A little while back we had in the new HEDD Audio Type 05s and Type 07 studio monitors. We were very impressed with what these were capable of.
Since then, we've had the flagship of the Type Series in to our demo stock. These are a three way, loaded with two 7" drivers handling the bass, a 4" mid range and the HEDD Air Motion Transformer, Klaus Heinz's latest take on the ribbon design. All the drive units are custom designs from HEDD. There are very few companies that actually make their own drivers. This puts HEDD at a bit of an advantage to most of the speaker manufacturers out there. They join a very select group of designers who are able to design the drivers around the performance of the whole monitor, rather than trying to adjust their amplifier, cabinet and cross over design to compensate for the performance of generic, off-the-shelf drive units. The cabinets are front-ported with a slot- design.
Designed as mid fields for decent sized rooms, they pack the kind of power you'd expect to see at this size with no less than four 300W ICEpower® amplifiers. This gives these monitors some serious welly.
On the back, there are balanced XLR inputs along with unbalanced RCA and the space for the HEDD Bridge cards- a series of digital expansion options that HEDD have developed, adding a very easy way to get their monitors working with digital gear or added to a Dante network. Along with that there are a couple of tuning trim controls for high and low shelf to adjust for any room discrepancies or personal taste.
In terms of performance, they're exactly what we'd expect for the money and fit exactly the aim that HEDD have set out for. Running some test tones through monitors can often reveal some of the characteristics of a monitor. Sweeping a sine wave across the cross over points shows a very balanced transition with no frequencies jumping out or ducking particularly. Similarly, getting down low, the design of the ports, HEDD seem to have fixed the port chuffing that some designs suffer from.
For mixing work, they produce a very well defined sound stage with instruments and vocal sounding very natural. Lows are very well represented and don't cloud mixes. The mids are clear and vocals project well but without the forced-feeling that some three way boxes give. Tops are detailed and smooth with transients sounding very musical.
Overall, HEDD have created a very capable monitor. We'll be keeping these on demo for a while. If you're interested in hearing them, you can book a demo with us now.