Spent a few days with this in my HT and tried various movie types with it. I'm not the sole instigator of this speaker, but I was a pain in Jim's derriere this summer looking for a center that would dig deep since so much content is steered to the center speaker.
I manually calibrated the system and left the center 1 dB hot because I like it hotter (and wanted to see what it could do).
Tried a usual suspect, Master and Commander, and found that the speaker wasn't giving me what I wanted. I couldn't get it to bite and attack my face. I was also disappointed in the bass response. I was expecting much more in that department.
One thing I did notice pretty quickly was that on the deck of the ship you wouldn't necessarily expect sounds to reflect into and around the folks on the deck given that there are no walls on the deck. Surprise! Yes, there were sounds and background voices moving into the screen and deeper across the deck than I had noticed with all previous speakers. Pretty cool stuff.
I still wasn't getting the bite I was expecting so I bumped it up another dB. Still nothing. Maybe this thing is just too hard to drive or too limber to be driven? After all I have 450 watts at hand ready to starch my hair at a moments notice. Nada.
So I watched several movies over the course of 5 days and pretty much didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the speaker and just enjoyed the movies. First time Jim built a stinker. Maybe Dennis lost his touch in retirement? The movies were totally enjoyable and the Song Towers performed dutifully (they're an amazing little speaker, aren't they?!) but I didn't get the jump factor I was after.
So I packed her up on Saturday before my trip to the Palace show that night and dropped it at Jim's. Mary came out in her overcoat to feed the kids cookies in the van while Jim and I discussed my cool response to the speaker's performance. In that conversation two things became clear to me:
There really isn't as much bass content in the center channel as I was expecting. Crap.
And the darned speaker was in fact performing a disappearing act that is consistent with Sound Scape performance. It never dawned on me that since I was using ST's and this center is in the SS camp that it too should be invisible like SS owners know their towers behave. So me wanting to bump up the output was feeding my paradigm that a center should be heard and your face should be slapped hard by it. That's what I'm used to anyways.
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The creepy thing is how invisible this speaker can be and I can only imagine how it must integrate with the SS towers. Jim's SSes are out of town on demo so he cannot evaluate in his home setting right now. I believe the SS owners who are planning HT duty for their beasts will be very pleased with this speaker as it completely gets out of the way. Can you say smooth? Can you say holographic? Can you say this is paradigm breaker? I was expecting more in your face results even though I knew this was not in the same league as a Song tower. In the end this is one of the smoothest performers I have been able to demo and for the rest of the demoed movies it did its thing quietly and superbly as an
invisible speaker should.
Order Up! - Sound Scape owners!
