# Sundown SA-2.75FR Full Range Speaker Review



## plushterry (Jan 22, 2015)

The speakers arrived promptly and well packaged. Inside the box, the speakers are wrapped in individual bags, screws and templates for mounting are provided. 

My initial impression of the speakers themselves was “wow they're small!”, “they feel nice and heavy” and “man that mounting flange is fugly”. They have a 'Bass Blocker' capacitor and short wires that have tinned ends already soldered onto the speaker terminals. They're nothing flashy to look at, but sort of look mean in an old-skool-butch sort of way. I honestly had no idea what to expect from these little fellas, so as you can imagine, I was itching to get them rigged up!



The specs on the box say:

2.75” Full range speaker
4ohm impedance
RMS 20W Power Handing
Frequency Range 170Hz-20kHz
Sensitivity 88dB


My test vehicle is a Ford Transit Connect 2009. It's a small diesel work van. The current system is as follows:

Alpine 178BT Headunit
Hertz HE4 4 Channel Amp 4×55W @ 4ohm
Focal ISS130 Component set with passive crossovers
Hertz EP1D Mono Amp 1×750W @ 2ohm
Hertz Hi Energy HX250D 10” Sub


I mounted the Sundowns in my a-pillars. I had originally made these for a pair of Scanspeak 10Fs, but I haven't bought those yet, so I mounted the Sundowns on a ring of Respatex (laminated plywood) backed with a bit of CCF (as a gasket) to reduce the opening down to fit the smaller speakers. They are mounted on axis, and I suppose they would be classed as being free-air, venting into the a-pillar. I did use a small amount of stuffing inside the a-pillar trims as I felt it made the sound a little smoother. 



My initial setup was to put the SA2.75FRs in my a-pillars, each connected to a 55W channel of my Hertz HE4, and just run them by themselves for a bit to see how they were (I used a little time correction on the Alpine headunit to centre the image better). First impressions are that they sound clear and upfront without being in your face, definitely not lacking in the high end. I listened to a few of my favourite tracks at a low level and the speakers responded well, plenty of detail, plenty of upper mid and treble. I actually used the Alpine's parametric EQ to tone down the hi mids and highs quite a bit to get them to sound a bit less brash.
The box says they should go down to 170Hz, so I set my crossover to 200Hz/12db and cranked them up a bit. They didn't take hardly any power before they started to break up with those settings, so I played around and upped them a bit to 400Hz/24db, now I could get to just under half power without hearing any distortion, which seemed a good listening level for me, and about three quarters volume (fairly loud listening level) with bearable levels of distortion but no clipping. 

Because these little fellas don't dig particularly deep, for the extended testing I rigged back up my mids and sub (leaving the tweeters disconnected, LP on the mids at ~400Hz/24dB). With the lower end taken care of and the new higher HP setting, the little Sundowns had a much easier time and once I'd EQ'd the high end a bit, I was really enjoying the sound. I can now see why people who like widebanders make so much fuss! I drove around with it set up like this for a couple of weeks and listened to all sorts of music. The lack of crossover in the mid range was noticeable, and although I wasn't running any tweeters, I didn't feel like I was missing out on much at the top. One of my friends remarked on how crisp my tweeters sounded before I told him that they weren't actually plugged in haha.



I love a wide range of musical styles and genres, but probably my favourite, especially for testing out new equipment is jungle/drum & bass. There are many sub-genres within, but generally with very intricate percussion, deep bass, busy mids and dynamic effects, this is a perfect genre to really push a speaker to it's limits and expose any flaws. I picked a few other favourite albums/tracks to give a fairly nice range of styles.

Disclosure - Settle
Leftfield – Leftism
Mad Professor & Lee Scratch Perry – Dub Take The Voodoo Out Of Reggae
Mungo's HiFi – Serious Time
Break – Resistance
DLR – Seeing Sounds
S.P.Y – Back To Basics 1 & 2
Stakka & Skynet – Clockwork
Moonbeam – Tiger EP
Stimming – Reflections
Alice in Chains – Facelift
Black Sabbath – Greatest Hits
Arctic Monkeys – AM
Gravediggaz - Niggamortis
Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon
Dire Straits – Brothers in Arms



While listening to Drum and Bass at fairly loud driving volumes, I didn't think that the Sundowns were able to keep up. While they are very good at lower volumes, once it gets loud, they really struggle with the fast percussion and top end of the synths together and distortion was very noticeable on many tracks. In fact, with my maximum available HP setting of 400Hz, they didn't really deal with any fast electronic genres particularly well at anything over 'fairly loud' volumes. Sometimes, I like to listen to music loud, but these speakers aren't really suitable for that unless maybe you have the HP set higher than I could with my equipment. To be fair though, bearing in mind they only have a 20W RMS power rating they did pretty well.

I most enjoyed listening to Dub on these speakers, with the “Dub Take The Voodoo Out Of Reggae” album, they did a good job on the less cluttered/compressed highs and mids of this type of music. I was particularly pleased with the way vocals sounded compared with my previous Focal Components, especially on the Disclosure album this was very noticeable.

When I tried a few 'classic' reference recordings, Dire Straits “Money for Nothing” and “Brothers in Arms” and Pink Floyd's “Dark Side of the Moon” Album, I found the lack of a tweeter more apparent than with the electronic stuff, but not glaringly so. Hard to describe, but I felt there was a lack of 'air' or 'sizzle' which I couldn't bring in with the EQ without making it sound cluttered.




While listening through them, the thing I like most is that pretty much all of the detail in the music is coming from just these two speakers, it really makes you realise how much the crossover between your mid/tweet would normally affect the sound. Music, and particularly vocals just sound more natural through the 'fullrange' speakers. I did find myself just listening to the music instead of trying to find faults in the speakers, which has got to be a good thing, right?

I did initially find them pretty ugly, but since living with them on my a-pillars for a couple of weeks, I've come to terms with their 'rugged good looks'. I guess you could use a jigsaw or something to trim down the mounting flange if you were going to mount them on show (I did debate it, but didn't want to accidentally bugger them up before I'd done this review). For anyone using these in a 'stock' location, the looks are unimportant as they'll usually be covered by a grille.


If you are going to use these as low cost/low hassle way to replace OEM speakers powered off either the OEM headunit, or a low power external amplifier, then I think that these would probably be a very good choice for you.

If you're looking for a low power affordable mid/fullrange for a 2/3way system, then these would be good so long as you have some processing available.

If you want to use these in a 2 way setup with any serious amount of power, then you are going to find these aren't really up to the job.


My main gripes with them are that they don't really go loud enough for me without some savage HP settings and even though I am fairly tolerant to distortion (compared to a lot of people) I found them to be prone to distortion well before clipping with certain styles of music, particularly the faster more compressed electronic stuff.

I think that these are probably better suited to pop/rap sort of music because vocals sounded pretty good through them. You could quite easily get away without running tweeters with these, especially with music that has a less demanding top end, or if most of your music is via MP3/iPod/Radio.

All-in-all, I'd say, especially for the money these things cost, they are pretty good. They won't blow you away, but I don't think many (any) speakers in this price range will do that. However, I will certainly be postponing the purchase of the Scan 10Fs for the time being and I will be keeping the little Sundowns on my a-pillars for a while yet.



Many thanks to Jacob at Sundown Audio for letting me have the opportunity to test these out. Top bloke!

Note – The only test equipment used was a digital multimeter to check amp gains and 1 pair of ears to listen to the speakers with.


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## sirbOOm (Jan 24, 2013)

It'd be interesting to try these along with Sundown's best 6.5" component set.


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## ben54b (May 30, 2014)

Great review. You've pretty much confirmed what Jacob said about these being designed as a stock replacement. Sounds like they do that job well. 


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## plushterry (Jan 22, 2015)

sirbOOm said:


> It'd be interesting to try these along with Sundown's best 6.5" component set.


Do you mean as a comparison or as part of a 3 way? I think these could work real good in a 3 way.





ben54b said:


> Great review. You've pretty much confirmed what Jacob said about these being designed as a stock replacement. Sounds like they do that job well.


Thanks! Well, I think they've got a bit more to them than just that, but yes they do suit the intended use rather nicely.


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## sirbOOm (Jan 24, 2013)

Yes, in a 3-way.


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## plushterry (Jan 22, 2015)

Yea man that would be pretty nice I reckon!


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