Alpine Type R 6×9 SPR-69

Product Details
Manufacturer: Alpine
Website: http://www.alpine-europe.com/united_kingdom/home.html
Typical Selling price: £179.99
The much-maligned six-by-nine model of the Type R speakers from Alpine. It gets all the Type R features, like the one inch ring-dome of silk and the Neo magnets on the bass cones. There’s no phase plug of course as the tweeter is pole-mounted but you do get the HAMR surround to the bass cone to allow for extra excursion. The tweeter can be swivelled in its housing and you are supplied with a good selection of fixings and also loose grille badges to apply last thing upon installation, or else to choose to use as subtle ornament on a custom and more stealthy shelf installation.
– Glass fibre reinforced polymer chassis big improvement over pressed steel (low resonance)
– Layered Hybrid fibre bass cone with HAMR surround. (High Amplitude Multiple Roll)
– Neodymium magnet motor structure
– 25mm Silk ring-dome tweeter with swivel mount on a pole
– Power handling 100w RMS, 300w peak
– Sensitivity 90dB (2.83V, 1m)
– Frequency Response: 60Hz to 29kHz
– Impedance 4 Ohms
– Mounting depth 72mm
– Lug connection terminals for spade-end speaker connectors
– Fixings included
– Separate badges for application after install or to trim if desired
– Steel mesh and plastic frame injection moulded grilles
– Perforated stiff card template on printed box, which has all technical details printed on it
Editor review : Alpine Type R SPR-69
The SPR-69 is by nature going to make better bass than any smaller component can and so scores a phat point higher on Sound Quality than its compo brethren that was in the same test on the same amp. In this case they were also fed a slightly richer diet of a little bass boost as well from the Infinity Kappa amplifier, also on test.
The tweeters are good but as found with the compos can get a little hard when driven with vigour and as a full one inch sized driver, they can also raise some Cain, so are really good for that make-some-bass-from-the-back effect that ovals are so good at.
Their bass was classic six-by-nine. Tight, well balanced, taut and with nuance and ability to track even rich bass lines with a great melodic ability, quite removed from a crappy cheap subwoofer that can only go boomp boomp badly, let alone one of the new generation of Alpine’s shallow HAMR woofers (as seen in the new Euro demo Nissan Infiniti demo car!) that sound so fabulous.
I love the swivelly tweeters and reckon that if on your rear shelf, you don’t attempt to point their output at the front of the car but rather work out some Newtonian angle-of-incidence stuff with your back window and spray the highs directly flat at the screen to the rear if you can to best distribute the high tones.
I really enjoyed these and can promise that if you marry them up to the components SPR-60C – also tested with them and play them from a decent four channel amplifier, you will get a slice of SQL! (Sound Quality Loud!) which is why they score so well on the Value For Money front, despite not being really cheap. These are great for the cash and just what the greedy ice hound wants to get as much music power as possible for the expenditure and easily score enough to garner a Talk Audio Recommended flag!
Overall 8.8
Sound Quality 9
Build Quality 9
Power Handling 10
Efficiency 8
Value For Money 8