Performance

Hearing planar speakers for the first time can be a bit disconcerting to anyone brought up on a diet of box speakers with cone drivers. The sound has a striking clarity and immediacy that can take a little getting used to. Planar speakers are directional in a way that “plays the room” far less than normal box speakers, so the sound from the panels doesn’t get lost in a wash of room reflections. Sure, there’s still the out-of-phase rear wave to contend with, but by the time it reaches the listener, it generally creates an enhanced sense of spaciousness rather than muddling the sound.

I played “Sparks” from the SACD edition of the Who’s Tommy and was struck by the vivid tonal palette of Pete Townshend’s dual acoustic guitars. From the clear attack of the pick hitting each string to the resonance of the guitar’s wood body, a sonic portrait of the instrument was laid bare before me. Even with the speakers spread so wide, image focus remained strong if I sat in the middle, although the three-channel Dolby Pro Logic IIx approach also helped to keep things locked in place when I listened at off-center seats.

With a live recording of Seiji Ozawa conducting Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, the MMC 2s displayed a remarkable ability to furnish the initial impact of double basses and percussion, even if the dipole woofers couldn’t quite get your pant legs flapping the way some dynamic speakers do. Tonally, they sounded just a little lean in the upper bass and a tad forward in the upper mids and low treble. Normally, even a hint of brightness can spell problems for a speaker, but the MMC 2s’ clarity was such that it acted more like a subtle spotlight on detail rather than something that might start to grate. The MMC 2s had no trouble handling the loudest passages in the Mahler symphony, but I found their dynamic strengths to be geared toward providing subtle microdynamic cues more than delivering a big, sledgehammer punch.

The same set of strengths and weaknesses I heard when listening to music also applied to movies; the system proved much more at ease with the gentle, immersive ambience of Pan’s Labyrinth than with a window-rattling action flick like Green Zone. Given the right movie, you could sit and relish little details buried deep in the soundtrack mix. But while big action sequences could get frighteningly loud without audible distortion, the speakers couldn’t quite muster the chest-pounding impact of the best dynamic speaker packages.

No matter what type of movie I played, dialogue clarity was always exemplary. I would rate the CC 5 as the most focused and transparent center-channel speaker I’ve yet encountered, with none of the off-axis frequency-response anomalies you hear with some dynamic models. The CC 5 was able to lock the dialogue to the center of the screen with razor-sharp precision over a wide arc of listening positions, and it made even voices buried way down in the mix easy to comprehend.