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News and New Products
Cheap thrills: Surround-sound home theater for $99
By Matthew Miller, Executive Editor, Online -- EDN, 3/16/2005
Whether because of prohibitive cost, lack of spousal approval, or shortage of time, space, or gumption, countless consumers watch DVD movies without the benefit of multichannel audio systems. Xitel's SOUNDaround, a $99.95 product that recently received an ears-on trial in the Digital Den, aims to rescue such folks from humdrum audio by coaxing conventional two-speaker stereos into producing virtual surround-sound.
Setup
"Humdrum" perfectly describes the stereo we used to test the SOUNDaround device: a 10-year-old Aiwa bookshelf system that features a 5.25-in. "bass" driver and a 2-in. tweeter in each of its two speakers. If SOUNDaround could make this anemic antique sound even remotely like a true home-theater system, it would deserve high praise indeed.
SOUNDaround is so easy to set up that the process hardly merits a mention. Plug in power cable. Plug in left and right audio cables coming from DVD player. Plug in left and right audio cables leading to stereo. That's it.
Performance
The device may not achieve everything its manufacturer boasts, but it delivers an astounding improvement for movie playback—especially considering its price and the lackluster stereo system with which we paired it.
SOUNDaround employs three technologies licensed from SRS Labs: TruSurround (virtual-surround algorithm), TruBass (a bass-enhancement scheme that relies on resonant frequencies), and Dialog Clarity (which attempts to emulate a center speaker dedicated to spoken dialog).
Buttons on the remote allow you to toggle between three operating modes that activate combinations of these technologies. In Surround mode, intended for movie viewing, the device employs all three effects. In Stereo mode, intended for music, only TruBass gets a workout. And in Bypass mode, the unit applies none of its tricks. The remote also offers up and down buttons for the intensity of the TruBass effect, as well as a button that toggles Dialog Clarity on and off.
The inclusion of the bypass mode—a shrewd marketing move, it must be noted—made it easy for us to evaluate the device's performance. We watched and re-watched sequences from a couple of feature films and a concert DVD while hopping among the various modes.
To describe the improvements we heard, we could sling around lots of adjectives and fancy parameters like soundstage and tonal balance. But when it comes to evaluating audio, the heart is really the most important test instrument. And each sequence we watched proved more riveting, more emotionally involving, and harder to tear away from when SOUNDaround was doing its thing than when we used the bypass mode. Watching the Mines of Moria sequence from The Fellowship of the Ring, for example, created a strong desire to finish that film, and perhaps continue straight through The Two Towers and The Return of the King as well.
In the interests of rigor, we also connected the DVD player to the stereo directly to make sure that Xitel hadn't purposely made the bypass mode especially hideous. In addition, we frequently adjusted the stereo to make sure the volume hitting our ears remained relatively constant; without these adjustments, the Surround mode was significantly louder than the bypass mode, and all else being equal, louder just sounds better. We ended up satisfied that SOUNDaround delivers an impressive boost in realism and impact.
Does the unit rival a true six- or eight-speaker system? Well, to our ears, all virtual-surround systems fall short of actual speakers placed behind the head. SOUNDaround definitely creates a more enveloping experience, but we were never fooled into thinking Tolkien's Orcs were sneaking up behind us.
On the other hand, Dialog Clarity proved to be a revelation. When we toggled the feature off, voices and key sound effects fell to the floor and got lost amid the din of the entire soundtrack, such as incidental sounds and musical cues. That forced us to turn the volume up in order to make the dialog audible. But because this action also raised the level of the background sounds, we found ourselves raising the volume again to hear the dialog—an upward feedback loop that many DVD viewers will find all too familiar. With Dialog Clarity on, however, every word came through clearly and seemed to emanate directly from the TV screen. We didn't have to resort to neighbor-annoying volume levels in order to catch every line, and bass output and the overall richness of the sound remained impressive even at lower volumes.
Assessment
Audio purists will surely object that virtual surround-sound is not surround-sound at all. And that's true. But for 99 bucks and with installation that won't take more than 5 minutes unless you try really hard, SOUNDaround delivers enormous bang for the buck.
Moreover, Xitel makes a pretty compelling case that the unit will provide higher user satisfaction than many home-theater-in-a-box packages that include six separate speakers. Aside from lower price, the argument (available in its entirety in this PDF file) trots out factors such as the difficulty of accurately positioning rear speakers for proper synchronization, the small size of the "sweet spot" in a typical multiple-speaker setup, and the inferior subwoofers included in some bundled products.
Xitel offers SOUNDaround in two versions, one for home theater and another targeting game consoles, although the two appear to differ only in packaging. Both can take input from any device with audio outputs, including set-top boxes and game consoles. In addition to Dolby and DTS formats, SOUNDaround also works its magic on content broadcast in the Circle Surround format, which is used by the major networks and some cable outfits, including ESPN, as well as radio stations using the HD Radio digital-terrestrial technology.
