NXT in trouble...

The future may not be flat:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1255434,00.html

-- Ian

 

And I've heard why...

 

I have the Mission NXT FS2Av gear in the lounge (purely so the sats can be hidden) and its really great,it will be a shame if they fold

 

isaac said

dude!
i have a pair of icon x4 - out of choice btw. i paid £1200 for them ex-dem. the only speakers i heard when demoing that came close to their transparency were the monitor gr10's. the bass is a tad flabby but they are in no way a crap idea. the treble and midrange has no noticeable crossover point and it provides a very very airy listen. the are very powerful and fantastically built. ridiculously priced at rrp though. the tunnel mindedness of the hifi bying public has stunted the development of a possible improvement in sound tech. our loss i'm afraid

 

Cyrus will be up for sale, it seems. Wish I had a spare few quid, I'd buy the company and force them to make full-width components.

-- Ian

 

Muffinman - I have in the past worked at a company where the product used NXT speakers.

They are a right pain in many ways. They're much easier to blow than a normal drive unit. The dispertion characteristics are plain odd and require very careful setup.

And they're harsher than sandpaper.

 

Iassc,
would that be the badgers arse grade, 40 grit reduction paper then ?

 

The stuff they've been leaving all over the roads around here lately.

 

Pfffft .... your units need to loose a few inches m8

 

Oh honestly, you cannot take something written in the Grauniad "business" section seriously

 

isaac said -

so my system does not sound fine then? i know i have posted another thread about upgrading, but it is not in respect of the speakers. how would you say that the dispertion characteristics vary from say electrostatics such as martin logans or quads? is it the mid bass intergration or is it something more?

 

I thought Cyrus had been completely independent for a few years? Maybe not.

 

muffinman - I can't comment on your system as I've not heard it. However, I do know for a fact (having worked with them) that for the price (and they are VERY expensive) you can achieve a better result with normal drive units than with NXTs. This is, in fact, the conclusion that someone from nxt (who will remain nameless) came to.

The dispertion characteristics are odd in that there are very significant dips in response off-axis, and then they pick up again further off axis. You get a smaller sweet spot and that requires toeing-in to achieve.

 

For sure the quality of speakers using this technology is generally far lower than audiophile and likely to remain so. The NXT panels' decay characteristics will see to this, even without the resonant peaks that are also generally present. However, I think that there may be some mileage in a combined system with the (inferior) NXT panels running at about -5dB relative to the moving coil units. This will mask their shortcomings and seems to give an overall dispersion characteristic that is more realistic (better ambients). Here, the decay characteristics of the flat panels can be a good thing.

I'm learning from my excursions into flat panel land. For example, where a conventional speaker's front baffle is allowed to vibrate by being too thin, inadequately braced or whatever, the speaker may be exhibiting combined flat panel/moving coil characteristics and the dispersion characteristics may be (against expectations) improved.

In a similar vein, and I'd like to whisper this, vibrating speaker/equipment supports may inadvertently improve the overall ambient sound of the system.

However, I would not be at all sorry if the company goes under. It would save the manufacturers who want to use the technology from paying the steep licence fees.

 

Nice use of fonts sizes Steve

 

Joel, check out Logic's second post :-

http://www.rdh.34sp.com/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=1987&

 

Blimey, an operating profit of £87,000 isn't much. I assumed Cyrus must be doing reasonably well, but obviously I was wrong.

-- Ian

 

I'm a bit confused as to whether the "speaker manufactering arm" referred to as Cyrus is Cyrus Electronics in its entirety, as oppposed to say "Cyrus Loudspeakers Ltd" for example. If it is the former then considering the R&D they must have invested in over the past few years, making an operating profit at all might be signs of some success. Instinctively though, considering how popular their range appears to have been recently, I would have expected them to be considerably more profitable. Anyone any idea what turnover this was based on?

 

AFAIK Cyrus is a single entity. I think it's safe to assume the Grauniad got that point of detail wrong, in typical style.

Cyrus have invested a lot in fabrication gear and surface mount equipment I would imagine, what I don't know is if (like Linn) they also use that investment to make non-hifi related products, if they don't it would easily swallow up a lot of investment capital.

-- Ian

 

Blimey 87K profits - I could understand if they were completely privately owned as one would expect the Directors to limit the profit subject to tax (ie, no shareholders to impress), but that seems a perilous number. Maybe NXT have been siphoning off revenue from Cyrus, but the implication of sale suggests it is the other way round. I really imagined Cyrus had made a highly successful (in revenue terms) relaunch of what was previously (to me anyway) a pretty unappealing brand. I bought a Cyrus 7 amp (having disliked their previous stuff) and was pleased with it. I feel their "concept" has been well articulated over recent years. Maybe any buyout would benefit considerably from the R&D and Fabrication investment that in theory has been largely completed (I guess ).

We made 60K profit and there's only two of us!