Phoenix Gold, a name that's been around for about two decades, started out in this industry as a simple cable company. Within just a few years the company branched out, introducing amps, speakers and even processors - most of these products boasting new ideas and technologies.
This month I auditioned PG's newest speaker offering, the RSd 65cs 6.5" component set, hailing from the company's Radial SD lineup and retailing at $159. The manual says these speakers have a power handling capability of 5 to 120 watts (minimum RMS/peak), which is a respectable number for a set in this range. Let's dive a little deeper and see if the gurus at Phoenix Gold have anything up their sleeve.
Impressions
Upon opening the box, I found an owner's manual, warranty card and full-size template for the woofer cutout (a nice inclusion). Written only in English, the manual includes detailed instructions for the installation of the woofers, tweeters and crossovers. On the back page, a chart lists Thiele/Small parameters for this model and the other two in the Radial SD component line.
Delving deeper into my box, I found a pair of woofers with black, wrinkle-finish, powdercoated, stamped steel frames with a multiple-bolt pattern that should fit whatever you have. Also featured on these woofers is a very light injection-molded, aluminum-plated, grained polypropylene cone to help track the signal more accurately. Butyl rubber surrounds the woofer, while a flat linear roll spider and interwoven tinsel leads add strength and reliability. Another nice addition is a self-adhesive foam gasket to seal the speaker to its mounting surface, and an attractive, acoustically transparent black grille. (Black is a much more attractive color for a grille than the silver we see so much of today.) These features are a rare find in a bargain-priced speaker.
Next for inspection are the 0.75", swivel-mount, soft-dome tweeters. Not only do the tweeters include two different plenums for surface mounting, they can be disassembled down to the bare tweeter if you need to install them in a small factory location like a mirror or sail panel. If you need to flush mount them, you can use them the way they come out of the box.
The final pieces of the puzzle are the passive crossovers. These 12dB units appear to employ high-quality components in their construction. They feature relatively large-gauge coils, good-quality Mylar capacitors in the high-frequency section (a boon for smooth tweeter response), sandstone resistors, an attenuation switch with two settings (+2dB and 0dB), and a clearly labeled barrier strip with gold-plated screws. All this is clearly visible through the translucent smoked-acrylic cover.
Installation
With all of the included mounting options, installation into my test boxes was a breeze. Installing them into a car should be just as easy and, with all of the mounting aids, they should fit into just about any vehicle.
Listening
Blues
B.B. King With Bonnie Raitt "Baby I Love You"
Bonnie Raitt and B.B. King are a couple of my very favorite performers of any genre. On this track they teamed up to do a blues classic.
The first thing I noticed was the very good bass response exhibited by these inexpensive speakers. Usually, at this price point, good bass response is something you can hope for but you can't always count on. Not only could I detect the bass fundamentals (surprisingly), they were almost in correct proportion to the vocals and instrumentals (even more surprising). Also quite pleasing was the sound of the drummer's rim shots and the comping guitar. The piano sounded like a piano without any bitey notes to jump out and assault my tender ears. Bonnie Raitt's sonic image was well centered and stable. These speakers conveyed a sense of space and openness that I rarely find at this price point. When B.B. King's vocals come in, they're also convincingly portrayed. The PGs did an acceptable job at almost everything, but the cymbals, at times, sound too splashy and overly bright.
Score: 7/10
Jazz
GRP All Stars "Senor Blues"
Always a pleasure to listen to, the GRP All Stars are a collection of some of the hottest jazz kats in the studio today. Here, they're playing a jazz classic that's been covered by many artists before, but I don't think anyone can do it better.
This piece starts off with a drum riff using snare and toms alternately, followed by a piano lead-in to the full band. This is a much more complex piece than the last one and it shows in the fact that the PGs didn't bring out the inner detail here as well as they did in the previous selection. This isn't to say they didn't sound good - they do - but some of the detail was lost and images weren't pinpoint or stable. When there's this much happening all at once, some speakers can be outpaced, as was the case here. As far as how well they dealt with the dynamics of this piece, they didn't seem to be strained at what I call performance level. To that effect, they didn't break up until the music was playing considerably louder than I normally listen to it. Even the flute and piano solos stayed together at a high-volume level, although on a few notes the flute sounded rather harsh and slightly too bright. The trumpet solo sounded great, and the ensemble work at the end of the selection was the perfect finishing touch.
Score: 6.5/10