FIRST EVER FULL TEN! Alpine X-S69C 2-Way Component Speakers
Manufacturer: Alpine Electronics
Website:link
Typical Selling price: £449.99
In A Nutshell
THE FIRST EVER PERFECT TEN!!!! The X-S69C is the biggest of the Alpine full range X Series loudspeakers, sharing the same High Resolution tweeter and passive network and being driven by same 35mm voice coil bass motor (around an internal super Neo magnet) that plays the 6.5 inch speakers, yet with a much larger surface area. This results in an absolutely immense potency, power, efficiency and general all round awesomeness, the like of which has never been witnessed in an oval chassis speaker. The bass motor is like Nipponese Harry Potter Majicke and the tweeter literally marvellous. I utterly adore these. Incredible clarity and detail, with a taut bass control that reveals things you never heard before on familiar tracks and virtuoso accurate highs that can smite you right in the feels. Buy once. Buy Alpine X-Series X-S69C because oddly, it’ll be cheaper than the several upgrades path I took with mine. That last bit makes the score 10/10/10/10/10
Overall 10
Sound Quality 10 Delicious, potent, linear, high resolution and smooth
Build Quality 10 Top end precision, breath taking new engineering, gorgeous
Power 10 These are stupid loud. Lout loud arrested in Southend loud
Efficiency 10 Serious use of watts from the massive cone area on the same motor
Value For Money 10 Costly vs. the rubbish ones at bike shops but insanely better value
The Ovals
The Tweeters
and their passive crossovers.
A truly delicious approach to the fabulous X-Series technology. I am so glad that this exists as a set of six by nines, for it dismisses any objections to rear stereo imagery that any installer may have, by way of their ability to high frequency phase flip, the attenuation of that HF or even the choice to site the component tweeters elsewhere. Easily State of the Art within Talk Stuff’s audio genre.
IN FACT, THESE HAVE JUST GOT THE FIRST EVER FULL TEN FOR ALL SCORES! The toughest of those is high end performance without getting to incredibly high prices that normal people could never afford, like say the £2,500 LTD edition Morel Elate things I have seen. But the Alpine X-S69C, while expensive, are smartphone-expensive, not sportscar expensive and more folks can aspire to them as being the BEST.
Editor Review : Alpine X-S69C 6×9 inch 2-way Component Speakers
This set of component loudspeakers has more resonance for me, personally, than almost anything I have ever reviewed. I am talking about an emotional issue to do with a favourite kind of product and how I discovered that the so-called Great & The Good of British car stereo regarded the 6×9 as the spawn of the devil. Like stereo flat Earthers that could not abide the concept of a subwoofer and to this day reject surround sound, these ‘˜experts’ decreed that any full range sound coming from behind you was essentially wrong. It all had to be in front of you, like a concert. Go Google ‘˜Hafler surround’, if you can be bothered. For sound in all directions is something, that despite being the most deaf of all mammals, we are really well equipped to detect. Of bloody course you can tell if a sound is coming from behind you and yet still enjoy it. This is car audio, not a concert. Only truly deep bass and odd midband noises can be hard to locate for us humans. Both mice and cats have ears that swivel, most mammals do. Owls can swivel their head with 270° flexibility instead of having movable ears. But we can still tell. Tiny fractions of a second. Even that ‘˜how far away is it?’ noise, is having you make judgements involving milliseconds, unconsciously.
And then there is the big bass elephant in the room. For the 6×9 inch loudspeaker is the daddy of the automotive standard size transducer. Like car radio DIN sizes, speakers for cars are made in a series of standard circular sizes (3in, 4in, 5.25in, 6in/6.5in) and traditionally one oval. Nowadays that one oval has been added to and you can get oval speakers in funny little sizes to replace some Ford and other car makers’ speakers. But the 6×9 remains the biggest hole you will ever find in a car’s factory location. The funny little Ford Ka had two of these big oval holes under the seat boss and lots of great big cars have got this hole shape in their parcel shelf.
The other historical thing was the easy availability of the replacement heavy duty parcel shelf, often buyable for a few quid complete with carpeting and the right holes and mountings for your car. Thus the DIY buyer could upgrade his or her car speakers and install them easily, without getting involved in boxes – a big step. And here is the other thing, again to do with elephants. Elephants, like bloody great huge cetaceans can use infrasonics for long-range communication. Their bodies are big enough to generate the big deep wavelengths sufficient to shake the African sod or wobble the very fabric of the ocean and call for mates across an entire ocean basin or 40 miles of savannah. Car speakers have been used by Cambridge University in their studies of elephant communication and I can tell you that they did not use the small drivers. For yes, the humble 6×9 for all that it has a main cone driven by the selfsame motor as a regular 6 1/2 inch speaker, still has more real estate, more crucial cone area, by far. Like the statement, ‘There ain’t no substitute for cubes’ about big bore muscle engines, surface area is key for bass power and these have that.
And the 6×9 is the first loudspeaker loud enough to squeeze your adrenal glands. This is about the sound pressure level Threshold of Excitement. The difference between, ‘I quite like that, I love this exciting music..’ and every hair on your body is standing on end as you shout, ‘YEAAAHHHH!!!!’. There is a tightness, a depth, power and emotional grip of the bass that a pair of 6x9s can make. Before I ever started to write about it, I had 6x9s and had been blowing them up, seeking ever yet better, more powerful, louder ones. I did reach a quality and power limit with another brand but I suspect that had I had access to this particular product back then, I would have been thrilled out of my mind.
In the unboxing video I made, I reveal that the biggest group test I ever did, was 6x9s in three groups of 20 pairs! Because despite what the pompous experts were saying, the sales figures for oval speakers meant that every single car speaker brand, no matter how ‘˜posh’ had several 6×9 models, from entry-level to them being the biggest, loudest coaxial loudspeaker they sold with their biggest price tag. Now, back in the mists of time in my very first job in car audio, when I joined the company they had some old stock of Acoustic Research 6×9 component loudspeakers. That was over 30 years ago. Around 20 years ago, I was repping in the industry and had 6×9 components from Kicker in the USA. But whilst I have seen genuinely high end tweeters hanging on bridges above 6×9 cones, rather than being pole mounted, in an effort to pursue excellence, I have never seen a set of 6×9 components since then.
That makes these loudspeakers absolute modern unicorns. Let’s go have a ride.
Holy HECK! Reviewers are prone to hyperbolic use of language. I try to avoid that, yet it will be impossible with these speakers. For after a career spanning thirty years and since I started to drive my parents Peugeot 104, seven years before that, I was looking for these 6x9s! That absurdly small motor with the 35mm voice coil wrapped around a heavy duty neodymium magnet was truly made to drive the big 6×9 oval cone. Hooked into the same bridged pair of channels on the Morel amplifier, they revealed their true character. In the spirit of F#1 Status and even Alpine’s V12 technology, these speakers are about savage high-performance in both quality but most crucially sheer bloody vast output. That High Amplitude Multi Roll surround is truly linear. Yes, they play sweetly at sensible volumes but something bonkers happens when you give them some real level. Both that fabulous tweeter and that prodigious bass making cone seem to be like a Honda VTEC engine coming on cam. Not a whining turbine-like engine note but a sudden change in overall character from merely beautiful to completely bloody awesome. Enormous, emotive, uplifting and ridiculously entertaining, the X-S69C loudspeakers from Alpine are truly epic. They throw more air around with utter taut control than seems possible. That new-old design team have pulled off a serious career peak with this particular model of the X-Series. The sheer weight and gravitas of the bass crossed a threshold and literally squeezed my adrenal glands as I stood there, marvelling.
That Hi-Res logo on the box has the genuine meaning and those tweeters are genuinely fabulous. If you pop their housing open, you will find expensively hand inserted acoustic wadding, installed to damp the back wave of the exotic material tweeter dome. This is a piece of why they cost the thick end of half a grand a set. The biggest piece though, is their ability to grasp you by the emotional cortex and kind of chuck you about little. I heard twizzly little details going on behind immense bass lines, that themselves had an internal wobble, tracked perfectly by the X-Series cone.
I got goosebumps.
The ancient resident reference ovals that I used, from VIETA, have magnets bigger than most 10 inch sub woofers, whereas the Alpine X-S69C are so 21st-century, they will fit in with the technology in the latest road going spaceships. They truly are super light weight. OK, so I was dancing, (or wobbling about a bit, anyway) and getting quite emotional. So naturally enough, as soon as I had decided that these ovals were awesome running on the bridged up channels, I wanted to hear the X-S65C playing at the same time from the amp now in 4 channel mode along with them. Thus, I disconnected the wires, added more and did ‘˜em up the right way.
At first, it was louder but something seemed not quite right. Somehow I had cross polarised the front and rear sets and the 6.5 inch were out of phase with the 6x9s. I had a quick reconnect around at the back and stood back once more. The extra mass of meaty low end that the 6x9s offered was now added to by a midband presence and enhanced high frequency detail that was just beyond impressive. The resolution was deep into HiFi but these speakers, with a front and rear set running, on just one small 4 channel amplifier, made an absolutely HUGE sound. As well as the little intricacies, this set could play music with the windows down at high speed and you won’t miss a note. The amount of sound they can make for the amount of weight they add to your car has never been better. These outperform the stuff that McLaren got from Kenwood for their legendary three seater.
I would like to see this set of 6x9s in boxes at a hifi show, put up against £1,000 speakers. These would beat most for quality!
Played at lesser volumes, they were sweet and accurate, yet that HAMR thing really does work and likes to be flexed to get the best from them. So I would love to hear them with an X-Series woofer as well.
A ridiculous achievement, a set of speakers that can just keep going, from posh to potent to POW. All in a light weight package with fidelity to enable new stuff you never heard before, to come from most every piece of music you ever bought.
Unreservedly recommended, posh but THE BEST. Ten for everything.
Specifications
Speaker System: 2-way component
Tweeter: 1in (2.5cm) Carbon Graphite Hard Dome
Woofer: 6×9 inch, (148mm x223mm) nano-fibre cone, radial ring magnet inside 35mm voice coil, HAMR surround.
Woofer Mounting Depth: 78mm
In-Line crossover network: High grade components, phase reversible, three step tweeter attenuation, compact size.
Rated Input Power: 120W RMS
Peak Input Power: 360W
Sensitivity: 89dB/W/m
Frequency Response: 45Hz to 40,000Hz