The Good:
It employs some heavy duty psychoacoustic trickery to sling sound behind and around the listener boomerang style, creating its own unique and remarkably effective brand of virtual surround sound in the processThe Bad:
A CRT-sized subwoofer could cramp the style of home décor mavensThe Verdict:
It brings the typically dodgy category of 'virtual' surround home theatres back to the realm of desirability
"Virtual surround sound." It's a fishy-sounding name for a home-theatre technology that typically delivers dodgy results. Not surprisingly, Philips has avoided using the notorious description altogether in naming the HTS8100 SoundBar.
But no matter what it's called, the SoundBar — a long, thin black box that sits below your television — is a virtual-surround-sound system. It's just one that doesn't lend itself to the adjectives, dodgy and fishy.
It works—just don't ask how
Unlike standard 5.1 home theatres, which typically have six distinct audio channels delivered through six speakers positioned strategically around the central listening area, virtual-surround-sound systems attempt to deliver the same number of channels with fewer speakers, thereby liberating your living room from wires and sound-delivery devices. The difference between the SoundBar and other virtual-surround-sound systems is in the means by which it fools the listener into thinking that sound is originating from places where no speakers exist.
Most virtual-surround-sound systems bounce sound waves off the side and rear walls of a room to change the angle at which sound arrives at our ears. It's messy at best, and fails almost completely in rooms that aren't perfectly rectangular or have walls covered in drapes, shelves, or other sound-dampening objects. The SoundBar, on the other hand, takes wall reflection completely out of the picture, opting instead to bend sound waves around the audience in much the same way the flight of a boomerang curves back on itself.
Or at least that's what I've been told. After pouring over the SoundBar technical literature and speaking with Philips reps on two occasions, I have to confess that I'm still a bit clueless as to just how the SoundBar accomplishes its mission. The technicians I spoke to lost me when they started talking about something called the "notch of silence," an area in front of the television in which certain sounds heard elsewhere in the room become inaudible.
They could have called it magic, for all the sense it made.
But in the end, I'm typically keener to determine how well a thing works than I am interested in understanding the intricacies of the technology that powers it. And the SoundBar works very well, indeed.
My living room is decidedly un-square, and my television is positioned in a peculiar location inside an alcove. I recently tried a traditional virtual-surround system within this environment and it failed utterly. But, moments after setting up the SoundBar, my wife and I were pleasantly stunned as the thunderous effects accompanying a magical spell in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire moved up and over our heads before reverberating in the empty half of the room behind the couch.
It was actually a bit creepy. With a standard six speaker 5.1 system my brain was always aware at some level that the sounds I heard coming from behind me were originating from a speaker. With that bit of sensory understanding removed, the sound of, say, footsteps coming up from behind the sofa, became significantly more menacing.
Home theatre made easy—and pretty
Once I got past my surprise that the SoundBar actually delivered the quality and type of sound Phillips advertised — a first in the virtual-surround scene as far as I'm concerned — I sat back and appreciate some of its other qualities.
The SoundBar makes good on virtual surround's promise to simplify the home-theatre experience and clean-living spaces of the technological clutter typically associated with more complex audio systems.
