Old 'n' Wize

I bought the D630 system at a 70% discount which should have been a hint as to what it is actually worth. I listened to the woofer free air and was immediately disappointed with what I heard. The sound was muddy, lacked dynamics and lacked micro-detail. Compared with a 15 year old Mercedes stock door speaker the D630 woofer was inferior in most ways. Once installed the overall sound was very poor with the 2 inch dome mid sounding particularly honky with lots of untamed resonances/non-linearities. Crossing over the mid at 500 Hz is probably asking way too much of it, I would think that an octave higher crossover and some eq'ing and trap filtering in the crossover would have been warranted. I built a pair of mini studio monitors using (Dynaudio copies) drivers made by Hi-Vi and those speakers sounded very good. The ScanSpeak cloned woofer in the D630 is a disaster. The tweeter is also not that great, sounding not very smooth. I replaced the dome mid with a ScanSpeak 10cm car specific midrange driver and the sound is much better but the rest of the D630 system has to go. I will replace the tweeter and woofer with a Focal two way system and the whole thing will be run with active crossovers. I don't have a lot of respect for HiVi. Their blatant copying of quality European drivers is shady at best, especially when the resulting product is totally inferior. I once heard a top of the line McIntosh monster line array speaker system with a six figure price tag. The sound was not good at all. That speaker used dozens and dozens of small diameter HiVi drivers in the line arrays. Lots of substandard quality drivers does not a quality loudspeaker make. Enough of my ranting. ///M5 was very perceptive here. Looking back on it I asked the loudspeaker distributor owner if the HiVi component systems were any good. His response to me suggests that either: 1) he is deaf, 2) he never really heard the D630 system or 3) he wasn't really being honest with me and just wanted to move the crappy product.