| Content | The 5.1.2 pack is the second generation in the Sib range, composed of two loudspeakers equipped with an additional speaker driver on the top featuring Dolby Atmos technology. This system distinguishes itself by offering sound effects on a vertical plane, reflected off the ceiling. Get ready to live a completely new audio experience worthy of cinemas!
Combination systems like the Focal Sib Evo have been around for a long time. They typically include small speakers and a subwoofer. Done properly, this type of design has some inherent advantages.
The human voice falls right in the critical midrange area of the acoustic range. By designing a small speaker that does not need to worry about producing deep bass, the engineer can focus on getting the important range of the music right. A well-designed sub can then take over to fill in the lower frequencies. The engineers know which speakers will be dedicated to which frequencies, and can design them to work perfectly with one another.
The real trick is coupling the satellites with a subwoofer that is fast enough to keep up with them without just being a boomy, noisy box. That boomy bass will cover up all the midrange goodness, defeating the whole purpose.
A good sat/sub system also offers the ability to place the smaller satellite speakers in the best spot in your room for great stereo imaging and put the sub in a place that couples best to your room for full and even bass response.
Most French audio products have a pretty cool look about them, and the Sib Evo is no exception. The five speakers are in a curvy ABS plastic housing. They will never be accused of having a basic, boxy look! Fit and finish are excellent. The speakers use a push connection for the speaker cable and will accept up to a 12 gauge speaker wire. All 5 also come with a neat little base for table use and included in the box are two wall mounts, which will probably come in handy for the rears. There is also an optional floor stand available for them.
The left and right larger speakers have two sets of connections on the rear, one pair for the main, and another on top of those for the Atmos speaker. One of our few complaints was the push connection widgets. It takes a little fiddling with them to get the speaker wire to go in all the way, and once you have it in, getting it out again is a bit of a challenge. For most people, getting the speaker wire in will be a one-time thing, so we felt this was not a deal-breaker.
Features & Technology
The five satellites each have a 5” Polyflex woofer and a ¾” soft dome tweeter. You will notice the main left and right satellites are larger than the other three. This is the cool part! These guys also have a 4” full-range Dolby Atmos speaker in the top of the cabinet that fires up at an angle.
The Cub subwoofer included in the package is almost a perfect 12” cube. It has an 8” Polyflex driver connected up to a 200-watt class D amplifier. The driver is downward firing with a front-firing port. Connections on the rear include a right and left input; the left is used for LFE (low-frequency extension channel). There is a level and crossover control, along with a phase switch. If you had to put the sub behind you, you’ll want to flip the phase switch to 180. The sub box itself is made out of a pretty dense MDF material and has a really solid feel to it with virtually no resonance. You’ll also notice that the feet for the sub are very large and designed to reduce vibrations.
Dolby Atmos came out about two years ago and we think it is the biggest improvement in surround sound we have heard since the introduction of Dolby Digital almost 20 years ago. Dolby Atmos is an object-based surround format where the audio engineer doing the movie soundtrack has the ability to place sounds in a three-dimensional space. The idea is to use surround speakers at ear level in addition to either in-ceiling Atmos speakers or speakers that reflect off the ceiling as the Sib system uses. The Atmos speakers in the larger left and right satellite cabinets are angled to bounce the sound off the ceiling so it will appear to be coming from right above you.
By now you may have figured out what the 5.1.2 means. In the new lingo of Dolby Atmos, this means you have five main speakers, one subwoofer, and two Atmos speakers.
Performance
We set up the Focal Sib 5.1.2 with one of the new Sony ES receivers to test it out. These are a great value, like the Focal system, and we suspect this will be a popular combination. Any Dolby Atmos-certified receiver will have a section in the setup in which you tell the system what kind of Atmos speakers you are using. When setting up the Focal system, make sure you specify that you are using upward-firing Atmos speakers in the front.
We set the crossover points for the satellites at 80 Hz and then put on some tunes to get the front speakers positioned best. Like most satellite/sub systems, we found you want them in a rough 2:3 ratio. This means that if they are two feet apart, you sit three feet from them. In most rooms, this will probably work out to about a 6-foot spread sitting about 9 feet away from them. We then played a few different cuts with deep bass to get bass levels set properly.
Being the two-channel audio geeks that we are, we first had to determine how this system performed with just music in a two-channel stereo. Our music tests used a NAD CD player going analog into the Sony receiver -- very impressive! The speakers are very clean sounding with no trace of harshness. If you dial in the satellite position, you can get a great 3-dimensional image with the main vocals floating dead center in front of you. Probably the most impressive part is how well the subwoofer blends with the satellites. It took a little fiddling with its position and output level, but once we had it set the way we wanted, the bass was quite seamless to the satellites. While it does not go as deep as a more expensive subwoofer, its response is excellent for its size. We just found music was a lot of fun to listen to using this setup.
Moving onto the home theater performance, we tried some cuts with challenging dialog. One of our favorite movies for this is Valkerie because there are a lot of accented, deep voices in the soundtrack. If your center channel is weak, you’ll really notice it on some of the scenes. The Sib system did very well in this regard -- the dialog was crystal clear, allowing the actors' emotions to come through.
You’ll get the best results if you set the surrounds up just a little above ear level when you are seated, and about 12-18” behind your head, aimed at your listening area. If you have a flat ceiling that is 10’ or under, the upward-firing Atmos speaker does a pretty impressive job too. The cool thing about the base that comes with the main fronts is the way you can adjust the tilt on it +/- about 5 degrees so you can “tune” the way Atmos feeds bounces off the ceiling and arrives at your listening spot. Overall, we still prefer actual Atmos in-ceiling speakers for the best effect, but for the money, this system works really well!
The Focal Sib 5.1.2 might be one of the best values we have ever seen in home theater. You’ll have to run some wires to the rears, but the end result is way beyond any soundbar/sub combo in the same price range as the Sib 5.1.2 and a good Dolby Atmos receiver.
Overall Recommendation
Over the past couple of years, the soundbar has gained popularity because it is just so easy to integrate with a TV. But the audio performance of a soundbar just can not even approach a great separate home theater package.
When making your choice, you have to think about how much time over the next ten years or so you will spend watching that TV and listening to the audio system. We feel like the Focal Sib Evo 5.1.2 bridges that gap between a full-fledged home theater system consisting of multiple speakers in your ceilings and walls and a soundbar/sub combination. Couple it with a modest Dolby Atmos home theater receiver and you’ll be having tons of fun enjoying movies, TV, and sports for many years to come!
- Composed of a 5″ Polyflex speaker driver and a 1″ silk dome tweeter integrated into a sizeable enclosure in order to give it extended frequency response. The Dolby Atmos loudspeaker is equipped with an additional 3″ full-range Polyflex speaker driver on top dedicated to the Atmos effects.
- The Cub Evo active bass-reflex subwoofer recalls the same design codes as Focal's Hi-Fi subwoofers in a ‘‘lifestyle" product. Equipped with an 8 ' ' speaker driver and a 200W Class D amplifier.
- Dolby Atmos offers sound effects on a vertical plane, which reflects sound off the ceiling, giving an ultra-realistic 3D realism effect to a home theater.
- Easy installation with a wide range of mount possibilities.
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The Triton Seven Loudspeaker is an award-winning speaker and the first Triton Tower without a built-in powered subwoofer. It still achieves superbly deep, subwoofer-like impactful bass performance by combining advanced drivers with refined bass-loading technologies.
Like the Five, the Seven’s strikingly attractive and acoustically purposeful cabinet provides the same performance benefits, as well as looking great. The Seven’s precise and totally boxless imaging characteristics are further enhanced by the narrow front baffle. A complex Linkwitz/Riley crossover perfectly blends the D'Appolito Arrayed twin 5-1/4" cast basket bass/midrange drivers specifically designed for exceptionally long-throw, for tremendous dynamic range and extraordinarily deep bass response. These surround the same signature High Velocity Folded Ribbon (HVFR™) tweeter for high-resolution reproduction of both music and cinema. And dual side-mounted inertially-balanced, planar sub-bass radiators deliver impactful, superbly detailed, subwoofer-quality bass performance. The Triton Seven’s high-resolution sonic performance makes it perfect for the highest quality two channel systems as well as the best multi-channel music and home theater systems.
- Features a complex Linkwitz/Riley crossover that perfectly blends the D'Appolito Arrayed twin 5-1/4" cast basket bass/midrange drivers specifically designed for exceptionally long-throw,resulting in tremendous dynamic range and extraordinarily deep bass response.
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The Motion FX features dual Folded Motion tweeters in a wide dispersion configuration, powerful bass, and a folded reflex port in a compact, affordable package with stunning performance.
- A single 5.25-inch paper cone woofer doped for stability and damping.
- Precision Vojtko™ crossover with custom air core coil and low DCR steel laminate inductors; polyester film and low DF electrolytic capacitors.
- Designed to easily corner mount, wall mount or angle-wall mount for versatile placement in any room.
- Convenient push-style binding posts easily adapt to accept banana plugs.
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The powerful EM-ESL C is a high-performance electrostatic center channel loudspeaker. With the exceptional mid-range dynamics of an electrostatic panel, the remarkable details delivered by a Folded Motion Tweeter, and the addition of a newly-designed CenterForce dual woofer system, the most surprising thing about the EM-ESL C isn’t its superior performance. It’s that the EM-ESL C is compact enough to fit easily into today’s most popular A/V furniture. With the EM-ESL C electrostatic center channel loudspeaker, you can match the acoustic signature of your ElectroMotion Series speakers and build a truly astounding home theater system.
Expanding the Dynamics of Center Channel Performance
By adding a compact electrostatic panel to a center channel speaker, MartinLogan engineers have succeeded in expanding the performance dynamics of the most important speaker in your home theater system. Your center channel speaker needs to be able to reproduce the finest high-frequency details. The midrange must be expansive; to reproduce every whisper of dialogue. Deep bass adds impact to the front-stage effects that anchor the action to your screen. The EM-ESL C accomplishes all this and more.
The EM-ESL C has a shallow height CLS (Curvilinear Line Source) XStat electrostatic panel wrapped around the front of the speaker enclosure. The gentle horizontal curve of the panel enhances the output of its deceptively compact 114-square-inch radiating area, extending mid-range dispersion patterns and blending the performance seamlessly with your front-stage ElectroMotion loudspeakers.
Just behind the electrostatic panel, in a specially designed housing, sits MartinLogan’s exclusive Folded Motion Tweeter. The low-mass diaphragm of the Folded Motion Tweeter minimizes distortion, and its short excursion length reinforces its lightning-fast high-frequency response. The 1 x 1.4-inch Folded Motion Tweeter in the EM-ESL C has a total diaphragm area of 9.2-inches, with the ability to reproduce precise details; one of the most important jobs of a center channel speaker.
The New CenterForce System
Designing a high-performance electrostatic center channel speaker sized to fit into A/V furniture was no easy task. Adding a dual woofer system seemed impossible! But MartinLogan’s skilled audio engineers found a novel solution, and they call it CenterForce.
Instead of taking up space by positioning the woofers on each side of the electrostatic panel, they’ve designed a central slot inside the cabinet for the woofers. Now, the dual woofers reside in a well-braced enclosure located behind the tweeter and electrostatic panel.
This new CenterForce solution allows the speaker to be more compact and encourages the woofers to produce a generous amount of well-blended deep bass. The CenterForce system in the EM-ESL C features two custom-designed 5.25-inch aluminum cone woofers. Rigid and yet lightweight, this material reduces flexure while minimizing response time. Their efficient construction optimizes suspension and magnetic flux field, further reducing potential sources of distortion. The EM-ESL C grounds its performance in accurate, musical bass response.
This is a center channel speaker that delivers a full-range performance, by combining an electrostatic panel with a Folded Motion Tweeter, bolstered by the CenterForce bass system. The compact EM-ESL C goes where you want it, and does what you need, for your high-performance ElectroMotion home theater system.
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The ForceField Subwoofers are unique in appearance and incomparable in its deep, rich bass ideal for music and movies. The ForceField 3 is extremely compact and affordable without compromising its ability to perform.
The ForceField Subwoofers’ unique and attractive cabinet shape, with its non-parallel cabinet walls (the top is narrower than the bottom when viewed from the front), helps the ForceField subs achieve extraordinarily deep and tuneful bass that is ideal for music and movies. Their cutting-edge amplifier design employs state-of-the-art DSP control for frequency shaping so the subwoofer produces accurate, consistent, and musical bass performance.
Many of today's subwoofers fall into either the ultra-compact high-output category or the (larger) high performance, extended response, high-output category. These two design types tend to offer different performance benefits, the ultra-compact having the ability to play extremely loud, but over a narrower bandwidth and the large subs having this high output plus more extended response.
GoldenEar's engineering team set out to accomplish the best of both worlds with the new ForceField subwoofers: small size, yet with the smooth & wide response of a larger sub. There's no sleight of hand, just great engineering - all ForceField subwoofers share the same technologies, here is a list of their features. Read through these and then take a good demo disc into your GoldenEar dealer's sound room and listen for yourself.
- Custom-designed high-output drivers with very large motor assemblies. These drivers handle massive power, have very long excursions, and have ultra-low distortion.
- Rigid cabinets with non-parallel sides to minimize standing waves and distortion. The drivers are front firing in all of our subwoofers for optimal performance. The cabinets' possess a unique and understated shape and style that matches well with any décor.
- The driver's response is enhanced with a carefully tuned, down-firing, quadratic-shaped passive radiator (no noisy ports on ForceField subs). The quadratic shape allows the radiators to use maximum surface area on the bottom of the cabinets and gets even greater output from the slot-loading that results from the subwoofers' interface with the floor (see next point).
- The soft, energy-absorbing feet provided with every ForceField sub serve a number of functions. First, they hold the subwoofer at the correct distance off the floor so the passive radiator slot-loads with it for significantly increased output at the lowest frequencies. Second, the soft feet keep the subwoofer from dancing around on the floor.
- ForceField subwoofer amplifiers are designed in-house by GoldenEar engineering, so each is the perfect amp to power its specific subwoofer model.
- In addition, the amps all have powerful DSP sections to optimize frequency response, minimize distortion and prevent damage from overdriving. These amplifiers are all low distortion and extraordinarily powerful (up to 1500 watts on the ForceField 5) for reproducing seriously high-output AND low bass.
- ForceField subs all have speaker-level inputs and outputs (with a high pass crossover on the outputs) as well as a direct LFE input, too.
- Non-parallel sides minimize standing waves and distortion. The shape allows the radiators to use maximum surface area on the bottom of the cabinets and gets even greater output from the slot-loading that results from the subwoofers' interface with the floor.
- Features 1000-watt digital amp, 8" high-power long-throw active driver, and 9-5/8"x 11-3/8" quadratic planar infrasonic radiator.
| The Triton Three+ Loudspeaker is a smaller version of the award-winning Triton One and Triton Two+. It includes a built-in powered subwoofer and is engineered for superb performance in both high quality two channel stereo systems as well as in multi-channel home theater and music systems.
Like the Triton Two+, the newly updated Triton Three+ incorporates technologies developed for the Triton One. Its built-in powered subwoofer (a technology first pioneered by GoldenEar principals Sandy Gross and Don Givogue) includes an integral 800 watt GoldenEar ForceField digital/DSP controlled power amp driving an active front-mounted long-throw 5" x 9" quadratic subwoofer driver. This is coupled to two opposing, inertially balanced 6-3/4" x 8" quadratic planar infrasonic passive radiators which are located on the sides, near the floor, in order to take full advantage of boundary coupling. There is one of the same 4.5" high-definition spider-leg, cast-basket MVPP™ drivers as used in the Triton Two+, along with the same GoldenEar signature High-Velocity Folded Ribbon (HVFR™) tweeter. Performance-wise, the Triton Three+ delivers the same boxless three-dimensional imaging as the bigger Tritons. Likewise, the powerful, deep subwoofer bass blends perfectly with the silky smooth, utterly transparent midrange and high frequencies, putting many dramatically more expensive speakers to shame.
- Features a built-in powered subwoofer, and an integral 800 watt GoldenEar ForceField digital/DSP controlled power amp driving an active front-mounted long-throw 5" x 9" quadratic subwoofer driver.
- Also features 4.5" high-definition spider-leg, cast-basket MVPP™ drivers used in the Triton Two+, along with the same GoldenEar signature High-Velocity Folded Ribbon (HVFR™) tweeter.
Driver Complement:
One - 5˝ x 9˝ Long-Throw Quadratic Subwoofer Bass Driver, coupled to:
Two - 6-3/4˝ x 8˝ Quadratic Planar Infrasonic Radiators
One - 4-1/2˝ High-Definition Cast-Basket MVPP™ Upper-Bass/Mid Driver
One - HVFR™ High-Velocity Folded Ribbon Tweeter
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