any experience with lsk m4? (kinda newbie)

[skyskraper]

hey guys, i've decided to take the plunge.

i've been messing around with diy audio stuff for a while and decided it was time to build a gainclone (after i finish my kevin gilmore dynamic hp amp). briangt's lm4780 kit looks to be the one for me. good price on the whole kit (there's just a couple of harder to find parts in oz that make it easier/cheaper to just order brian's kit). im pretty confident i'll have zero problems getting the amp rocking.

but i realised that its a pointless project! because in our house we only have powered speakers. no problems. lets make the amp a project with a purpose. so i was looking for small passive bookshelf speakers that i could power with the gainclone.

before i go further i'll give you a bit of background on my listening. i'm a dj/producer of house music and some breaks. currently my production and dj needs are served by krk rokit rp8's. but when i move the krk's around often im left needing something to listen with at my production station/pc. i use an esi waveterminal 192m that gives me music and tv from the pc. headphones are mainly akg k240s and ultrasone hfi 650 dvd. powered by a pimeta now, but a gilmore dynamic soon.

ok so i needed some small speakers that could operate near a CRT monitor without any major issues, and still sound "good" not perfectly flat, or hugely bassy, or even push a large volume of space. i really just need a pair of speakers that make noise and it sound enjoyable and good, dare i even say it, musical?

ok no problems, plenty of bookshelf speakers and kits out there. uh oh. next hurdle! money !!! i dont have much to spend on these. these are basically going to be kick around speakers to listen to the tv and some casual music listening. i didnt want to spend too much. im trying to limit myself to $200aud.

so when i was looking at headphonic's site a while back i remember they moved in with a speaker kit company, so looked up LSK and came across their M4 mini monitor kit. this looked pretty interesting. small, magnetically shielded, pretty easy to put together, cheap to boot. a kit looked sweet, and theyre only up the road from me so i intend to go in and check them out in person. i shouldnt have any real problems putting it together, and im guessing that the performance will be beyond comparably priced passive speakers if i don't stuff up the build.

i was wondering if any of you aussies or not so aussies had any experience with this kit? how it sounds just a pair of them on their own, how well they will do for my needs, etc etc. any feedback you guys can give me would be much appreciated.

yes i did consider building my own enclosures, but seeing as this is my first foray in to speaker building, i thought id learn to walk before i run that and the kit cost is pretty damn competitive compared to buying just the parts....

thanks in advance

SS

ps: love the "please search before posting" every forum needs this. and yes i did search without any joy.

 

[tktran]

"i really just need a pair of speakers that make noise and it sound enjoyable and good, dare i even say it, musical?"

I've heard them and from your description it does the job, fits your budget and is painless to put together. It's like an IKEA kit- almost so easy it's really cheating DIY... .

 

[skyskraper]

when you say does the job does that equate to a somewhat average speaker system as a whole? i mean the other choice for me with this setup is non DIY where i'd get something like behringer truth b2030p speakers and fire them through the gainclone, not stunning sound but hardly crap. they just suck as studio monitors on their own i am leaning towards the m4 combo because i loved the sound of the krk rp5 whih has a 5" woofer and 1" tweeter, the m5 kit is out of my price range, but for small use the m4 should suffice.

do you or any others have any kit suggestions i might look at elsewhere? because another option would be to diy a pair of PA speakers and use those for dj'ing and leave the KRK's parked in my room forever. if i did that i wouldnt need to push a huge volume of sound in the dj studio, the 8" woofer and 1" tweeter on the RP8's is barely exercised when we have our jams at high volume.

so something in the $200aud range with a similar air moving capacity that will sound accurate driven by an lm4780 gainclone could be another solution. right now its annoying when either my housemate or i have to move out KRK's in to the studio to have a mix. are there any other options you guys can suggest to me?

 

[tktran]

You're in trouble now, because I'm a fairly obstinate personn, and like to sprout my opinions. So here goes-

Since you're in Perth the best thing to do is to pop into LSK and listen to the M4, as I did. The speaker itself is a nice little thing. It images well and the port alignment even gives some punchy mid-bass. I'd use it in small rooms- bedroom/apartments etc, listening at medium SPL levels.

But let's not forget that this is a tiny 4" mini-woofer here. There's only so much air it can move, and upper mids are not as weighty or realistic as a bigger midwoofer. And of course there's no real low bass to speak of.

I'm intimately familiar with house, electro, breaks, techno, trance and other electronic dance music styles. And in my opinion, a small speaker can never do justice. Dance music is engineered to sound good through club PA speakers.

In the first post it sounded that you just wanted a cheap pair of small speakers to fall back on, so the M4 sound like a reasonable option. But in your second post it seems you are interested in something that will sound close to what you're currently using. I suspect your powered monitors use 6.5" or 8" midwoofers. If you are listening almost exclusively to dance/electronic at home studio environment, I would not think that anything smaller than a 6.5" midbass, at a bare minimum, will keep you entertained for very long.

My advice is to save a little more money and invest in something larger. The waveterminal 192 isn't cheap, and briangt's amp deserves something better.

Have you considered other LSK offerings? (eg M5 or M6) or DIYing from scratch, higher resolution monitors (eg Troels Gravesen's HDS/XT or John Jrujke's L18/TBFCG come to my mind). I don't have the links handy (Google?), but they are well engineered designs, well documented. Unfortunately it doesn't come as a kit, but I know that all parts are available in Australia, although you will need to source them from different distributors yourself...