Micca Club 3 3.5-Inch Bookshelf Speaker

The new cheap... shiny boxes that made from the cheapest crap you can find. As you can tell I needed a few beers to get through the review, no worries they are only 8 ounces a piece.

Components

Tweeter

This is the Micca tweeter, as far as I know this is the only tweeter they use in their speakers. It's a 3/4 inch silk dome and not a particularly great driver as a matter of fact it's pretty shit. The fact that it's probably the best tweeter used on budget speakers should tell you a little about how bad budget speaker actually are in treble reproduction.

Here is the back of the tweeter, from this vantage point we can see a magnet and a plastic bezel.

Woofer

The woofer is the main attraction here... At 3 1/2 inches it's a freak of nature with carbon fiber cone, foam surround, and my guess is about 3/4 inch of excursion travel. That cat hair on there has no chance once I get things started.

Here you can see the double magnet, and spider. Both look pretty healthy for a 3.5 inch driver.

Cabinet

Taking apart a Micca Club 3 speaker the first thing I noticed is that this speaker has a two piece baffle. One part shiny masonite like material and one standard low density fiber board. These are not glued together, they probably should be to avoid rattling and other nonsense. Gluing them together would mean that you could not get back into the box without a saw, so I would put that last on the modification list.

Crossover and Port

It's not a crossover just a cap to keep the tweeter from blowing up. The port is a very long very skinny cardboard tube that extends almost all the way up to the front baffle.

Grill

The Micca Club 3's grill is magnetic and does not like to stay on. This not a problem because these speaker are designed to be shiny and pretty. Grills are for people ashamed of their speakers, don't be one of those people.

Terminals

Yep, it's got terminals, these are the smallest I've seen. Bare wire is not gonna happen unless you use a very small gauge.

Listening impressions

Boomy, inefficient, painful treble, missing midrange, uncontrolled and to top it all off rattling.

The speakers overall balance is "V" shaped, all bass and treble, no midrange.

This is a high distortion low-fi speaker that has a boomy nasty bottom end like a cheap subwoofer.

The tweeter is alright, the problem here is the box, the woofer, and the lack of a crossover.

There is very little right with this speaker, and as such there is very little that is does right.

There does not seem to be any comb filtering going on as far as I can tell which is a little surprising given the lack of a crossover. My guess is the bizarre placement of the tweeter way in front of the woofer is actually helping to keep them from combing.

Lots of "air" from these speakers you can hear too much shout from vocals and high hats, I'm guessing cone break up from the woofer is to blame.

Every once in a while the speakers have a bass hit and they just kind of make an erp sound like they are eating themselves.. while endlessly entertaining I eventually tracked down the problem to the speaker jumping around on my stands. I'm not sure if these come with little feet, I tossed the box out a while back and I rarely look at packaging material. At any rate placing a large chunk of cork underneath of the speakers fixed the problem.

Putting some weights on top of the speaker seemed to help as well.

OK, something else is going on here... this is a problem, the arrows point to air leaks because the bezel for the woofer is too small.

This shows the way I fixed the problem, repositioning the foam gasket tape to seal the driver. I tighten the speakers up one more time and give them a listen.

Things are starting to sound alright with some music, but it's still a mess.

Parts missing from some music, there may not be comb filtering, but there is obvious cancelation going on from the two drivers.

Uncorrected Verdict

The Micca Club 3's sound like a dollar store boom box with a tweeter for cancelation and some type of "super bass" loudness. Taking the time and effort to properly put the speakers together yields reductions in bass distortion as well as addition bass output, but the speaker still sounds like shit.

Measurements

Here is a close mic of each of the drivers, even with the mic extremely close to the drivers you can see I'm still picking up cancelation between the woofer and tweeter at 2k-6k.

The uncorrected frequency response of the speaker looks much better than the Club 3's actually sounds. Note that my room modes are all over the bass response, and below 700Hz should be more of an indication of the speaker doing something at those frequencies and not much more.

DSP corrections

Had to drop the Micca Club 3's down a lot to bring the midrange and lower treble back. Also took a hump out of the bass and made it deep instead of boomy.

Got them flat on axis for the most part, with cancelation from the tweeter happening it's going to do some strange things off axis.

Corrected Listening Impressions

Well they were inefficient, at this point they are about as efficient as hooking speaker cables to a potato. We are gonna need all of the power you can muster. I'm running off of an older Onkyo home theater in a box receiver and it's pushing the little woofers into a full on fap session.

These are shit speakers, but they do something special.... all of the frequencies! I've got solid real bass to 43Hz in room.

If you are going to buy cheap speakers at least make them entertaining. These are fucking hilarious. I could laugh at this shit for days.

Playing Mason's San Remo shows activity at 36Hz on the RTA... my reaction is in red.

The bass from Soulwax's remix of Phantom Part II is full and the sawtooth sounds correctly meaty with extra distortion sprinkled on top for flavor.

The highs really fall off as you move away from the speakers, a product of the lack of a crossover. When at arms length away it's a good tonal balance. Backing up some more and the bass is still hitting me... you could use these as party speakers in a small bedroom given enough power.

Alicudi by Digitalism, shit's falling off of walls.

Can hear port noise from the back of the speaker, but for most music it's drowned out from the sound coming from the front of the speaker.

I'm getting distortion from everything in the room not just vibrating but shaking to shit.. I'm looking at 100+dB nearfield and it does not hurt in the slightest. This may be due to the amount of beer I've drank at this point, or it's just that it's mostly flat with enough bottom end which is where the real loud sounds are in music.

Final Thoughts:

With DSP correction the Micca Club 3 speakers have done something that few speakers do, they have impressed me. These tiny speakers play lower than any other desktop speaker I've tested under $300. That says plenty. I would love to see a pair with a real crossover and put together better, but I doubt that will happen given that the Micca MB42x exists.

Downside is that the speakers are bad, without correction they are hideous and some of the worst speakers I've tested. With a little bit of reengineering and a lot of DSP correction and a bunch of clean power they can be personal party monsters, but they still suck in comparison to 42X at making music. The price is cheap enough to get them for a laugh, or if you really value bass performance over musicality.

Requirements for these speakers are an amp that can put out clean power to at least 30 watts per channel(50-60watt per channel amp), the ability to implement the DSP filters, and a good sense of humor. If you want something to tweak on I think there is room for improvement with just simple stuff like gluing the box together properly and mass loading it. Just keep in mind these speakers will never be "right" but they can be a lot of fun.

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