Pioneer 6x9 Speakers

[Earleen Statham]

Thatwas my first thought when Pioneer asked if I would be interested in reviewing a pair of their Pure Malt Speakers, whose cabinets are made from 50 year old retired malt whiskey barrels. Apparently Pioneer has sold these speakers for years in Japan, and last year began to offer them for sale in the USA exclusively via their website.

I have never thought of Pioneer as a speaker company. I am aware that they have made speakers for years, but to be honest, I have never considered them when shopping for speakers. But how can I resist the opportunity to audition what appeared to me to be a unique custom product such as these?

I was really surprised at how small the speakers were when they arrived. I had not looked at the specs, and figured they would be a medium sized bookshelf. But they are actually quite small, with the cabinets measuring roughly 6"(w) x 10"(h) x 8"(d). But from the moment I removed them from their boxes I was smitten. They are gorgeous to look at, and extremely well made. I love hand-crafted products, and these are easily described as small works of art. The finish is well sanded, smooth and full of the character of the barrels. Although the pair is matched, each speaker has its own unique look due to all of the staves of wood that have been pieced together to create the cabinet. Pioneer says that it takes an entire whiskey barrel to produce each pair of Pure Malts.

The Malts are incredibly well made - when was the last time you saw a speaker made entirely of hardwood? Upon opening up the speakers, that is exactly what I found. Even the extended port protruding into the speaker is constructed from hardwood. The tiny woofer has a beefy, heavy magnet, and there was a modest amount of damping material covering the interior. The gold-plated banana plug input terminals were very solid, but I do have a few complaints. They are spaced too far apart to be able to use banana plug pairs, and the terminals were too small to accommodate one brand of banana plug connectors I have. I have always assumed that banana plugs are standardized, but apparently not. This sent me on a side project of testing all of the different banana plugs I had lying around the house. In fairness to Pioneer, only the one brand did not fit (although it fits in all of the other speaker brands I have tried).

The black speaker grills connect via four solid metal nubs that worked very well and will not break. The grill itself has a plastic frame, but is very solid - more so than many higher priced speakers I have encountered. The cabinet itself is deep - deeper than it is wide, and has a port on the rear. The top and sides of the speaker taper in towards the front ever so slightly, giving the speaker very high-quality design touch.

I really did not know what to expect from such small speakers. The first thing I was very surprised to find was that they actually had some bottom end. In fact, the more I listened, the more I was amazed at what I was hearing from such a small woofer. As long as I kept them at a moderate level they really filled the room with a rich, and even warm sound. My listening room is not a huge room, and this worked in the Malt's favor. I ran some cable out into my great room, which is very large with 12 foot ceilings, and found a large drop-off in the quality. They began to distort when I pushed the volume to levels needed for the bigger area. They simply cannot fill a large room with adequate sound.

Back in my listening room, I found that for critical listening, you could not veer too far off axis before audio quality suffered, particularly frequency response and imaging. But when sitting on my couch (the preferred listening spot in the room), they were quite respectable.

Using my trusty Lyle Lovett Joshua Judges Ruth disc, I found the speakers to be very musical, providing a very warm tone for the lush vocals found throughout the disc. I tried out selections from Norah Jones and Tift Merritt with similar results - as long as I kept the volume at a moderate volume level, the speakers did fine. At times I was startled by the amount of bottom end produced. They also excelled with similar content from Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris (Real Live Roadrunning).

At $598 for a pair, these speakers are not cheap for their size and ability. But if you consider the aesthetic appeal and high build quality of these speakers, they are a great fit for certain applications. If you are looking for a conversation piece for your study or small office, these not only look great, but sound very good for a smaller environment where music will be listened to a lower levels. They are quite capable of filling a 12 x 12 room, for example, with warm and tasty music. In fact, dim the lights, build a fire in your fireplace, turn on your stereo system, sit back and enjoy listening to your music through speakers that may, in a former life, have been used to age that glass of whiskey in your hand.

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Over the years J. has constantly found himself to be an "early-adopter," spending way too much money on "new" technologies such as Compact Disc, LaserDisc, and DVD. He is one of the few people who actually purchased (and still owns) a CORE programmable remote control (bonus points if you remember this product).

When I first started out in vintage audio, I knew I needed to upgraded my speakers. I began researching vintage speakers and one pair kept popping up as legendary, the JBL L-100 speakers. I was thrown off by the price, often over $800 a pair, and mentioned to a friend that I wanted JBLs but they were too expensive. He suggested I look for Pioneer HPM-100 speakers instead. They were designed by the same person who made them for JBL but the Pioneers were an improvement from his original design. Even better, not many people knew this so the Pioneer speakers often sell for much less.

I began my search for Pioneer HPM-100s locally but could not find anyone selling a pair. Our family took a spring break trip to Nokomis, FL, and while there I searched for Pioneer speakers on Craiglist and found a pair of HPM-100s for sale in Tampa for just $400. I jumped at the chance to buy them and we picked them up on our way to a spring training game in Tampa between the Detroit Tigers and the New York Yankees.

Playing the turntable (and anything else from the receiver) through the Sonos speakers- yes. I would like to change my regular speakers to sonos speakers so I can scatter the speakers around the house when needed.

If you want to keep using the Pioneer you could use the Sonos Port to bring sound from your receiver to Sonos speakers and vice versa. The Pioneer should have an RCA in and an out for this. Does it come with that?

I've reviewed a few of these types of speakers. Pioneer calls this one a "Wireless Speaker" but that's not really adequate for the category. Music streaming speaker (MSS?) is probably more accurate, if less pithy.

Either way, my experience has been that for most, it's function first, quality second. As in, you get sound, but it's not very good. Unless the MSS has some sort of special attention paid to sound quality, I try to avoid them.

What got my attention with this one, then? Well, the A4 has been tuned by none other than Andrew Jones, and given how amazing his inexpensive Pioneer speakers are, I figured this doodad was worth a look.

Inside is what counts, and there you'll find two 1-inch tweeters, two 3-inch midranges, and a 4-inch "subwoofer." Not sure why any 4-inch driver is called a "sub" when even "woofer" would be a bit of a stretch, but what do I know? There are two 10-watt amps inside, plus a single 20-watter.

On the back there's Ethernet and USB for wired digital, and a 1/8th inch jack for analog. A credit card-sized remote offers volume, play controls, and an input button. The power, volume, and input buttons on the front of the A4 are all touch-sensitive, which is cool.

With so few buttons, how, might you ask, does one connect this thing to your wireless network? Smartly, Pioneer has multiple videos on their website, known most people's mortal fear of reading manuals (myself included).

I expect most people will use their iPhonadpod, and there's a video for that. It's incredibly simple, literally just plugging in your iOS thing and pressing two buttons. You can also connect the A4 to your network using your computer.

Once connected, you can use the free Pioneer Control App to control the A4, and to play Pandora or vTuner. On the Android side, it has HTC Connect built-in as well, but since I don't have the One (yet...), I wasn't able to test this.

It gets cooler. The A4 has AirPlay, so you can open iTunes and select it as a speaker. Whole house audio, anyone? Right now, I can play music through the speakers connected to my computer (through a Wadia PowerDAC mini), the speakers in my theater (via an Apple TV), and the A4. Three rooms, no fuss. Awesome.

But what if you're not near WiFi? The A4 is capable of creating its own network, called Wireless Direct mode, which you can access directly from your phone, and stream music that way. It does this instead of Bluetooth, which isn't exactly known for sound quality.

So first up, I placed it on my dining room table and cued up "Fable (Dream Version)" by Robert Miles. I would qualify the A4 as "surprisingly loud." At maximum it definitely approaches party volumes, enough so you'd have to raise your voice a little if you were standing near it. With an SPL meter roughly 1m away, I measured about 97 dB. Perhaps more impressive, there's no distortion at these levels.

The bass on this 90's techno track, isn't particularly deep, so I queued up my standard organ test track, "Lindenkirche Berlin" played by Gerhard Oppelt. There is definitely more bass than you'd usually expect from such a small speaker. Four-inch "subwoofer" indeed. The low pedal tones were both loud and deep.

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