MOFI Sourcepoint 10
Stand mount monitors
Mobile Fidelity aka MoFi knows how to promote a product, and so had the Sourcepoint 10’s launch been surrounded by halo even before the first boxes arrived at dealers. No wonder – it is the first loudspeaker from the renowned vinyl house, and a star designer, Mr. Andrew Jones, was recruited for the job.
Function and form
Jones was tasked with impossible: to design an affordable loudspeaker that sounds like a cost-no-object loudspeaker. At the same time the speaker should have had a feel and vibe of the MoFi’s vinyl deck line up, which it should have complemented. The result is quite interesting, although perhaps not surprising – Jones leveraged his strengths and built a speaker around the concentric driver system he had become famous for in his years with KEF, Pioneer, TAD, and Elac. Thus, the Sourcepoint 10 will watch you in your listening spot via its 10-inch paper cone in the middle of which 1.25” soft dome (material unspecified) tweeter is mounted. For the dome’s efficiency is highly increased by the surrounding cone that works as a waveguide, the crossover, set at 1.6kHz, can be simple. The MDF cabinet of the Sourcepoint 10 looks like a box but it isn’t; its side walls are very slightly angled. Neither is the front baffle planar – its diamond shapes prevent diffractions and its thickness (2”) makes it rigid. The rear panel hosts two standard bassreflex ports and two gold-plated non-biwireable terminals. Through the ports one can see sparsely damped interior of the speakers. The Sourcepoint 10 is available in black or walnut veneer, the baffle will remain black for both. MoFi offers compatible stands for about 10% extra.
The speakers are quite sensitive at 91dB and behave well from impedance and dispersion point of view, so no amplifier should have a problem to drive them.
Bass management
While the Sourcepoint 10 is a stand-mount speaker, it is a big one, measuring 37 x 58 x 43 cm. A little giant, indeed. Jones is like that – his TAD Compact Reference speakers were anything but compact. And – alike the TADs – the MoFi Sourcepoints need to turn up the volume to sound their best. They can play soft, but it is when the music is play loud that everything comes alive. For example, the earthy blues of Jimmy Rogers, Blue Bird, as found on Stereophile’s CD3 sampler, sounds fabulous through the MoFis when pushed hard. This track was laid on 3M tape in 1993 in Chicago under the supervision of Chad Kassem (yes, the owner of Acoustic Sounds and Analogue Productions) as a aprt of their Originals series. The blues was recorded live in studio on two-track Ampex ATR-104 and mastered by Doug Sax for a spectacular result. So, here is the equation: Analogue Productions + Doug Sax + Mobile Fidelity + Andrew Jones. Make your calculation.
Clarity & delicacy
The Sourcepoint 10s produce very communicative and immediate sound. When I listened to the Blue Bird, I loved the sound of piano that was quite dry and saloon-like. It was also raw enough to be authentic and honest. The ability of authentic communication of the music to a listener is one of the biggest assets of the Sourcepoint 10. True, sometimes the authenticity is not what you want to hear, and sometimes the MoFi speaker pushes a bit too much in the upper presence region, so what may be a welcome recording insight with good material, can become a bit over the top with lesser recordings. However, this is the part of the design: the Sourcepoint 10s should have been true to the source, and they are. And they have the same genius vibe as the MoFi’s turntables – check their Fender Precision Deck and you will know what I am talking about. This music smells vinyl, paper, and magnetic tapes.
Tonal accuracy
The rather big cone of the midbass driver provides a waveguide to the dome tweeter, therefore it is no surprise that the highs travel to the listener with horn-like quality. I mean they are lively, fast, spitting (in the good sense of this word), and open. The Sourcepoint 10s are capable of drawing the line between studio acoustics, intimate and dry, and much larger reverberant space that is artificially encoded via Spatializer in Empire Brass Quintet’s track (the same Stereophile disc). The difference is not only in the acoustics size as such – the MoFi lets you know that the Spatializer expansiveness is not tied to a particular instrument, that it is just a halo. What sounds attractive at first listen, ends up hollow and uninvolving after while. The Sourcepoint 10 will show you this truth.
It does not mean it is a perfect speaker. For example, the quick percussive tracks show the slightly reverberant nature of the cabinets, that are not overdamped and participate partially in what is heard. Again, it was an intent, a deliberate choice. This makes the Sourcepoint a similar concept like e.g. Harbeth and ATC speakers.
Spatial resolution
Like with any other loudspeaker, the MoFi Sourcepoint 10 interact with the room. My experience says that the placement intuition “the farther from the room boundaries the better” does not work with the Sourcepoints. If they are too much in the room, the sound is too dry and lacks the bottom end oomph, subjectively the bass won’t dive below 50-40Hz. When dragged into room corners, the room will reinforce the bass maybe too much, and the greater the bass contribution of the room, the bigger chance that the midrange will become masked by it. Finding a sweet spot between “in the room” and “in the corners” will be crucial for the sound balance. In the end, this is a good thing for the MoFis – who would prefer having two rather large boxes in the middle of the room?
So, what is the conclusion? Unlike other “revival” speakers (we have reviewed JBL Classis L100 recently) The MoFi Sourcepoint 10’s authenticity does not stop with the retro visual. They balance between the vibe and modern engineering successfully, and they provide a lot of entertainment.
Recommended resellers
HI-FI studio TYKON, Ostrava, tel. +420 723 449 894
Manufacturer's website: http://www.mofielectronics.com
Associated components
- Sources: emmLabs Meitner DV2 DAC, Electrocompaniet EMC 1 MKV
- Amplifiers: Electrocompaniet AW 800 M, Audia Flight Strumento No.4 MkII
- Interconnects and speaker cables: Shunyata Research Sigma V2, Shunyata Omega S/PDIF
- Loudspeakers: Gauder Akustik RS-7, Gauder Akustik DARC 80
- Power conditioning: Shunyata Research Everest, Shunyata Research Omega XC and Alpha NR
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