To the Point: Design Acoustic PS10A
Design Source PS-10A speaker next to my Pioneer components
What a neat little speaker!
The Design Acoustic PS-10A is a compact 3-way speaker with an interesting twist – it’s almost a cube and from the front all you see are the 5″ midway and 1 1/8″ tweeter. The 10″ woofer fires down and is hidden above the raised base. Amazingly the cub dimensions give the speaker enough internal volume for it to reach down to a reported 48hz from a sealed enclosure.
There was no way of verifying that when I bought these – the woofers’ speaker surrounds had almost completely dry-rotted. The seller had not even known there were woofers on the bottom, or that they were inoperable!
PS-10A with the grille on. Not much to see here.
Otherwise these were in perfect condition – veneers (vinyl) and grilles were spotless, tweeters and mids in similarly good shape.
I bought a couple of replacement surrounds off the internet and got to work on the ratty woofers. The biggest part of the job was cleaning the old dried foam off of the old woofer cone and basket – that took me about an hour total for both. Installing the new surrounds was simple – maybe took me 10 minutes per speaker. In an hour they were dry and ready to play. The woofers are an innovative shallow design, which allowed them to fit into the smaller enclosure. The tweeter was enclosed into its own isolation tube, which I noticed when I had everything apart.
After re-installation I fired them up. They loosened up in about one song and they things started to get fun.
The PS-10As are rated at 90db efficiency, and they don’t need big power to get loud. Surprisingly for a small speaker bass is present and accounted for – the down-firing woofer does its job. The larger enclosure over the earlier models helps as well.
The ‘Point Source’ moniker was a nod to the speaker’s reported imaging capabilities, which are supposed to be impressive. I have to say that things sounded pretty good to me, but I didn’t ge the ideal placement in my short listening session to really prove the claim. I can say that these speakers can be a little heavy on the higher end of the spectrum – Design Acoustics planned for this, installing a +/- 3db tweeter switch on the back of each speaker to allow for placements bringing too much treble.
PS-10A front face. Little graph shows the frequency response.
I have these currently hooked up to a Lepai 2020+ T-Amp on top of my workbench. This puts the woofers at about ear level while I am working. I do not sense any treble problems now.
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