Hybrid Audio Technologies Unity U61-2 6in Two-Way Component Speakers
Product Details
Manufacturer: Hybrid Audio Technologies
Distributor: Hybrid Distribution UK
Website: hybrid
Typical Selling price: £329.99Description
Six inch speaker component system with separate silk dome tweeter and passive crossovers. From a very high end line, these are their middle-price option, offering a lot of the top models’ technology but with certain savings made. Still intended to astonish but not only by the price tag.Specifications
– Two-way system, U2x passive crossovers with tweeter protection and selectable tweeter attenuation
– Impedance: 4 Ohms
– Power Handling: 100W RMS/230W peak (20 to 150W)
-U1 tweeter is impregnated silk textile dome with high-loss rubber suspension, 20mm voice coil, Ferrofluid cooled and damped
– U6 bass cones of pressed paper, treated with polymer, with inverted high loss rubber surrounds
– Cast ABS polymer chassis, grilles supplied
– Passband: 50Hz to 22kHz +/-3dB
– Sensitivity (1w/1m): 93.2dB
– Mounting Depth:69mm
– C/W grilles, long fixing screws, tweeter mounting hardware options and the best manual I have ever seenThiele-Small Parameters for BOTH UNITY SYSTEMS’ midbass drivers
Parameter Unity U61-2
Overall Diameter 150mm 165mm
Mounting Depth 68mm ;68.8mm
Bolt Circle Diameter 156mm
Mounting Hole 140mm
Rec Min Hipass Freq (4th order) 65Hz 60Hz
Pnom Rated Power Input (No Xover) 25watts 40watts
Pmax Rated Power Input (No Xover) 50watts 80watts
midbass driver passband 60-8,000 Hz +/- 3dB 55-6,500 Hz +/- 3 dB
Mms 9.48g 10.5g
Editor Review : Hybrid Audio Technologies U61-2 Two-Way Component SpeakersFirst off, check this out as a mission statement. ‘Our goal is to not only build the best-performing mobile audio systems in the world, but to also educate consumers and professional installers alike on how to achieve reference-grade audio system playback in the mobile audio environment.’ Wow! They clearly mean business. This is from a manual that is not just a brilliant speaker installation guide but also goes off into the depths of serious in car audio. Things like path length offset and Inter-aural time delays. It’s brilliant stuff and is of use to anyone who cares about ultimate sound quality in their car.
So, what is all this Hybrid Audio Technology (HAT) fuss about? Well, Scott Buwulda, the owner, started out as a sound off competitor and progressed into designing his own speakers, based upon what he found worked best in cars. Now, many years along the line, the stuff is no longer with a ‘hobbyist’ distributor, although the serious slice of expertise that the previous ‘day job’ other chap brought to bear is still available to UK buyers – helpful to have tech in the same time zone – and the new Matrix Audio operation is a scaled-up version of the previous way of doing things, with advertising in the trade and consumer press as well as attending consumer and trade shows, too.
The speakers are known to have a massive reputation, with a USA magazine raving about them and indeed, I was very impressed with the posh ones I was sent that time a while back. But like any talented technologist, what happens is that you develop the best you can make and then you start to work out how to offer more and more of the technology devised at a lower price point. And these UNITY speakers are just that sort of product. I won’t go into full details here as they are all available on the HAT site but suffice it to say that a large slice of the stuff that could be used from the range above this, has been utilised in making the Unity speakers.
Make no mistake, the HAT stuff starts at the sort of prices that other speaker makers finish at but when you start comparing them with CDT, high end Audison, Focal or Morel speakers, their prices start to look less bonkers. (Let alone the lofty grand per pair for the raw Pioneer top end drivers!) And how well they work is why.>
I fired up a sweet source – the Pioneer P88RSII and sent signals through JL Audio RCA cords to the Alpine 4ch amp that reviewed so very well here: talk audio and then I spun some tunes.
The Focal Spirit of Sound disc #6 is getting really tedious as I know every note. But that is the point. I found myself able to count backing vocalists. Able to hear the layers of instruments in a recording, from the rasp of a bowed cello to that archetypical ruddy triangle going ting ting. But you could hear it was metal, with that complex ring and how hard it had been hit and you could feel the rasp of the beeswax on the Horsehair across the gut strings. The edges of drums and their crisp attack and above all a wonderful sound stage hanging before you.
I found them a little strident and still feel that even at this level, it is sad that it is necessary to put a (+) on a marking on a passive crossover as it is passive and can add no watts. Therefore, all you can do is attenuate and maybe start with an over bright HF to combat the essentially absorptive nature of a lot of the interior. I hate the perfect sparkle removal that happens when you run through just one extra resistor in a passive, as it doesn’t just lower the whole output by the decibel or so, it also removes the very pointiest part of the crystal’s tip, right where it is sharpest.And with this set, you can tell as the tweeters are just prodigious in their ability. I love the inverted suspension of the midbasses and can tell you that these really are special drivers. The whole adds up to a level of purity and yet rich sonic loveliness that is just a treat for the ears. Even with the over bright-on-the-bench effect, I have to realise that many of these will be in foot wells to minimise the difference between how far each speaker is to the ear from each other and so will need this power.
It was so like having real HiFi in the test bench it was phenomenal and I heartily recommend these to anyone who just wants some purity in reproduction and cares about nuance and subtlety. And as for what the best ones are like now, wellwe’ll have to try. But for now, this is one well-impressed speaker tester.The tweeter furniture is pretty standard.
In a Nutshell
These are bloody well made and sound wonderful. Bright, crisp, detailed, sweet and enjoyable with awesome sonic cues and sound staging.
Highly developed by a true car audio nutter, there are many ways in which these systems are car audio gospel purity-in-intent. Not prettied-up domestic speakers not even rated properly for use in the damp old car (I know a big brand notorious for just that) but rather stuff designed to sound good in the car audio environment. Features like smaller tweeters with fabulous engineering or the minimalist passives with the drivers’ roll offs being crucial to the process.
So, not only do these score a Best Buy flag for their overall score, they are also the earners of a new Talk Audio flag. One we needed but didn’t have and, just like my chums over on Home Cinema Choice, gets awarded entirely upon the reviewers’ discretion. And that is REFERENCE class. For above a certain quality point, you can use a ‘reference’ grade piece of kit to ‘listen’ to the performance of other bits plugged into it. So ‘reference’ grade speakers mean you can hear how well the amp and player are working. A ‘reference’ amp is needed to hear how well a speaker sounds and so forth. And these really are that good. The very fact that these earn a Reference flag and are not all the way up the HAT line, just proves that despite the huge prices on these babies, you get good value and you get what you pay for!
Overall 9.2
Sound Quality 10
Build Quality 9
Power Handling 9
Efficiency 10
Value For Money 8
PS You might enjoy their video:
http://vimeo.com/31210591