OTHER TECH

As any audio tweak can tell you, it takes work to find the exact position where speakers perform best. To ensure optimal imaging, you first need to dial in the proper side-to-side spread for the front left/right pair. Correct placement of surround speakers, meanwhile, can mean the difference between a constricted sound field and one that provides the expansive quality of sonic events encountered in real space. The Setup section is where you'll find the saga of our speaker-positioning trials and errors, and we also fill you in on the details of included hardware like speaker stands or special brackets for wall- or ceiling-mounting.

Positioning the main speakers might be a pain, but it's nothing compared with the agony of pinpointing optimal placement for the subwoofer. Every sub reacts differently to the space it's dropped into, so a reviewer needs to start from scratch with each model he encounters, nudging the box a few inches left or right, and closer to or further away from the front and side walls. Finding the correct receiver crossover settings for filtering bass from the main speakers and routing it to the sub also requires extensive experimentation. That accomplished, the bass should sound tight and blend as seamlessly as possible with the rest of the speakers - and you can take the settings we use to get to that point to the bank.

Music Performance Okay, so the speakers blow your mind during the opening chase scene from Casino Royale - but how do they fare with music? We usually start our listening tests in sub-free, stereo-only mode to hear how a system's front left/right pair handles a few reference stereo music tracks. But many home theater speaker systems require a sub by design to deliver full-range sound. If that's the case with the one under review, we add the sub and then report our 2.1-channel findings.

The first thing we'll usually comment on in subjective music-listening tests is the system's overall tonal balance. Does it have a forward presentation, or is the sound more laid-back and dark? Does its midrange come across as lean when we're listening to vocal recordings, or is its character more warm and lush? Each reviewer will conjure up a different set of adjectives to communicate what he hears, but we strive to keep those descriptions real. We avoid using pretentious metaphors or vague terminology to describe the sound.

Once we've given a precise description of a system's overall balance and midrange character on music, we next move on to its bass performance. We're listening here for the smoothness of the blend between the subwoofer and the satellites, as well as the system's overall extension and impact. This is also where we get a chance to strut our bass reference tracks - one of the more memorable titles being Bass Erotica's Bass Ecstasy, a fave of Tom Nousaine, our Test Bench guru. A thorough speaker-system review should also use a few choice multichannel-music tracks, if only to prime things for the report's next section.