Loudspeakers

Tested here without any 'RAM Tweaks' this active version of the Legend 40.2 employs the same cabinet and trio of 135mm carbon-fibre reinforced bass and mid units, but with the rear-facing reflex port internally 'shorted' to yield a 2nd-order sealed-box bass alignment. Incidentally, there's a ~27msec latency on the analogue input... Meanwhile, the two lower woofers are driven in parallel from one TI Class D amp, delivering a –6dB bandpass of 45Hz-250Hz while the upper mid/woofer extends over a far wider 25Hz-2.9kHz (–6dB re. 200Hz). Thanks to SA's actively-tailored bass, the diffraction-corrected LF extension (–6dB re. 200Hz) is far lower at 31Hz [green shaded area, Graph 1] than the 50Hz we saw in the passive Legend 40 [HFN Aug '20]. Distortion is also reduced to <0.25% through bass and midrange at 90dB SPL but increases closer to the Legend 40's 1% once the DXT tweeter takes over.

The forward response, measured just above the cabinet at the likely listening axis, is not especially uniform but follows the uptilted presence/treble trend of the Legend 40, its HF response extending out to 34kHz (–6dB re. 10kHz) following a +3.0dB peak at 22.5kHz. There is a ~3dB dip at 1.5kHz here, seen closer to 1.2kHz in the Legend 40 and suggesting the mid/treble crossover has been adapted, together with a 'new' ~3dB reinforcement at 6kHz that skews the response uniformity to ±3.1dB and ±3.3dB, respectively. Pair-matching, again, was a slightly poor 2.2dB as one of our speakers possessed a higher 2kHz-20kHz output than the other [black/red traces, Graph 1].

The effect of the grille [blue trace, Graph 1] is to diminish the presence output, while the ±6dB gain settings do just what they say [grey traces]. On both speakers, there is some fine structure in the response between 3-5kHz that's also reflected in a persistent but low-level resonance seen on the CSD waterfall [Graph 2, below] – and also the Legend 40 before it. PM