Alpine SPG-17CS Two-Way Components

The passive for this new Alpine ‘Type G’ speaker system is most odd. A simple smoke coloured translucent-topped box of caps, coils (iron cored ones, which is nice) and resistors, five bits in total, is on two boards inside with a set of jumper wires in between. The Woofer side has just the one iron cored inductor, making it a 6dB per Octave lowpass filter while the HF side has two resistors to add to its cap and coil 12dB per Octave filter. A simple three position jumper allows you to attenuate by 3dB or 6dB. The oddity is that the bass side has a set of input terminals on one end that are hidden when the top is covered, with the internal wires joining the two sections. If you were to open the box, remove the boards and cut the wires, you could run the passive as a true bi-wire/bi-amp filter. Or you could drill a hole for speaker wire egress on the other end. The tweeters are fabric domes and have a long wire ready attached. No wires are supplied for the bass end but you do get a comprehensive kit of surface/flush/angle mountings for the tweeters included. The bass drivers have plastic injection moulded chassis that seem very inert and solid and the cones feature a phase plug type central dome. Unlike some high end speakers that would have this plug used as a shaped piece protruding through the cone, often very solidly made of turned Aluminium, this is a similar shape but moves with the cone and is moulded from a  high rigidity, low weight material. There is a simple ring-shaped template perforated into the carton for mounting the midbass driver and the box also bears all instructions and a speaker fitting chart printed onto it. Fixings included.
– Power Handling 70w RMS
– Sensitivity 88.5dB 1w/1M
– Passband 68Hz to 20kHz
– Tweeter diameter 20mm
– Tweeter Mounting Depth 20mm
– Midbass Mounting Depth 61mm
– Cone: Polypropylene Pearl Mica injection
– Edge wound voice coil
– Tweeter: Silk dome with Neodymium magnet
– Passive dimensions (HxWxD) 108 x 70 x 32 mm
– Split board design for easy bi-wire or bi-amplification use
– Crossover slope 12dB per octave for HF  and 6dB per Octave for LF
– HF attenuation by internal jumper -3dB/-6dB
– Chassis: Injection moulded polymer
– Grilles included
– Complete with: tweeter mounting kit (surface/flush/angle) and fixings
– Perforated stiff card template on box
Review by Adam Rayner
These components were wired conventionally so as to get their ‘regular’ performance tested with one speaker wire from each channel of a stereo Rockford Fosgate Power 600-2 amplifier. You could use a small four channel amplifier and bi-amplify them and use their passive filters split (to add some security to any active filtering you may apply from the amp’s features) or you can use two sets of speaker wires attached to one set of stereo outputs so as to run the two drivers in parallel configuration. This is a direct comparator with bi-wiring a double set of binding posts on the back of a HiFi speaker. Most of the better home HiFi speakers come with two sets of connections that are joined externally with short metal jumpers. This the first time I have seen a speaker set in this lower price bracket have such a feature as it’s normally only found on the esoterica. I gather that this is part of the product’s direct tuning and aiming at the discerning UK market, which is Uber-cool.
I played the Sony MEX-DV1000 multi disc player and used a new all time favourite disc – a hybrid SACD that has way-beyond-CD resolution of old hippie music by Pink Floyd. After an indulgence with that I got Mudbone out and spun that up instead. This is a CD I was given by the guys at Bowers & Wilkins on a visit. Makers of cool and very posh home speakers, they are interested in cool tunes and run their own super-resolution downloads ‘club’. The material is blues fused with screaming hard rock and other styles. It’s awesomely well produced.
And the really nice thing is that you really can tell through these speakers as they sing like big posh birds and they do the crucial thing too. Which is to go loud enough so that the music is done justice. These are tunes to accelerate to. They need power behind them and they go loud with real purity, grip and pleasurable accuracy.
They also hold that detail and edge at high power levels. At first I was worried I was overloading them as there were a few grumbley sounds with the monster heartbeats at the start of the Floyd SACD (take bigger-than-CD-signal, then boost the bass? Hmmm) and realised I had some of the mad Rockford Fosgate Punch EQ dialled up, so quelled that and ran them again.
The bass end does roll off fast below the cut off as is inherent in a six inch driver but down to the point where it can go no further it plays with authority and grip unlike it aughta at the cost. This has to be down to those Edge Wound voice coils. This is when the wire isn’t round, it’s square in cross-section so when you make a coil, you get a solid cylinder of wire wrapped around the former like a stack of carpenter’s pencils, rather than round ones.
Thus you get more metal in the gap in the magnet and you get more shove and grip as a result and you can hear this in the ability to handle the low midbass with some proper power. Eventually I called up the EQ Seven feature on the Sony and pulled back the 68Hz fader, rolling off the bass somewhat and dramatically improving the slight tendency to overload as I was really sending them way too much power versus their rated nominal 70 watts. The Rockford is good for 200w RMS per channel so I had some amplifier headroom. (Or you were just being a ruddy hooligan, matey! Guru)
So, despite running them well over the recommended power limit, they didn’t care and simply seemed to love it. The bass is more than impressive from the low drivers and the massively rigid cone acts in a truly pistonic fashion. The suspension is solid and will need some running in as one of the top tech honchos at Alpine told me that their test examples really opened out once they had had some twenty hours or so running time. Which means they will go from merely good to outstanding after this time.
Lovely set of compos, really incredible value for the money and voiced to sound sweet to my UK reviewers’ ears. Alpine have done it again and Talk Audio happily awards a TA Recommended flag.
Overall 8.8
Sound Quality 9
Build Quality 9
Power Handling 9
Efficiency 7
Value For Money 10