Paul White takes a look at a pair of nearfield monitors from Dawn which produce a solid, confident sound and are efficient enough to use with relatively small power amplifiers.

Measuring a compact 387 x 260 x 211mm, the Scout cabinets are reassuringly heavy and are finished in black textured paint. There is no grille on the studio version, though a hi-fi version is available with a removable fabric grille. Aside from being robust, the cabinets also appear to be very well damped, due, no doubt, to the use of heavy-grade MDF combined with additional bracing and damping.

The bass and mid range is handled by a 6.5-inch polypropylene driver with a soft roll-rubber surround. This is set into a shallow rebate in the baffle, as is the tweeter, a 1-inch, soft-domed, Ferro-damped device. The crossover has a nominal impedance of 8 ohms, though if the cabinet is bi-wired, more accurate figures are 8 ohms for the bass/mid and 6 ohms for the tweeter. A conservative 20-80 Watts of power handling is suggested by the manufacturers, though tests confirm that undistorted peaks well in excess of this can be accommodated with no problem. The manufacturers quote a frequency response that extends from 40Hz-25kHz, plus or minus 3dB, which is creditable for a speaker of this size, especially when you consider that the overall efficiency is a respectable 89dB/Watt at 1m.

In Use

The fact that these are completely sealed rather than ported cabinets must have some bearing on the progressive bass rolloff of these monitors (which is preferable to the common tendency to fall flat below the frequency at which the cabinet is tuned). This roll-off lends the bass an even, well-controlled feel, but is less hard hitting than you'd expect from a ported cab because there's no tuning to 'hype' the sound. From a monitoring point of view, this is a safer approach, as highly-tuned cabinets have a dangerous tendency to 'favour' certain bass notes, though I know there are some engineers who simply must have lots of bass, honest or not!

The high-frequency end exhibits a reasonably broad directivity pattern and is less abrasive than you'd expect from something with a rigid plastic or metal tweeter, but there's sufficient brightness there for analytical monitoring.

Sound Check

I tested these speakers with three different amplifiers — a Yamaha 2075, 75 Watts per channel job, a hefty Harman Kardon hi-fi amp rated at almost twice that figure, and with Tony Larking's TLA Mini Amp. I also managed to hear the speakers working for a short while with one of Dawn's own power amplifiers using the bi-wiring option. Like most small speakers, these sound bass light at low listening levels, but once you get them warmed up with a few watts behind them, the bass starts to fill out and take on rather more authority. The speakers are quite tolerant of positioning and produce a reasonably consistent tonal balance anywhere within 40 degrees of the main axis, the overall character tending to be reasonably smooth and neutral-sounding. In listening tests with the original prototypes, the speakers had a degree of forced brightness and hardness about them that could be wearing on some material. However, Dawn responded to the comments by radically changing the crossover design, which has improved the sound immeasurably. Obviously the perceived tonality will change depending on the room and the mounting position; care should be taken when positioning any speakers on a mixer meter bridge, as this can change the sound quite significantly.

Loudness was no problem with the recommended amplifier power — even when listening from two or three metres there was plenty of level. Stereo imaging was generally good, with plenty of flexibility in the engineer's position across the desk. A side benefit of the modest bass response is that the vital mid-range detail is left unobscured.

Dawn apparently took the prototypes of the Scout nearfield monitor around several studios to gauge the reaction of a number of engineers and producers, and were encouraged by the positive response. While I found the sound of the Dawn Scout prototypes a little hard for my own preference, I felt the production version was much better sounding and subjectively more accurate. Certainly the speakers stand up well alongside other small monitors in their price range, and if you're in the market for a new pair of speakers that are detailed, efficient and affordable, then the Dawn Scout should most certainly go on your list of speakers to hear.

Further Information
Dawn Scout monitors £481.75 per pair including VAT.

Dawn Audio Ltd, (Contact Details).

Bi-Wiring has been used in hi-fi circles for some time, though it seems that studios are only just starting to latch on to the benefits. But before telling you what bi-wiring is, it would help to outline the potential problems that it can help avoid.

Loudspeakers are relatively low impedance devices, typically eight ohms or so, and they are separated from the power amplifier by a length of connecting cable which also has a small but nevertheless finite impedance. When an electric current is passed through anything which exhibits electrical resistance, there is a voltage drop across the resistor which can be calculated quite simply using Ohms law; in this case, the voltage drop is equal to the resistance in ohms multiplied by the current in amps.

This effect also occurs in speaker cables, and the more power the amplifier pumps into the speakers, the more voltage drop there will be. Most of the power in a typical music signal occurs at the low end of the spectrum, but any voltage drop across the speaker cables will also affect the signal being fed to the high frequency side of the crossover network and, consequently, the signal being fed to the tweeter. In most cases, the effect is so minor as to be insignificant, but as much of the lore of hi-fi is devoted to solving insignificant problems, several designs are arranged such that the crossover network is built in two separate parts, each with its own set of input terminals. The trick is to use two sets of speaker cables to feed the two crossover inputs, (high and low), and to join these cables together at the amplifier end as shown in Figure 1. Now, any voltage drop which occurs in the 'low' feed will not modulate the 'high' feed. Whether or not you feel this is worthwhile depends on whether you feel the perceived improvement is worth the cost of two additional lengths of speaker cable!