April 2005 Reviewed by Jeff Van Dyne	Elac Cinema Pipes / XL Center / 2 Sat / Sub 111.2 ESP Home-Theater Speaker System

Description Model: Cinema Pipe floorstanding speaker Price: $1130 USD per pair Dimensions: 35.5"H x 3.5"W x 4"D Weight: 13.25 pounds each Model: Cinema XL Center center-channel speaker Price: $245 USD Dimensions: 11.5"W x 3.5"H x 4"D Weight: 4.6 pounds Model: Cinema 2 Sat surround speaker Price: $310 USD per pair Dimensions: 5.2"H x 3.5"W x 4"D Weight: 2.1 pounds each Model: Sub 111.2 ESP powered subwoofer Price: $559 USD Dimensions: 15.4"H x 10.1"W x 15"D Weight: 28.7 pounds System price: $2244 USD Warranty: Two years parts and labor

Features 1" aluminum-coated dome tweeter with neodymium magnet (except 2 Sat) 1" Mylar-dome tweeter with neodymium magnet (2 Sat) 3" magnetically shielded pulp-fiber woofers (except Sub 111.2 ESP) 8" aluminum-sandwich cone woofer (Sub 111.2 ESP) Nickel push terminals compatible with pins and bare wire Extruded brushed-aluminum enclosures (all) Matching wall brackets (XL Center, 2 Sat) 80W built-in amplifier (Sub 111.2 ESP) Speaker-level inputs and outputs for left, center, right speakers (Sub 111.2 ESP) ESP system to reduce harmonic distortion (Sub 111.2 ESP)

Is it just me, or are more and more audio companies thinking outside the box? When I first got into audio back in the 1970s, you rarely found speakers that were anything other than the standard cone-and-dome dynamic drivers in a wooden box. I think my first experience with anything different was a pair of Acoustat electrostatics that a local dealer sold sometime around 1983. The following year I was introduced to Magnepan’s planar speakers and shortly thereafter purchased a pair. But other than that, not much changed in the world of speakers in the next 15 years.

Today we have a flourishing speaker industry that breaks with traditional design. Look at the myriad variety of in-wall, on-wall, and microspeakers that have hit the market in recent years and you begin to see my point. But the most impressive thing about this new wave of speakers is that they are, for the most part, good.

While Elac’s Cinema series are conventional cone-and-dome designs, they leave the standard wooden enclosure behind in favor of sleek housings of brushed aluminum that taper gracefully to the rear. What’s presented to the listener is a slender, 3.5"-wide housing with a silver metal grille that covers the drivers -- simple, elegant, attractive, unobtrusive. The Cinemas are designed to complement the media systems many of us live with today, not dominate the space like the audio systems I grew up with. The Elac system I evaluated consisted of the Cinema Pipes, XL Center, 2 Sats, and Sub 111.2 ESP. Total system price: $2244 USD.

Options

The Cinema series comes in a variety of flavors to match just about any requirements; to cover all the bases, Elac sent me a little of everything. Most of the speakers in the series use the same drivers and basic housing design, adding or subtracting woofers to suit different needs. The basic cabinet is an aluminum shell 3.5" wide by 4" deep, with a somewhat bell-shaped profile that tapers toward the back. The front baffle is recessed slightly behind a nonremovable metal grille. The narrow (1.5") rear of the enclosure allows room for a single pair of nickel-plated, spring-loaded posts that accept bare wires or pins but not bananas or spade lugs. All of the Cinemas except the Pipe come with brackets for wall mounting.

First out of the boxes were the floorstanding Cinema Pipes, which I ended up using as the front left and right speakers for the bulk of the review. The Pipe’s driver array consists of two pairs of 3" woofers that look like metal but are made of pulp fiber. These are placed above and below a single 1" aluminum-coated dome tweeter set about a foot down from the top of the 35.5"-high column. This puts the tweeter well below ear level, but the placement didn’t seem to materially affect the sound quality. Except for the 8" aluminum-sandwich cone used in the subwoofer and the 1" Mylar-dome tweeter in the 2 Sat, these drivers are used throughout the Cinema line.

The Cinema 24 CM ($800/pair) -- which can be used instead of the Pipe or, with them, as surrounds -- follows the same basic arrangement but shortens the cabinet’s height to 24" in order to make the 24 CM suitable for on-wall mounting as left, center, and right channels surrounding a flat-panel display. The XL Center lops off the two outer woofers and another 12" to create a compact center-channel speaker. Finally, the Cinema 2 Sat gets by with only one woofer and tweeter to create a very compact speaker only 4.6" tall. To fill in the bottom end, Elac provided a compact subwoofer: the Sub 111.2 ESP.

I like the fact that most of the Cinema models use the same drivers. This greatly limits tonal variances between speakers of different sizes, and makes it easier to assemble a coherent system. Depending on the size of your room and budget, you could assemble a system based on four Cinema 2 Sats and an XL Center, or perhaps three Cinema 24 CMs surrounding a plasma TV with a pair of 2 Sats to cover rear-channel duties. I placed the Cinema Pipes on either side of my rear-projection television and tried both the XL Center and a Cinema 24 CM as a center-channel. The 2 Sat pulled surround duty, perched atop shelves mounted about 6’ off the floor. Using a pair of Cinema 24 CMs as surrounds would provide the same driver complement in each speaker and, presumably, a somewhat more cohesive soundstage. However, not wanting to drill holes in my theater’s freshly painted plaster, and lacking a secure way to otherwise stand-mount the slender columns, I chickened out and stayed with the 2 Sats as surrounds.

The XL Center and Cinema 24 come with wall brackets, but placing either atop a TV causes its curved side/bottom to tilt up toward the ceiling. Because, as in many other installations, the center-channel position in my theater is already well above head height, this is unacceptable. No matter -- the situation was easily resolved with a few bits of Blu-tac and two rubber doorstops, which I used to tilt the speakers toward the listening position. The solution is inelegant when viewed from behind, virtually invisible from the front.

Listening notes

After years of reviewing, I’d begun to expect certain things from different types of speakers -- but increasingly, companies prove my assumptions wrong. When I see very small speakers, I always suspect they’ll lack warmth due to the typical hole in the frequency response that such designs have between the satellites and the subwoofer. Systems with this hole frequently have trouble with big-band music, such as that found on Erich Kunzel and Cincinnati Pops’ Nice ’N’ Easy [SACD, Telarc SACD-60532]. "Face the Music and Dance" quickly put this notion to rest. On the contrary, at times the Elacs sounded more like my tube-and-vinyl analog system than I would have ever expected. (I should note that the volume of the Pipe’s slender enclosure is actually a bit greater than you might believe.)

One of the first SACDs I generally use to check out a new surround system is Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon [Capitol 82136]. If this were a John Coltrane album and the remix engineers had passed music and effects around the rear channels, it would have ticked me off. But DSOM was a stoner album, and that wavering sound at the opening of "On the Run" and the footsteps circling the room are entirely in order, considering the off-kilter nature of the entire album. The Elac system did a remarkable job of reproducing the footsteps with perfect accuracy -- they had that right there, reach out and touch them quality as they circled around behind me -- eerie, just as it’s supposed to be.

Immediately following in that track’s footsteps (pun intended) is "Time." A bit more surprising was the fact that the heartbeat at the front of the room was sharper and better defined through the Elac system than through most other systems I’ve heard in this space. The percussion was more open and transparent -- more like my Magnepan reference speakers than I would have ever expected. This is an extremely interesting combination of qualities in a speaker this small and easy to live with.

I then popped in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. One of the better demo scenes around is when Hagrid opens the brick wall to Diagon Alley. Through the Elacs, the sound of each brick moving was its own clearly defined sonic event within a larger soundscape as each brick slowly moved from the center of the screen out to the sides. In chapter 28, the sounds of the keys flying around the room moved seamlessly without ever anchoring themselves to a speaker’s location, and without that telltale shift in tone as the sound moved from the much larger Pipes in front to the diminutive 2 Sats in back. This was excellent performance by any standard.

Underwater scenes are always good tests for surround systems, and the car crashing into the river in chapter 4 of The Bourne Supremacy is no exception. The sound of air bubbles rising through the water and the creaking of metal should be heard not as blanket background noise but as hundreds of independently recognizable sounds. That’s exactly what I got with the Elac system. This movie has tons of gunshots, explosions, and crashes with lots of bass energy. The Elac subwoofer had limited low-frequency abilities but was surprisingly punchy for such a little guy. This added impact to action scenes without shaking the whole room, which, in some cases, can be a good thing.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World has quickly become a staple of my arsenal of test DVDs. Like U-571, this film has a very active surround track, with the ship’s miscellaneous creaks and groans coming from all directions. The Elac system was more than up to the task: clearly delineated noises from the rigging came from overhead, and popping noises from the hull came from distinct points to the sides. The sharp reports of cannon fire were other points that provided some measure of surprise. The diminutive Sub 111.2 ESP subwoofer couldn’t hope to plumb the depths or hit the volume levels of the likes of the Hsu Research VTF-3, but it managed to be believable by virtue of its ability to provide impact in the frequency range it does cover.

Comparison

Because Elac’s Cinema line targets owners of flat-panel displays, I could compare it with such microspeaker systems as the Hsu Ventriloquist and Athena Micra. On the other hand, the Cinemas’ quality and prices demand that they be compared with more expensive and, mostly, larger speakers. None of this is exactly comparing apples with apples, and maybe that’s the point. The Elac Cinema series has little competition in its price range as a high-quality, extremely compact speaker system.

In the end, it seemed to make the most sense to compare the Elac Cinemas with the Ascend Acoustics CBM-170/CMT-340c with Hsu Research VTF-3 subwoofer ($1707 system price), even though they are vastly different speaker systems. The Ascend system is utilitarian in its approach to cosmetics and is designed for medium to large spaces, whereas the Elac system is a high-style, high-performance system intended for smaller rooms.

Sonically, the two systems were highly competitive. Both displayed excellent imaging and tonal balance, and the ability to resolve inner detail. While the Hsu VTF-3 clearly outperformed the Elac Sub 111.2 ESP in almost every category, this may not always be an advantage. For those of you that live in apartments, a sub such as the VTF-3 will almost certainly elicit loud and frequent complaints from the downstairs neighbors. In such instances, the Elac sub’s limited low-frequency range suddenly becomes an advantage. Add to that the Sub 111.2 ESP’s sonic finesse and tonal match to the remainder of the Cinema series and you have one of the best overall apartment systems I’ve heard.

Conclusions

With their Cinema speakers’ small sizes and clean cosmetics, Elac has clearly targeted people who have smaller spaces and flat-panel displays. There are speakers at or near this price that outperform the Elac Cinemas in certain areas, but all are considerably larger, and few are anywhere near as attractive. Where space is at a premium but quality still counts, the Elac Cinemas’ sound and appearance make compelling cases for themselves. This series represents the next step up in quality in the rapidly expanding market of microspeakers.

Manufacturer contact information:

Elac Electroacustic GmbH
Rendsburger Landstraße 215
24113 Kiel, Germany
Phone: (49) 431 647740
Fax: (49) 431 682101

E-mail: info@elac.com
Website: www.elac.com

US distributor:
Q-USA, Inc.
462 N Baldwin St
Madison, WI 53703
Phone: (608) 237-1726
Fax: (608) 237-1728

E-mail: info@q-usa.com
Website: www.q-usa.com

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