Clarion SRE-1722S Component Speakers

Product Details
Manufacturer: Clarion
Website: clarion
Typical Selling price: £69.99 Clarion world price £59.99 inc delivery
Buying link (Clarion World – specialist Clarion sellers as few folks sell the speakers as well.) clarion
In a Nutshell
The Best First Sound Upgrade of choice for six marques: to whit, Alfa Romeo, Citroën, Opel/GM, Peugeot, Renault and Volkswagen. Efficient and snappy, these have a sweet tone and excellent imaging and staging. A real result for a small investment for those wishing to make their stock systems just sound a bit better and not have to have too much hassle or cost to get a PHAT improvement in their driving experience.
Overall 8.2
Sound Quality 7
Build Quality 8
Power Handling 7
Efficiency 9
Value For Money 9

Description
A set of two-way 6.5in or 165mm component speakers i.e. midwoofer and tweeter pairs with a minimalist passive crossover of a simple inline capacitor on the tweeter feed wire and no other control at all. No passive box, just a capacitor in the speaker wire. The chassis of the midwoofer is pressed steel and the magnet to its rear is a Rare Earth enhanced type, with Strontium in it. The frame is designed with made-to-fit screw holes for Alfa Romeo, Citroen, Opel, Peugeot, Renault and Volkswagen cars’ stock locations. The tweeters are supplied with a serious selection of hardware to allow surface/flush/angled mount as well as stock-style fitment of the tweeters into Renault, Peugeot and Citroen’s stock HF locations, too. The grilles are metal mesh and plastic and there are connection wires and fixings supplied. The tweeter wires are fitted with male/female plugs such that you cannot miss-connect them and get them out of phase. The midwoofers feature a prominent phase plug and have foam top roll suspensions.

Editor Review : Clarion SRE1722S Two-Way component Speakers
These babies are a remarkable set of speakers. You take one look and can be quite dismissive at first, as they appear to be pretty low tech. In fact the opposite is the case, with a paired set of transducers that work so well as a musical entity that all you need to keep them working sweetly is to keep the bass out of the tweeters with a basic -6dB per Octave capacitor in the positive speaker wire to the tweets. The strontium-magnetted mids do not care about being given high frequencies, they just roll them off and that treble is handled by the sturdy 25mm device that also is pretty good at coping with some deeper stuff being present in its voice coil than some would be happy with. The overlap of a mild -6dB per Octave crossover makes for a sweetly natural division of labour that really does not get in your face nor really let you know where the division is taking place. They just sound good.
I had them on a really posh amplifier to see how well they worked, given a clean signal and the answer was absurdly well. For make no mistake, these babies are what I would call First Upgrade, or even semi-OEM as they are made to drop perfectly to the fraction of a mm into no fewer than six different makes of cars’ stock locations’ screw holes and fittings. The grilles are entirely optional and you will be throwing some of that tweeter fitting furniture away, as you are provided with stuff for either slotting perfectly into a stock tweeter location (the French brands of car) or else using one of a choice of the other housings for a flush, or else surface or angled surface mounting. All the fixings you need are also supplied.
I played some stuff from a daft bass recording and also my usual audiophillia material. Now instead of playing as they aught to, upon mere head unit power – as despite the mad 300W rating on the box, this is a ‘commercial watts’ rating and the nominal power handling is, in fact a more sane true 40 watts, I powered them from a Soundstream 4.400 four channel amplifier.
They were in boxes immediately above the Hertz Mille two way components, whose each single passive crossover box easily outweighs the whole set of Clarion SRE1722S’s speakers, wires and all! The Hertzes are less pricey than they used to be at a fulsome ten times the price of the Clarions we are looking at here and yet the SRE1722S were a much much bigger fraction of the Hertz Mille’s performance than a mere tenth. It is terribly hard to quantify these things to exactitude as I am but human and loaded with my very own prejudices, feelings and moods but you try your hardest to be objective. And these speakers really do have some reach, both up and down in frequency and will utterly out-perform ANYTHING and I mean ANYTHING you may have fitted in the holes in your car from the factory of the brands these are made to marry up to.
So if you have Alfa, Citroën, Opel, Pug, Renny or Vee Dub, then these speakers represent a bloody brilliant and affordable sonic upgrade. You will not believe your ears as to how much louder, clearer and plain BETTER your car’s stock system will sound if you just apply these speakers. You do not have to make custom baffles in your doors nor even use the grilles if you don’t want to. Easy to fit with holes that meet up with your car’s, have all the bits you need to fit them and come with sweet tweeters you decide to site as you wish, if not using stock HF spots. Again, for these, you get some special hardware provided.
The sound has punch and depth and some really clean dynamics as well. They are not specialist stuff but they are affordable and amazingly high performance for what they cost. The don’t score enough on the Talk Audio Top Trumps system to get a gong award but I do heartily recommend these personally. If you simply want to hike the sound quality and power in your car (as these are made to be extra efficient as well) then these are a real option. And despite the low 40W nominal power handling and the silly 300Watts thing on the box and specs, they do also cope well with more than they were supposed to have as I gave them the thick end of 100w RMS at times to keep up with the same power going up the Milles in the boxes underneath (which were turned ALL the way down to test the Clarions) and they simply played all they were sent. So you can use a moderate amplifier with them later on as a second upgrade if you like, without killing them.
Specifications
– 165mm MI-PP (Mixed Injection Mica-Polypropylene) cone woofer
– 25mm Metalised PEI balanced-drive tweeter with neodymium magnet
– Two-way mounting tweeter (variable angle flush mounting/surface mounting)
– Custom-fit tweeter bracket included (for Renault, Peugeot, Citroën)
– Powerful strontium magnet for dynamic bass response
– In-line -6dB/oct. crossover network
– RMS power handling 40W (‘Music peak power 300W’)
– Frequency response 28Hz – 35kHz
– Efficiency 91dB/W/m
– Mounting depth 53mm