Simplifying Home Theater

Multiple speakers and wires are the first thing you have to deal with when setting up a surround sound system. It can be a real pain in the butt, especially when you are dealing with an oddly shaped room or you don’t have any way to hide the wires. If you’ve seen the nice marketing brochures the speaker companies produce, you’ll notice the speakers hanging on the wall aren’t actually connected to the amplifiers—It would just be too hard to make the photograph look nice with unsightly wires hanging about. Sure, you could drill holes in the wall and run wire, but that option isn’t available to everyone.

This is partly why companies like Polk and Yamaha have been producing single-cabinet speaker options. These two speakers use different methods with the same result: surround sound from a single location. It should be said that neither is a 100 percent perfect replacement for a true 5.1-channel speaker system. But they can sound great and can be a good option for apartment dwellers or small rooms.



Polk Audio SurroundBar

Polk’s SurroundBar is long and thin, and can fit on the shelf of a credenza or under a TV (you can wall mount it, too). Built-in are seven drivers and three tweeters to handle all of the 5.1 channels of sound, as well as two drivers that are used for what Polk calls “SDA surround.” SDA (stereo dimensional array) is a technology Polk introduced in the 1980’s to improve stereo sound reproduction. Originally, part of its purpose was to improve the direction of sound so that you could produce good stereo from drivers that were placed near to each other.

Transitioning this acoustic engineering over to the SurroundBar allows the company to position the surround sound and trick the ears into thinking that there is sound coming from all around.

And this actually does work, for the most part. I won’t say that I could pick out sounds from a movie soundtrack to the left or right of me as easily as a true surround speaker, but the sound field was much more three dimensional than a stereo interpretation. And for a system that doesn’t boast huge drivers, it certainly does deliver big sound, even when listening to regular stereo music (though use with a subwoofer is highly recommended). It hooks up to any audio/video receiver and, because of the use of SDA, it doesn’t rely on walls to reflect any sound. You can pretty much place it anywhere and the SurroundBar will sound great.



Yamaha Digital Sound Projector

Unlike the Polk SurroundBar, which is a speaker only, the Yamaha Digital Sound Projector (YSP-800) is both a speaker and amplifier in one, so you don’t have to worry about buying an A/V receiver. It also has multiple inputs, so you can connect a DVD player as well as your television or game console. This makes this model a true all-in-one home theater.

To deliver surround sound, it operates much differently than the Polk speaker system. In the unit there are 21 small-driver speakers and two small subwoofers, so the bass is included. These speakers are specifically positioned and use the walls in the room to reflect sound at the viewer, creating the effect of surround sound.

There is a disadvantage to this in that objects like curtains or other furniture can affect the delivery of the sound. The walls of the room are very important, too. While the projector can be against a flat wall or in a corner, it may have trouble reproducing surround sound in a large factory loft-style apartment or a family room with odd shaped or open walls.

But if the setup is right, the Sound Projector can deliver some pretty powerful audio. When watching movies it was easy to forget that this was not a regular 5.1 system—all the elements of the soundtrack were clearly distinguished. The dialog never got lost among sound effects and music. Again, the surround sound is not a carbon copy of a true 5.1 system, but the sound field this system produced was very effective. yy