I finished building the Excellent Two – M1 DXT around 4 year ago. Initially I bought the Seas woofers
from someone’s unfinished project. After researching the units I realized that these are difficult to
implement correctly. Thus rather than designing a configuration myself I found the design of the
Excellent Two as one of the few available online using this excellent little woofer. It ticked all the
boxes; small, simple filter setup, and high quality parts.
Getting the parts was more difficult than I originally anticipated. Seas doesn’t have a large presence
in Australia. Thus I ended up ordering the tweeters and filter parts from Europe myself.
The build was straightforward, only detail missing is the exact location of the port, thus I guessed
directly behind the tweeter. I build the speaker boxes from MDF and sprayed them with acrylic car
paint blue metallic (see picture). IMO this works well due to their rather smallish size.
The first testrun I did with the excellent two was in our 65m2 family room which has a lot of hard
surfaces, I used a 30 W class A amp. The sound blow me away, very revealing with unbelievable
dynamics for such a small speaker; it was able to fill the room up to reasonable sound levels. Bass
was very good too, obvious no subsonic heavy bass, but that’s to be expected from a 4.5” driver. My
wife and daughters were equally impressed.
After the test I moved the speakers to my desktop, besides my 38” monitor. Initially I heard some
distortion using a cd-player, class A amp and class A pre amp. After switching channels etc. I found
out that one of the channels of the pre-amp had a too high bias which pushed the power transitor
slightly in saturation. Now this must have been like this for a long time and I never picked it up
before, even not with my Solosound Electrostatic speakers (which I love too, but they are so
impractical).
After fixing the pre-amp I still found the sound a bit harsh, so I bought a good quality DAC, and that
gave me sound I was after; clean, clear and still plenty umph for this application. So yes the speakers
are revealing and will show any imperfection in your equipment.
I have my laptop (and cd player) connected to the DAC through an USB slot and use the Excellent
Two nearly every day. Now after using them for more than 4 years I still love the Excellent Two and
still like them as much as I did 4 years back. So thanks for the work you did Göran with designing
these excellent little speakers. Only issue I have is that I am sitting a bit too close to the speakers
(80-90 cm) but I can live with that.
So thumps up for this design, and feel free to put my review on your website.
Cheers,
Bart G.
