Loudspeakers

As is usually the case with compact loudspeakers, the Gold 100 has to make a trade-off between bass extension and sensitivity. The evidence points to MA's design team choosing to sacrifice a little of the latter to improve the former. While the specified sensitivity of 86dB is typical for a reflex-loaded speaker of this size, our measurements show it to be rather optimistic. Our pink noise figure of 84.5dB and 'music' figure of 84.4dB together suggest that 84.5dB is a more realistic figure. But there is payback in the bass extension, which our summed diffraction-corrected nearfield measurements recorded as 44Hz (–6dB re. 200Hz). However our tests also showed a mild 1dB peak at 58Hz before the response drops off rapidly at lower frequencies with the usual reflex fourth-order (24dB per octave) roll-off.

Foam bungs are provided to block the reflex ports should bass performance become boomy as a result of using the Gold 100 close to a room boundary, and with these in place the bass corner frequency rises to 78Hz (–6dB re. 200Hz) but the roll-off rate reduces to second-order. Forward frequency responses for the review pair, measured at 1m on the tweeter axis [see Graph 1, below] demonstrate a commendably flat trend from 700Hz to 12kHz. However, a broad dip at 400Hz and early tweeter peak at 16kHz increase the response errors to ±3.1dB and ±2.6dB respectively – though these are still respectable figures. Over the same 200Hz-20kHz frequency range, the pair matching error is ±1.1dB, the largest disparities being narrow-band between 2.3 and 3kHz. This corresponds with a ridge in the cumulative spectral decay waterfall [Graph 2, below], probably due to a breakup in the bass-mid unit diaphragm. KH