MoFi Electronics SourcePoint 8 - LOUDSPEAKER

When I got these new speakers for review, they were so new that, at the time I unpacked them, no official user manual was included or posted on the manufacturer's website, and the promised matching stands didn't exist. Yet, I have the abiding feeling that I am getting to the party long after it has started. The Mobile Fidelity SourcePoint 8 is the newer, smaller sibling of the SourcePoint 10 reviewed by John Atkinson in Stereophile's February 2023 issue, with a follow-up by Ken Micallef in June.¹

- KALMAN RUBINSON

With so much ink already spilled, it seems wasteful of your time, the magazine's space, and my time and effort to rehash what has been ably covered and annotated by my colleagues, so I won't describe the history and qualifications of the speaker's deservedly well-known designer, Andrew Jones, or the principles of design and engineering applied to the SourcePoint 10 and SourcePoint 8 in common. What I will do is what high school English teachers so often request: Compare and contrast.

First, the obvious: The SourcePoint 8 was designed to be smaller, utilizing a smaller driver which, in turn, requires a smaller enclosure. It is smaller by 20% in every dimension, at 11.4" x 18" x 12.6" compared to the SourcePoint 10's 14.5" x 22.5" x 16". Consequently, it is much lighter, too, at 27.9lb vs 46.2lb.

However, creating it was not simply a matter of scaling down in a linear fashion, as Jones explained to me over Zoom. With the SourcePoint 10, Jones chose a large-diaphragm woofer not only to extend LF performance but also to minimize cone displacement, which is especially important in a concentric design because the woofer cone serves as a (moving) waveguide: Displacement can intermodulate the tweeter's output. An 8" driver mounted with a standard surround with typical half-roll termination would have a much smaller active surface, requiring even greater displacement. So, Jones designed an 8" driver (as measured by the radius of its mounting holes) with a narrowed corrugated termination, which also serves as mounting support. The result is an 8" driver whose active area is almost as large as the SourcePoint 10's 10" driver and whose displacement will be similar, especially since its range does not extend as low: 47Hz vs 42Hz.