Here’s a little update for anyone interested in the Andrew Jones pioneer line. I recently purchased another pair of the bs22 on sale, and the fs52 and c22 center as well.
I found a thread at audiocircle on these speakers in which two Dennis Murphy mods is discussed. The lessor known one is to install the same vita/peerless tweeter, but with just a 3.9 uf cap on the positive side of the tweeter at the crossover.
I did this with the center(c22) and also installed some one inch sonic barrier, parts express sells all of this stuff.
Anyway, with the tweeter, cap and sonic barrier, the center performance is markedly better. Previously the cabinet verberations affected clarity and the dialogue at times. Also the stock tweeter can be a little inexact with some music I’ve noticed.
So I did the tweeter cap thing with the fs52’s as well. But no barrier as I didn’t have enough. The better tweeter does make itself known, but I think the towers could still benefit from added sound damping.
Still, improved sound for sure and the center’s 4” drivers are so ideal for dialogue. I’ve owned 3 other centers and bigger woofers tend to add a sense of bass to voices that dont belong. maybe more expensive drivers don’t do this, but the $350 and under centers I’ve owned are not perfectly neutral, or at least Paradigm centers from a decade ago have this weakness.
The 4 inch drivers in the C22 are really something. Only weakness is the 90 watt rating, but I’m fine with it with my 150 wpc Denon AVR. At my seating distance of 12 feet, 70 decibels for typical dialogue is plenty loud, and at that level the C22 is probably seeing a watt or two except for action scenes.
Also, I prefer the bs22 for music over the fs52. Weird but true, the tower has a little haziness in the upper mids to lower tweeter range, but of course goes lower than the bookshelf model. Too bad they couldn’t have used the 4 inch mid in the tower, thuogh what I’m hearing might have been aleveated with a more expensive crossover network, something that just couldn’t happen at the price point Pioneer was working with.
Also, some say the Elac stuff is better at higher prices. That may well be true, but the very nice curved cabinets of the Pioneers is not matched by anything out there anywhere near the price. Edited to add: If Pioneer upgraded the color, improved the tweeter and cabinet damping, they could call the whole line Version 2 and easily add $50-75 to the retail price. I should call them!