Intertechnik Family14 loudspeaker kit

Family14 loudspeaker kit

The Family 14 is designed to be placed close to the wall, preferably on a shelf or in a wall unit. However, even with a free placement, the Family 14 plays without any notable weaknesses. Considering the driver size, the bass seems surprisingly deep, but above all tight and without being overbearing.

Idea

In the car industry, a facelift is common. So why shouldn't there also be an update in loudspeaker self-assembly? After all, the need for a kit update testifies to its success and the development team has the chance to improve its work once again with the experience of time.

Cabinet

 

Chassis

The data of the GDT 104 N tweeter have already been published and are reproduced here for completeness.

 

Frequency Switch

The crossover is not from the original version of the Family14, in which case it would have worked rudimentarily, but it would certainly not have been the optimal solution. So we installed the individual loudspeaker drivers with cables leading out of the cabinet and set up the crossover next to the cabinet and optimised it until the measurements met our and thus also your requirements.

In the end, the result of our efforts showed three coloured lines that fit together quite well. The small tweeter ripple is due to the time saved by mounting the tweeter, it would disappear when the tweeter is mounted flush and is not of great importance in practice, as one rarely hears the speakers exactly on axis and at practically any listening angle the influence of these small frequency response ripples becomes relative.

The second order crossover with 12 dB per octave slope for each of the two drivers has a clear switching scheme with all in all just 6 components, two for the woofer, 4 for the tweeter, as the latter needs a voltage divider to be able to interact adequately with the woofer without pushing itself cheekily into the foreground.

Here we also insert the diagrams of the Family14 measurements.
It is also visible that the peaks and valleys in the frequency response are much smoother under practical listening angles.

Sound

When placed close to the wall, i.e. on a shelf, a wall unit, for which the compact speakers were designed - and even on a sideboard or stand when placed freely in the room - the sound quality of the updated Family14 is hardly worth mentioning: For the moderate diameter of the bass-midrange speaker, the bass response reaches down surprisingly deep and remains nice and tight without being overbearing.

It should be obvious to everyone that higher-priced speakers offer more fine detail in the midrange and treble, but the comparison speakers in our listening room are from a different (price class) world, so to speak, and in the face of this competition the Family14 can hold their own. The Family14s do not show any weaknesses in the criteria "speech intelligibility" and "impulse reproduction", which are particularly important for films, but also for music. Even piano notes are clearly separated from the subsequent decay phase, something that even speakers highly praised by trade magazines cannot always do better.

Even if high-end tweeters such as the ferrofluid-free Seas dome, which costs more than twice as much, reproduce more fine details, the tweeter used in the Family 14 doesn't seem cheap at all. Unpleasant sharpness or even annoyance is fortunately alien to it.

In pairs, the Family 14s are ideal for the teenager's room or the study; in the former, the sister model, designed primarily as a family centre, with its double bass, may also be used if the parents are as bass-resistant to hip-hop, rap or electro as the offspring.

For the young target group, the coarse chipboard construction is sufficient. The time delay associated with the design of beautiful surfaces might meet with incomprehension from the plug-and-play generation. All other family users are, of course, free to design the boxes beautifully, and recessing the individual loudspeaker drivers has never done any harm to a speaker.

Those who share their living space with a woman should therefore consider a nicer set-up to argue the necessity of, for example, five Family 14 plus Family 7 or two subwoofers at once and a set of four Family14 with a Family Centre and one or two subwoofers.

Conclusion

An old rule in modern German says: You get what you pay for. It's no different with the Family14 and the accompanying Family Centre, which has its own assembly instructions. Even though this is our smallest cinema set, the sound quality is right and the minimal effort was made with the cabinet.

Due to its good full-range characteristics, the Family 14 is by no means only suitable as a satellite in combination with a subwoofer, but due to its well-balanced sound characteristics, it is also excellent as a fully-fledged stereo set-up, for example, in the study or in other small rooms where the music primarily serves as background music.