The 2025 Speaker Shootout at DJs ASSEMBLE

What Is The Shootout?

I’ve now known Ben Stowe for almost the entirety of me coming back into the DJ business. I was about to start to make some serious investments after some months of starting out and I started to ask around who to look towards and there was an overwhelming consensus that Ben was THE go-to guy. And our first convo we literally geeked out on lots of things. From there we’ve bonded over everything tech, Star Wars, and more and are truly great friends. Then in 2021 we found ourselves in Boston working towards a goal of how to get a ton of speakers that were brought in by various DJs to compare them. This was literally a out of the blue operation which became “Year 0” of Harvest of Sound. From there we put our heads together to make this Shootout a gold standard in the industry.

We get all these speakers together, put them in different groupings of peer equipment, and pink noise test them using A-weighted measuring. We then throw a number of songs at them for people to listen to. Over the years we’ve made some significant refinements to help achieve an even more fair and equitable testing environment and 2025 we made additional strides in that goal. We now have a full 20+ foot sonically transparent curtain to hide the entries so people listen with their ears and not their eyes, looping song samples through each speaker to get the same exact reference points for each speaker, and having all the speakers ready to go.

For 2025 we have 17 “stacks” of equipment. Most are single speakers or a column array with it’s own standard pairing of top and sub. We also have a few cab-over-sub entries to round out our testing.

23 people in total joined into the Google Form to jot down their personal ratings from 1-10. The scores are aggregates for each grouping. So say the winner of the batteries would score differently competing against the cabs over subs if directly competing. At the end of the judging the speakers were revealed. Neither Ben nor I participated in the scoring.

The Songs

I took some time to curate a wide range of songs from different genres and sub-genres that would be familiar to most DJs. Frankly this may be the hardest part of the whole testing because music is just as subjective as the speakers that people judge. We would make 8 second to 13 second loops of ea ch song and let each speaker work all of the songs.

• Hey Nineteen – Steely Dan [Yacht Rock] (Ben hates this song but has become a staple of the shootout)
• Take Five – Dave Brubeck [Jazz]
• Hotel California (live) – The Eagles [Live Rock]
• Billie Jean – Michael Jackson [Pop/R&B]
• Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This – Eurythmics [Synth Pop]
• Teardrop – Massive Attack [Trip Hop/Deep Bass]
• Man! I Feel Like A Woman! – Shania Twain [Country]
• Are You Gonna Be My Girl? – Jet [Rock]
• I Write Sins Not Tragedies – Panic At The Disco [Pop Punk]
• Levels – Avicii [Dance]
• One More Time – Daft Punk [French House/Disco]
• The Next Episode – Dr. Dre & Snoop [Hip Hop]
• It’s Love – Jill Scott [Go-Go]

A note on the songs. A couple people felt that Shania Twain’s track sounded compressed and muddied. All of these tracks were personal CD FLAC rips of mine. Now there could be some mastering differences that made my copy less desirable but I wanted to ensure that all tracks were not bringing in a lossy variable into the mix. All tracks were normalized through Virtual DJ and played through my Rane One to simulate a typical sound chain of a DJ.

Now some people may see the wide range of columns in this third class and wonder why we didn’t create two segments out of this group. The reality is that a lot of people considering column arrays are also considering a very wide range of options. So beyond the two 8″ entries, we wanted to offer each option as a peer in a larger category. In addition the RCF 14A is marketed as both a point source and a column. It does have dual 6″ drivers up top, and that technically could be considered a column. But a better definition in all this is simply “Skinny Speakers”.

The Matrix

*Note: Prices are at the time of publishing and are subject to change

Make	Model	Gp	Score	Price	SPL	Watts	Coverage	Freq Resp -3 db	Freq Range -10 db	Weight
EV	EVERSE 8	1	6.20	$799	121dB	400W	100º x 100º	60 Hz – 20 kHz	50 Hz – 20 kHz	24
EV	EVERSE 12	1	7.89	$1,099	126dB	400W	100º x 60º	55 Hz – 20 kHz	45 Hz – 20 kHz	31
JBL	EON One Compact	1	4.35	$679	112dB	150W	100º x 60º	38 Hz – 20 kHz		18
LD	Maui 11 G3	2	7.65	$1,199	125dB	730W (RMS)	120º x 30º		39 Hz – 20 kHz	45 + 22 = 67
EV	Evolve 30M	2	6.62	$1,499	123dB	500W + 500W	120º x 40º	51 Hz – 20 kHz	45 Hz – 20 kHz	35 + 6 + 3 = 44
LD	Maui 28 G3	3	5.67	$1,759	127dB	2060W	120º x 20º	45 Hz – 20 kHz	N/A	50 + 28 = 78
EV	Evolve 50M	3	6.33	$2,199	127dB	500W + 500W	120º x 40º	43 Hz – 20 kHz	37 Hz – 20 kHz	45 + 10 + 3 = 58
QSC	KC12	3	4.76	$2,199	132dB	3000W	145º x 35º		40 Hz – 20 kHz	49 + 2 + 9 = 60
EV	Evolve 70	3	7.67	$2,999	133dB	1000W + 10000W	120º x 25º	40 Hz – 18 kHz	35 Hz – 20 kHz	59 + 15 + 5 = 79
EV	Evolve 90	3	6.76	$3,399	134dB	1000W + 10000W	120º x 25º	35 Hz – 18 kHz	28 Hz – 20 kHz	79 + 15 + 4 = 98
LD	Maui 44 G2	3	4.29	$2,999	132dB	1500W (RMS)	120º x 25º	37 Hz – 20 kHz	N/A	105
RCF	NXL 14A + 15AX	3	7.24	$3,798	133dB	4300W	100º x 70º	35 Hz – 20 kHz		69 + 32 = 101
LD	ICOA Pro 12 + Pro 21	4	6.44	$3,898	136dB	5000W	90º x 50º	29 Hz – 20 kHz		51 + 126 = 177
EV	ETX 10P + 18SP	4	3.39	$3,498	135dB	3800W		33 Hz – 20 kHz		45 + 114 = 159
RCF	NX 32A + 9019-AS	4	7.61	$7,349	138dB	6100W		30 Hz – 20 kHz		40 + 118 = 158
Martin	CCD Live 12 + SXP18 Stack	4	5.00	$6,998	135dB	3500W			47Hz – 20 kHz	62 + 103 = 165