Post by MartinT on Feb 13, 2016 10:24:55 GMT
Usher Dancer Be-20 Speakers
I have had my Usher Be-20 speakers for over 7 years now, and feel well qualified to describe what’s good and bad about them and how they have given me the biggest uplift in my system’s sound during its long history.
I moved into my current house with my previous JM Lab Mezzo Utopia speakers, themselves a very capable and good all-round speaker. However, I was looking for my ‘final’ speakers, ones I could live with for the rest of my days and which would be capable enough to grow as the system grew. A very positive review in The Absolute Sound magazine triggered my interest in Usher and led to me having a demo of the smaller Be-10 at Audio Affair in Birmingham. I arranged to hear them against the Mezzos and the B&W ‘studio’ speakers of the day and was instantly smitten. Since I knew I would one day have a bigger house and I really wanted it to be my final purchase, I went for the Be-20 on the basis of what I heard in the Be-10 that day. The key difference is a larger cabinet and twin woofers per side. No difference in those superb mid and treble drivers. A few months later, just arrived from Taiwan and driven to me from the distributor in a Luton van, three burly men arrived with four boxes on two crates...
Description
The Usher Be-20 is a large full-range speaker system with 1” beryllium tweeter, a unique 5” concave beryllium midrange driver and twin 11” Eton bass drivers per side. The beryllium drivers are Usher’s own design which they claim to have put a great deal of R&D into. The crossover is a d’Appolito design. The cabinets are superbly crafted and shaped ‘boat hulls’, remarkably deep at about one metre. They sit on bolted plinths made from the same gorgeous wood, with impressively large brass floor spikes, level adjustable. The terminals on the large rear plate are sturdy WBTs accommodating 4mm plugs and spades. There are two rear facing ports. Sensitivity is quoted as 90dB/1W/1m but take care, the impedance is 4 ohms and this speaker needs high current capability.
A compartment at the bottom, with nicely designed cover plate, allows for filling with the damping material of your choice. I put 30kg of recycled keel lead shot into each, bringing each speaker up to around 160kg in weight. They are not easily moved!
Sound
So to the sound. My system has improved in leaps and bounds throughout their time with me, but one thing has remained consistent: the Ushers are remarkably revealing, transparent and tonally very neutral. They don’t really have a voice, they just pass through whatever they’re receiving down to the tiniest detail. They are dynamically unconstrained and very prodigious in the bass, negating any thoughts of a subwoofer (I sold my REL Studio II as being entirely surplus to requirements).
At the micro level, that portrayal of dynamics means that the tiniest cues in the music and the space surrounding the performance are starkly revealed, serving to make it highly vivid and ‘real’. At the macro level, their ability to swell with the music makes so many albums utterly exciting to listen to. You wouldn’t normally think of human voice as having a great dynamic range, but don’t be fooled. These speakers will reveal the tiniest detail in a dead silent soundstage, and later in the song can blow your head off with the power of a full-on bellow. Orchestral crescendi can be highly visceral, giving the lie to any ideas of classical music being for cerebral appreciation only. Try the Verdi Requiem or Shostakovich’s 10th and you will hear their true capabilities. I simply don’t have the room or the raw power to test their limits, but I have plenty for the portrayal of any music I have in my collection. The Belles SA-100 power amp drives them superbly with its 34A current delivery.
There is no doubt that the two beryllium drivers integrate coherently to give a stellar rendition, not cold or metallic but just highly musical. The Eton bass drivers are fast enough to keep up making the whole even better than the sum of the parts. The cabinet is sufficiently dead to minimise overhang and what’s left is potent down to subterranean levels of extension. More than anything, though, is your awareness of music making. You will soon stop analysing treble performance or midrange transparency as you become lost in the music being played in front of you. Time and time I have become so lost, and that’s the essence of what the Ushers do. They make you listen to the music.
Being large speakers I had expected imaging not to be their strong suit. The reality is that their left-right soundstaging was immediately better than the Mezzos and has remained consistently good. Depth imaging has improved over the time I’ve upgraded my system, just revealing more and more with each tiny positive change. A recent switch to NVA interconnects has revealed amazingly good depth soundstaging such that I have a complete 3D image in my room, from up-front vocals to stage rear detail well behind my rear wall.
Using in a Real Room
There is a fly in the ointment. I am running the Be-20s in an undersized room and they have the ability to load up the room with seismic waves of bass intensity. Thankfully, this turned out to be quite easy to control thanks to their ported design. Port stuffing entails putting a resistive load into the ports, sacrificing bass output in favour of a slight rise in resonant frequency and tightening of the bass response. I experimented with rolls of Monacor lambs wool damping material until I got it just right with four rolls, one in each of the ports extending to their full length and medium tightly rolled. The bass extension remains potent but bass is controlled and very tight while only loading up the room with extreme material played loudly, like Kraftwerk’s Minimum-Maximum, which is the ultimate trouser-flapping fun anyway. The graph shows the difference but doesn’t portray the real-world improvement to the degree that I hear.
A d’Appolito crossover design is a win for Usher and you might have thought that I would leave well alone. However, that was before I heard the SPEC 501 boxes on the Ushers. These small wooden beauties connect across the speaker terminals and modify the total load seen by the amplifier to one that is overall more benign and linear. I believe KEF started this trend by creating an inverse of the load impedance within the crossover itself. I was so impressed that I bought the top of the range SPEC 901EX units and they bring out even more of what the Ushers do so well, with a highly defined, wide and deep soundstage and remarkable focus on instruments and voice. Clearly the Belles finds the whole an easier load and I’m not arguing with that.
Conclusions
The Be-20 speakers are the single best hi-fi component I’ve ever bought. Pricy (but I didn’t pay close to their list price now), they are so capable that I’m not even sure I’m exploring their limits now. They clearly perform to a very high level and will most likely get even better in a bigger room. Not once have they proven to be even close to the weakest link in my system so they are highly likely to prove my last ever speakers, a prospect that fills me with satisfaction.
The good thing is, having heard some of the lesser models in the Usher range, the trickle-down effect is strong. I’ve heard similar traits in the CP range too, making the Usher offering available at much lower budgets and to a great many more members. It’s a shame that Usher representation has been patchy in the UK but don’t let that put you off. You owe it to yourself to hear these (or the Be-10 or CP series) if you are considering a serious speaker purchase.[/a]
I have had my Usher Be-20 speakers for over 7 years now, and feel well qualified to describe what’s good and bad about them and how they have given me the biggest uplift in my system’s sound during its long history.
I moved into my current house with my previous JM Lab Mezzo Utopia speakers, themselves a very capable and good all-round speaker. However, I was looking for my ‘final’ speakers, ones I could live with for the rest of my days and which would be capable enough to grow as the system grew. A very positive review in The Absolute Sound magazine triggered my interest in Usher and led to me having a demo of the smaller Be-10 at Audio Affair in Birmingham. I arranged to hear them against the Mezzos and the B&W ‘studio’ speakers of the day and was instantly smitten. Since I knew I would one day have a bigger house and I really wanted it to be my final purchase, I went for the Be-20 on the basis of what I heard in the Be-10 that day. The key difference is a larger cabinet and twin woofers per side. No difference in those superb mid and treble drivers. A few months later, just arrived from Taiwan and driven to me from the distributor in a Luton van, three burly men arrived with four boxes on two crates...
Description
The Usher Be-20 is a large full-range speaker system with 1” beryllium tweeter, a unique 5” concave beryllium midrange driver and twin 11” Eton bass drivers per side. The beryllium drivers are Usher’s own design which they claim to have put a great deal of R&D into. The crossover is a d’Appolito design. The cabinets are superbly crafted and shaped ‘boat hulls’, remarkably deep at about one metre. They sit on bolted plinths made from the same gorgeous wood, with impressively large brass floor spikes, level adjustable. The terminals on the large rear plate are sturdy WBTs accommodating 4mm plugs and spades. There are two rear facing ports. Sensitivity is quoted as 90dB/1W/1m but take care, the impedance is 4 ohms and this speaker needs high current capability.
A compartment at the bottom, with nicely designed cover plate, allows for filling with the damping material of your choice. I put 30kg of recycled keel lead shot into each, bringing each speaker up to around 160kg in weight. They are not easily moved!
Sound
So to the sound. My system has improved in leaps and bounds throughout their time with me, but one thing has remained consistent: the Ushers are remarkably revealing, transparent and tonally very neutral. They don’t really have a voice, they just pass through whatever they’re receiving down to the tiniest detail. They are dynamically unconstrained and very prodigious in the bass, negating any thoughts of a subwoofer (I sold my REL Studio II as being entirely surplus to requirements).
At the micro level, that portrayal of dynamics means that the tiniest cues in the music and the space surrounding the performance are starkly revealed, serving to make it highly vivid and ‘real’. At the macro level, their ability to swell with the music makes so many albums utterly exciting to listen to. You wouldn’t normally think of human voice as having a great dynamic range, but don’t be fooled. These speakers will reveal the tiniest detail in a dead silent soundstage, and later in the song can blow your head off with the power of a full-on bellow. Orchestral crescendi can be highly visceral, giving the lie to any ideas of classical music being for cerebral appreciation only. Try the Verdi Requiem or Shostakovich’s 10th and you will hear their true capabilities. I simply don’t have the room or the raw power to test their limits, but I have plenty for the portrayal of any music I have in my collection. The Belles SA-100 power amp drives them superbly with its 34A current delivery.
There is no doubt that the two beryllium drivers integrate coherently to give a stellar rendition, not cold or metallic but just highly musical. The Eton bass drivers are fast enough to keep up making the whole even better than the sum of the parts. The cabinet is sufficiently dead to minimise overhang and what’s left is potent down to subterranean levels of extension. More than anything, though, is your awareness of music making. You will soon stop analysing treble performance or midrange transparency as you become lost in the music being played in front of you. Time and time I have become so lost, and that’s the essence of what the Ushers do. They make you listen to the music.
Being large speakers I had expected imaging not to be their strong suit. The reality is that their left-right soundstaging was immediately better than the Mezzos and has remained consistently good. Depth imaging has improved over the time I’ve upgraded my system, just revealing more and more with each tiny positive change. A recent switch to NVA interconnects has revealed amazingly good depth soundstaging such that I have a complete 3D image in my room, from up-front vocals to stage rear detail well behind my rear wall.
Using in a Real Room
There is a fly in the ointment. I am running the Be-20s in an undersized room and they have the ability to load up the room with seismic waves of bass intensity. Thankfully, this turned out to be quite easy to control thanks to their ported design. Port stuffing entails putting a resistive load into the ports, sacrificing bass output in favour of a slight rise in resonant frequency and tightening of the bass response. I experimented with rolls of Monacor lambs wool damping material until I got it just right with four rolls, one in each of the ports extending to their full length and medium tightly rolled. The bass extension remains potent but bass is controlled and very tight while only loading up the room with extreme material played loudly, like Kraftwerk’s Minimum-Maximum, which is the ultimate trouser-flapping fun anyway. The graph shows the difference but doesn’t portray the real-world improvement to the degree that I hear.
A d’Appolito crossover design is a win for Usher and you might have thought that I would leave well alone. However, that was before I heard the SPEC 501 boxes on the Ushers. These small wooden beauties connect across the speaker terminals and modify the total load seen by the amplifier to one that is overall more benign and linear. I believe KEF started this trend by creating an inverse of the load impedance within the crossover itself. I was so impressed that I bought the top of the range SPEC 901EX units and they bring out even more of what the Ushers do so well, with a highly defined, wide and deep soundstage and remarkable focus on instruments and voice. Clearly the Belles finds the whole an easier load and I’m not arguing with that.
Conclusions
The Be-20 speakers are the single best hi-fi component I’ve ever bought. Pricy (but I didn’t pay close to their list price now), they are so capable that I’m not even sure I’m exploring their limits now. They clearly perform to a very high level and will most likely get even better in a bigger room. Not once have they proven to be even close to the weakest link in my system so they are highly likely to prove my last ever speakers, a prospect that fills me with satisfaction.
The good thing is, having heard some of the lesser models in the Usher range, the trickle-down effect is strong. I’ve heard similar traits in the CP range too, making the Usher offering available at much lower budgets and to a great many more members. It’s a shame that Usher representation has been patchy in the UK but don’t let that put you off. You owe it to yourself to hear these (or the Be-10 or CP series) if you are considering a serious speaker purchase.[/a]