Tower Speaker Reviews

The speaker, as modern-looking as possible, has a certain amount of placement flexibility via the self-centering adjustable stand: It can be placed atop your monitor, below it on a stand, or mounted to a wall above the monitor. (At 43 inches wide by 11.5 deep by 13 high and 57 pounds, stud anchoring is essential.) Finally, the 90-dB-sensitive Theater center handles 250 watts of power and carries a nominal impedance of 4 ohms (again, a larger amp will optimize this speaker's performance).

With a CLS electrostatic element, the Scenario is similar to the Prodigy, with several exceptions. At a height of 47.33 inches, it is shorter, and it houses an 8-inch high-excursion, high-rigidity driver in an asymmetrical chamber. Its bass module does not utilize the ForceForward technology. As a reminder, in order to energize an electrostatic's diaphragm with high-voltage DC, its internal power supplies must be connected to the AC mains, which means that this ML array requires five suitable outlet locations.

A number of avenues can be taken to assess a speaker system's ability to create both impact and sensuality, by which I mean the ability to wrap your ears in a luscious ambience that engrosses you fully in the film rather than bringing attention to the effects in a kind of third-person perspective. Take, for instance, the wild cab ride in The Fifth Element. Just before the ride begins, the Fifth Element pounds the plastic partition separating her from the driver. Not only can you hear flesh hitting plastic, but the sound of plastic chattering in its retaining barrier sounds like every plastic divider I've ever heard in a Yellow cab in New York City. The Theater center captures these distinct sounds realistically, melding them into two continuous but subtle sonic events that help create the illusion of reality. This ability to shift so smoothly between initial transient and decay of different sounds coming in rapid succession works equally throughout the entire speaker system, not merely in the sophisticated center channel.

On a more-complex level, consider how the MartinLogan arrangement handles simultaneous dialogue and echo. As two cops talk within the confines of their cruiser, each cop's voice is distinct. Yet, while the conversation clearly takes places within an enclosed environment, outside that environment, the echo of commands coming from the megaphones of other cruisers can be heard reverberating against and ricocheting from the monumental glass and steel structures of the city. Neither dialogue nor echoes intrude into each other's sonic space; they exist separately, simultaneously.

The Fifth Element's Diva scene, chapter 26, is a standard in the reviewer's toolbox. The clarity of the Diva's voice when she performs an aria is used to note tonal purity, amount of sibilance, echoes at the rear of the performance hall, and so on. Needless to say, the MartinLogans fully realize the performance. It was one of the best, in fact, I'd ever heard: crystal clear, with only an occasional (minor) hint of sibilance, although this may be attributed to factors other than compression on the part of the speakers themselves—from cabling to power-cord choices to wires possibly crossing at non-right-degree angles.

In another segment of the same chapter, the Fifth Element herself has just crawled into an air duct to escape Gary Oldman. When he begins firing his weapon at her into the duct, the sound designer's magic comes through perfectly. The bullets encircling her and the sound of metal being punctured lend to an altogether-enveloping claustrophobia. Again, the speaker array helps create the sense of helpless inescapability and imminent threat, the kind of reality that causes piloerection on the nape of the neck.

DVD after DVD, the same subtle stuff—the marriage of micro- and macrosounds—is captured by the electrostatic speakers. Take chapter 11 of Braveheart. When the British army's archers are commanded to fire the first salvo against the Scots, every subtlety of the act is conveyed vividly. The sound of increasing tension being applied to bow strings as they are pulled back is married simultaneously to the groaning from the bow shafts under growing pressure, giving the brief sequence a palpable reality. Then, as the arrows fly through the air, you can often hear one shaft overtake another, a sonic feat of reproduction that many other speaker arrays would find difficult to accomplish with such clear-cut adeptness.

Shortly thereafter, the British and Scottish forces run toward each other for the first military clash. The British footfalls sound ever-so-slightly heavier than those of the Scots, and for a moment I wondered whether some sort of discontinuity of sound was transpiring—until I realized that this was instead an important but subtle rendering of the two military forces rushing toward each other. The British army was outfitted with heavier gear, armor, and so on, and the sound designer's attempt to delineate the difference became magically transparent through the Prodigies. Brilliant stuff, in both execution and reproduction.

I can hear you now: But what about the big noise, the Sturm und Drang of dynamic power? Trust me, it's there, and I'll get to that shortly. The point of attending to the minutiae has something to do with the devil living in all the details. The most subtle transient response existing equally alongside the big sounds, not obscured by them, spells the difference between observing a film and giving yourself up to it completely, and it's this immersion in a movie's essence that the MartinLogan system delivers—scene after scene, moment after moment. It's a willing suspension of disbelief.