Boston Acoustics 6.5 System 6.5" Car Component System

The first thing you notice about this speaker set is the military-issue cast-aluminum basket on the 6.5 woofer. One look at this baby and you know it's not going anywhere for a while. A quick glance at the box reveals power handling upwards of 450 watts RMS, and you know you've got a solid setup ready to give you many many years of sonic fulfillment.

I personally have heard these speakers in setups ranging from 50watts@2ohm to 100watts@4ohms to 200watts@2ohms, and every combination was handled beautifully, if well-equalized. If not tremendously powered, these speakers may sound a bit shortchanged on lower end bass. At around 50 watts, I personally don't trust them to drive anything below 100hz, as anything below that at higher volumes tends to cause distortion along the rest of the woofer's range. With this kind of power, the upper end of the woofer, and the lower end of the tweeter tend to be very strong, which results in ear-piercing vocals, and not much else.

Well-powered, and I'm referring to my experiences with 200 watts here, these speakers are actually strong on the lower-end, and have the potential for flat response down to 60hz, a number I was quoted by a Boston Acoustic rep.. I've found that a lot of power tends to smooth out the response curve, and also the sibilance, as one other reviewer called it. I like to refer to it as the s-factor.

A big key for these speakers is imaging. The tweeters and woofers both need to be imaged perfectly, unfortunately, to produce a truly euphoric experience. If your imaging is nearly non-existent, like mine, you'll periodically wonder where the money went. At times like that I stick my head down by the gearshift, and dream of my next vehicle. Imaged correctly, the woofer is super sharp, better than some mid-range headphones. Also the tweeter evens out, and brightness becomes less of a problem. Luckily the crossovers provide jumpers to knock the tweeter level down -2dbs. This is probably the ideal setting for most people under 90.

(updated 5/2)
I've been toying with these speakers a lot lately, and it's becoming obvious to me that another big factor in the quality of sound they produce is equalization. I can't stress enough how sensitive they are to this factor if they aren't properly imaged and staged. I'll give a bit of a drawn out example, but I feel it's necessary to make my point. I have an 11-band equalizer, with gain adjustment at 2.2khz, 4.5hkz, 9khz, and 18khz on the high end. As mentioned by me and a few others, these speakers have a tendency to produce strong and annoying pitches on vocals with the letter "s", "t", etc. sibilance. If you toy with the equalization, you find that the majority of this comes from the 4khz-10khz region. The obvious solution would be to cut these frequencies, right? That's what I thought, but was I ever wrong. Instead, these frequencies need to be blended at just the right amount, and poof, the annoying problem almost vanishes. I have the gain set higher at 9 khz than I have since I bought the equalizer, and there is LESS sibilance now then ever before. This has made me come to two conclusions: 1) The tweeter is very sensitive to wild swings in gain, and 2) The woofer's high end is real prone to being too strong. Unfortunately, this makes me think that this very high quality speaker will not produce the best results for those who don't have a multi-band equalizer in their system.

A word about durability. These speakers will handle everything you throw at them. this includes distortion, this include 22 gauge speaker wire, this includes 200 watts per channel rms, this includes the screwdriver that slipped out of the screw during install that the tech forgot to mention.

I would give these speakers a solid 5 stars any day of the week below $300, but they are pricey. However, if you are like me and are willing to spend a few extra bucks to have crisp audio that you can count on as return on invest for a lot of years, the price is just a small bump in the road.