Summary
LCD and plasma tools give birth to enabled TVs to follow wider in inverse proportion to their thickness, which can create the audio plane of the home-theater equation stick dated like a sore thumb. Denon’s $500 DHT-FS5 promises to surrender an authentic surround-sound experience from a single, low-profile box. And while it doesn’t completely imitate come again? A proper surround procedure is talented of, it comes pretty close.
Features and Design
The DHT-FS5 is self-powered, so it eliminates the need intended for an A/V receiver; and it houses six 8cm drivers with the intention of can take the place of three narrator cabinets up front (left, desirable, and center), two or more in back (for surround effects), and a subwoofer (for low-frequency effects). Unlike more or less single-cabinet home-theater speakers with the intention of agreement to surrender surround sound from an analog stereo indicate, Denon’s is equipped with a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), a digital indicate laptop (DSP), and is talented of decoding Dolby Digital and DTS tad streams. The cabinet has two optical S/DPIF inputs, lone coaxial S/PDIF input, and lone RCA analog stereo input, so you can plug in multiple sources: A DVD player, a television, and a gaming console, intended for illustration.
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| Denon DHT-FS5 Connections |
The DAC, however, can’t carry sampling toll elevated than 48kHz, and the DSP can’t decode audio that’s been encoded in Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD Master Audio, the lossless compression formats unfilled on Blu-ray movies. That doesn’t mean the narrator won’t drive with a Blu-ray player, a moment ago with the intention of you won’t hear the soundtrack in the highest fidelity unfilled on the disc. There’s as well thumbs down phono input, so you can’t plug in a turntable (but generally community won’t fuss roughly with the intention of feature’s absence since they don’t own a turntable anyway).
Our Test Environment
We evaluated the DHT-FS5 in a 250-square-foot local show business, a room-within-a-room design constructed of four 2×4-framed walls inside four 2×6-framed walls, with two layers of R19 filling stuffed in the done with hole involving them. The walls and ceiling are covered by two layers of sheetrock with sound-deadening caulk sandwiched involving them, and the front wall is canted by three degrees to help prevent the formation of station waves (a trick we learned from someone who designed sample place to stay intended for consumer electronics retailers). We placed the narrator by the foundation of a 42-inch ViewSonic N4285P LCD television, and connected it to the coaxial digital-audio output of a home-theater PC. We played Spiderman 3 on the PC’s Pioneer BD202MR Blu-ray drive intended for our source material.
The DHT-FS5 has settings intended for three opportunity sizes – 108 pay off feet, 172 pay off feet, and 215 pay off feet – so you can roughly tailor the speaker’s performance to your fastidious background. We used the third setting and found with the intention of the device’s 150-watt amplifier was very much up to the task of satisfying the opportunity with sound. The DHT-FS5 has four surround modes – show, stereo, tune, and news – with the intention of adjust the sound stage to suit the source material. We preferred the stereo mode intended for listening to tune, which creates a sound stage emblematic of a match up of square stereo speakers. All the rage our look over, it did the preeminent job of rendering the audio experience with the intention of the musicians and engineers in the studio originally sought to create.
The tune mode, in comparison, proliferate the sound stage too extensive intended for our taste. The news setting emphasizes vocal frequencies and is intended to create narration and dialog easier to hear, but we found with the intention of our ears became shattered like listening to it intended for long periods of period. We spent generally of our evaluation with the narrator in show mode, since we were generally interested in the speaker’s performance with Blu-ray movies.
A Thin Illusion
One event became crystal patent as soon as the movie’s opening credits began to roll: Even with its bass boost activated, the DHT-FS5’s 8cm drivers aren’t up to the task of delivering the visceral, gut-punching bass with the intention of we crave from a home-theater audio procedure. It’s a moment ago a carry some weight of physics: Petite speakers aren’t efficient by reproducing low frequencies. We liked Denon’s procedure much better as we added our existing powered subwoofer and solid its crossover to match the Denon’s 150Hz crossover. (When a narrator is plugged into the Denon’s subwoofer preamp output, it redirects frequencies of 150Hz and less than to the subwoofer.)
The creature ear and brain are exceptionally talented of locating a sound’s origin, so it’s very not easy intended for a narrator in the front of a opportunity to fool them into perceiving sounds as originating from the back of the opportunity. The DHT-FS5 did a lovely job of expanding the sound stage, but it by no means fooled us into believing with the intention of we were sincerely surrounded by sound. There are two chapters in Spiderman 3 in which this became generally readily deceptive: The essential is the lone in which James Franco’s character is pursuing Tobey Maguire (Spiderman). Franco is short on a jet-powered skateboard, and he hurls explosive globes by Spiderman. Watching this picture on a proper 5.1-channel sound procedure, we may possibly hear the globes whiz on us and ancient us sooner than exploding behind our heads. On the Denon procedure, their sound traveled roughly halfway up the wall and stopped. That’s an impressive accomplishment intended for a single-cabinet narrator procedure, but it’s a moment ago not the same.
The Denon had even more care with the trice engagement picture. This period, Thomas Haden Church’s character cascade into a sand pit in which scientists are roughly to conduct more or less sort of particle-accelerator test. Being these three enormous vertical arms make a start spiraling around him, the audience is made-up to feel as though they’re sitting in the core of the ensuing vortex, with these mechanical arms whirling around their heads. The DHT-FS5 stimulated the sound from missing to desirable, but our ears were by no means fooled into perceiving with the intention of we were in the core of with the intention of sound stage.
Conclusion
The Denon DHT-FS5 weighs merely 11 pounds, so it can be by a long shot hung beneath a wall-mounted box, provided you give birth to a power outlet nearby (most community will need to give birth to an outlet installed; so while you give birth to the wall unlock, run a cable to a subwoofer). It does a lovely job of simulating a surround-sound procedure, and it consumes much fewer hole than a square A/V receiver and six speakers. But it doesn’t approach close to delivering the same audio experience as persons components.
Denon DHT-FS5 Specifications
| Speakers: |
| Six 8cm cone drivers |
| Amplifer: |
| 150 watts |
| Frequency response: 80Hz – 20kHz |
| Signal-to-noise ratio: 100dB |
| Subwoofer Crossover: 150Hz |
| Dimensions: |
| Height 4.6 inches |
| Width: 25.5 inches |
| Depth: 5.4 inches |
| Weight: 11 pounds, four ounces |
| Audio Inputs: |
| Optical S/PDIF (2) |
| Coaxial S/PDIF (1) |
| RCA Analog (Left and Right) |
| Audio Outputs: |
| Subwoofer Pre-amp |
Credits : Digital Trends
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