Friday, November 15, 2024
Car AudioProduct Reviews

Alpine SPX-17REF

A two-way component speaker system with separate tweeter units, midbass drivers and passive crossovers. Complete with a mounting kit to fit the tweeters in more than one application and screws and fixings. Unique in this collection, this set also has the ability to mount the tweeter over the midbass cone coaxially but does so via a steel bridge frame piece rather than having the tweeter mounted on a pole protruding up through the middle of the cone, thus allowing dirt into the voice coil gap over time. This also allows the dust dome to form part of the diaphragm’s moving surface and is by far a better method. I recall JBL ranting about this in their T545 promo material years ago. The speakers are built with heavy duty engineering standards and are massy and bulky. The passives have large size inductor coils to avoid high power saturation and so handle more watts.
The tweeters are very high quality and are an annular ring/dome design rated to reach all the way up to 40kHz, which is beyond hearing but is good for high resolution audio and means the headroom at audible frequencies is better. A serious box of layered components with feature grilles but no wire included.
– Power Handling 75wRMS
– Sensitivity 89.5dB 1w/1M
– Own Pink noise test figure 113.5dB (Vol @20 @ trk 9 dB Drag Vol III)
– Passband 35Hz to 40kHz
– Tweeter diameter 25mm
– Tweeter Mounting Depth 16mm
– Midbass Mounting Depth 65mm
– Cone: Aluminium with sipes
– Tweeter: Hybrid ring/dome design silk
– Crossover slope & point: 12dB per octave @ 1.8kHz
– Chassis: Aluminium cast chassis with tuned chamber
– Complete with: tweeter mounting kit (surface/flush/angle), fixings and tweeter bridge pieces
Review by Adam Rayner
These Alpine speakers are like the Pioneer set in that apart from the distinctively Japanese style of ornate printed and perforated box and polystyrene packaging used, the speakers themselves look as if they came from a specialist speaker company rather than being part of a mainstream range. They are gorgeously engineered and any brand-o-phile will love the sheer Alpine-ness of the look and design of these. The mids have shapely cast chassis, the passives use fat and meaty inductor coils and the tweeters have massive high end extension.
This results in a very fast and speedy HF that has no issues at all with headroom. The metal cones have a lovely snap and speed and give a well defined sound with a clean and melodic bass end that moves with a bass line and never gets monotonic or boomy as did some of the USA flavoured items. To me, the set has a distinctly high-end Japanese sound to it. Clinical and tremendously detailed yet with the ability to wick up the muscle when the user wants to.
Again, The Race by Yello was so much fun I just left it playing. It lacked the sweet wonderfulness of some of the massively more expensive sets and certainly didn’t have the absurd hairy chested throb of things like the Atomics or the JBLs, but for the money it’s an easy certainty of a level of excellence that’ll satisfy all but your dyed in the wool audiophile. Alpine have their mad end F#1 Status speakers for them. They also feature siped cones but unlike these Aluminium ones that don’t really need it but do look cool with the shapely curves, the paper F#1 jobs are cut-sipes and are all about break-up modes and insanely expensive, too. So back with these very posh real world 17Refs, they can do the loud stuff but I would suggest they were best for mostly sensible use, even if on a pretty big amplifier or a four channeller bridged like the iPaul I used. An easy Recommended buy.
Overall 8.8
Sound Quality 9
Build Quality 10
Power Handling 9
Efficiency 9
Value For Money 8