Morel is no stranger to the pages of CA&E. Moreover, the company is no stranger to praise. Since the brand reinvented itself stateside just a few years back, we've had the opportunity to run several of the company's products through our daunting tests only to report back to with enthusiasm. Heck, we liked one set so much that it landed Morel a spot in our coveted "Best Of" for 2005. In retrospect, though, all that praise by our evaluators was for products in the upper echelon of Morel's lineup, such as the $500 Supremo tweeters and component sets retailing for a wallet-cleansing $900 and $1,150. So I guess the question needs to be asked: "Can Morel build an affordable system that performs?"
I was recently sent the Morel Dotech Ovation 6 component set; a set I hope will answer my question. With a price tag considerably lower than those aforementioned Morel components at a mere (by comparison) $499.95, there's no doubt I'm interested to hear them. So let's get to it.
Impressions
Morel really knows how to make an appearance. The box for the Dotech Ovation 6 is simple, artsy, and sophisticated with its natural, light brown exposed corrugate packing. A 1" x 1" Morel logo adorns its topside while the front, rear, left and right panels get a 1/2" x 4" (approximately) imprinted paper badge with the system's model number. There is nothing cheap about the looks and, at this point, I would hope that's an indication of the product inside.
After running my hand over the corrugated box a couple of times, I lifted the lid and started pulling out the components. The Dotech Ovation 6 is your typical 2-way system using a pair of 6 1/2" woofers, a couple of 28mm (1.1") tweeters, and a crossover duo. Also found was a pair of modern, highly unique woofer grilles stamped out of a nice thick-gauge steel with half-oval cutouts adorning one large circle in the center and a goody bag of mounting hardware and accessories that even includes gaskets for the woofers.
Morel took a giant leap in the crossover design for their products, at least in terms of cosmetics. I've been told that they look like little spacecraft, but personally I think they have a more alien-being appearance, resembling giant eyes with the two clear acrylic oval windows snapped into the topside of each crossover. The case itself is nearly a half oval made of black injection-molded ABS plastic and furthers the impression of an alien. But that's where the sci-fi ends. Protruding from the straight edge of the case is a red masked pcb holding the crossover components and barrier terminal strip. The woofer gets a good size air core inductor making up the -6dB filter, and the tweeter side uses a smaller iron core inductor and Mylar capacitor for -12dB filtering along with two resistors for tweeter attenuation. The tweeter level can be selected between +3, 0, and -3dB by removing the left window to access to the jumper.
In their own right, the 6 1/2" woofers in this set are just as unique as the crossovers, but not as foreign in look. Somehow the engineers at Morel figured out how to stamp a basket out of steel to some serious depth. Honestly, I can't recall ever seeing metal stretched in a manner such as this - the frame fully encompasses the motor! Sure, you can cast a basket like this, but this was once a flat piece of metal, and a thick gauge at that! Morel calls it a unified one-piece chassis and claims it was "aerodynamically designed to reduce sound reflection distortion and mounting depth." Behind the cone are nine semi-circular holes punched through the metal and perforations on the bottom to vent the motor.
Under the hood, so to speak, horsepower comes from a double-magnet drive motor. This creates the force to move the large, yet lightweight 2 1/8" diameter Hexatech aluminum voice coil that's wrapped around an aluminum former. Using such a large coil format means that the ferrite magnets actually reside on the interior to save space. Morel also uses their unique C.A.R filter (Controlled Acoustic Resistance), which is an acoustic material located to the inside of the magnetic rings (and behind the dust cap) and is said to improve acoustical accuracy and provide greater cone control in infinite baffle environments (i.e., the doors of your car).
The woofer cone is made of a composite cellulose fiber that is paper based. It has a nice metallic look to it and a matching dome dust cap of a different material. Morel uses an NBR rubber for the surround with additional compliance handled by a poly/cotton spider.
High frequencies for this set are handled by Morel's MT-12 Acuflex-coated soft dome tweeter. This compact driver uses a neodymium magnet and a large 28mm (1.1") voice coil that is said to allow for a wide frequency response and lower resonance point. The driver is situated in a plastic housing that incorporates a permanent phase alignment plug sitting above the dome, the latter also acts handily as a grille. The tweeter's plastic housing press-fits into different mounting options, two of which are surface mount and one, flush mount. If additional protection is desired, a mesh grille is also provided that simply press-fits into a small gap around the driver in any of the three mounting options. Overall, it's an impressive design with thoughtful engineering behind it.
Manual
The manual is a 4-page affair that uses a single sheet of paper folded in half. Words are few, but the pictures are detailed and plentiful. Just about every application scenario is covered for mounting the woofers and tweeters, connecting the system with or without an amplifier, and tweeter attenuation instructions for the crossover, complete with graph. The back page includes an entire list of parameters for each individual Dotech Ovation speaker model and even crossover specifications. Unfortunately no warranty information included, but a call to Morel's U.S. headquarters informed me that it is three years, dealer installed, and one year, consumer installed.
Setup
As I mentioned earlier, the Dotech Ovation 6 is a typical 2-way set. In order to properly fit the components, I made new baffles for my well-damped, 2.25ft3 test enclosures. The manual thoughtfully provides cutout dimensions for both the woofer and the tweeter (flush mount), so the new baffles were a snap. I mounted each pair of drivers within an inch of each other, with the tweeter above the woofer.
Supplying the amplified signal to this component system, I wired up an Alpine CDA-9857 head unit directly to a TRU Technology C-7 amplifier (conservatively rated at 125 watts x 4). Channel A was used for the left components and channel C for the right, providing ample headroom while limiting crosstalk. The channels were level-matched within 0.05 volts. No addition crossovers or processing were used.
I finished up my setup with some basic listening to determine the best position for the test cabinets, verify phase and to adjust the passive crossovers accordingly. Yielding the best results, I ended up with the enclosures nearly on-axis in a close proximity of my seating position and the tweeter attenuation circuit of the crossovers set to -3dB. You read that correctly, -3dB. One would naturally think that the 0dB setting would be the proper match, but the midranges were a little tame by comparison to the tweeters at that level. The lower setting proved to be an excellent compromise to get that desired linear response.