoComm demo rooms and remember being pretty impressed by them.

I've done some projects with Fulcrum as well and consider their products to be pretty good. Not generally the first product out of my tool chest but for no particular reason. Most of their development team are former EAW guys before EAW got bought out and entered the dark ages. Their passive cardioid subs are very interesting, though I have not yet used them on a project.

Tannoy -- I have no opinion. The couple times I've seen them in the wild I haven't heard the speakers turned on.

I was only adding Fulcrum and Tannoy to the comparison mix because of the somewhat similar coaxial design and I've heard those two extensively.
Thanks for your honest opinions.

Any comparison of the CDD8s to any other 8" or general small delay speakers? Like Meyer UPM or JBL Control 25AV or QSC K8 or anything?
Delays usually have some leftover low mids from the mains, but thinking about small full range needs and not sure if they sound beefy enough or maybe kinda boxy on the bottom.
Thanks again. Great stuff mike

No major opinions in particular about the 8’s versus any other speaker. I run delays pretty low relative to the mains so even if they sounded off it probably wouldn’t be discernible to the average listener. Usually one of my final tests is walking away from system for few minutes to reset my ears and then listen to Mains + Delays and the mute the delays. If it’s hard to tell if the delays are on but then muting them makes a night and day difference, I consider that pretty spot on.

K8’s are great utility speakers you can throw at just about anything. You have to stick AC outlets at your delay locations to power them. I’ve never had a K8/10/12 fail, but there is a little comfort in knowing you don’t have an amp module up in the air in the middle of your seating areas that you might have to get to for troubleshooting some day. Generally I bump up to a K10 for most applications though just to get that 105° pattern tightened up to 90°. If you have a highly reverberant room you may want to stay away from this series though to go with speakers that have tighter pattern control so you don’t spill as much energy onto the walls.

I usually avoid the Control series except for the 321’s that are great down fire speakers for gym systems. Controls are economical but it seems like I always find myself putting an unhealthy amount of DSP filters in to get them sounding halfway decent and they inevitably end up getting shoved in places that either have no DSP’s or really primitive DSP controls. You may notice when JBL says the 25AV’s go from 70 Hz - 23 kHz, that that range is based on a 10dB margin, which perceptibly -10dB is half as loud. It’s not surprising when you consider that they are 5” speakers, but you definitely won’t get full range out of them even if you stick a giant low frequency boost in place.

For delays, I would also want something a little more rigid and easier to reliably aim than those ball mounts the little Control speakers have.

I see a lot of installs with EAW UB82e’s for delays. They were a mainstay in a lot of projects when I was in Wisconsin, but when EAW’s quality control fell apart however many years ago I saw them fall out of favor pretty quickly. The 60x90 pattern with rotatable horn was pretty reliable at hitting rear seating sections without blowing sound all over the walls. This is a lot like the pattern the CDD8’s have, 80-110° x 60°, with the 80-110° reflecting that the horns are assymetric to have a wider pattern up close than in the back rows, which helps minimize hot spotting of your pattern coverage. If you look in their CDD brochure you’ll find a bunch of heat maps that illustrate this.

I'll just echo what Mike said about the K8's. I used 8's, 10's and 12' as the main workhorse (for our day to day PA needs) in a rental house and they got abused, rode hard, and sounded great through all of it and were pretty bulletproof, with plenty of power even for the 8's.