Yamaha All-In-One Home Theater (1 Viewer)

[Dick Boneske]

What happened to Yamaha's "revolutionary" surround speaker setup? Photos showed a front-only array that could electronically set itself up for any room to use reflected sound waves to create a realistic 5.1 or 6.1 soundfield. I believe it was shown at the 2005 CES show but I haven't seen anything about it from the 2006 show or other sources.

Description is similar to Bose's front-only surround setup, which doesn't create anything like a true 5.1 soundfield. I have heard this setup and cringe at how much people pay for something that performs so poorly.

 

[trevorDO]

I think that kind of speaker is a big gimmic that could never reproduce surround sound by not having the 5.1, 6.1, 7.1 speaker set up. Maybe in the perfect acoustic room setup for that speaker it might work a little bit and I mean a little bit. But realistically how can one speaker replace 5 and be as effective? I must admit I have never heard that speaker, but I have strong doubts it will not produce or replace an actuall 5.1 set up.

 

[RickRO]

I was in a local B&M store just before Christmas and the salesmen wanted very badly for me to demo the new Polk "Sound Bar" He told me it would replace all of those "unsightly" surround speakers that you have "all over the place. He even told me if I bought one at that time they would throw in a "free subwoofer". The speaker was definitely better than the Plasma TV speakers it was sitting under and the auditioning area did not have any walls close to bounce the sound off of so in effect there was not any surround effect that I could hear. I think that for someone wanting better sound from their TV it is OK but you should go into it knowing that that type of system has limitations. The sound was good but I would not say that it was surround at all.

BTW you could tell that they had turned the subwoofer (Polk) up because the bass was very booming IMO.

I told him thanks but no thanks