For years, Baltimore's Definitive Technology has produced phalanxes of tall, imposing, powerful floorstanding towers. Nevertheless, the eyes of company founder Sandy Gross always seem to take on a special twinkle when he sings the praises of his latest pint-size production, which suggests he gets a special buzz out of squeezing the mostest from the leastest — like the Definitive Technology ProCinema 800 home theater speaker system seen here. Not pint-size, exactly (quart-and-a-half would be closer), but impressively small nonetheless, Definitive's latest ProMonitor 800 satellite design employs an unusually located passive radiator firing straight up to help the bantamweight speaker produce enough low-frequency output to "reach" and blend with a subwoofer effectively. The same technique is found in the matching center channel, in doubles.
SETUP Definitive sent a pair of its inexpensive fixed-height stands for the front speakers, which worked fine in my room. The ProCenter went on a stand below my 50-inch Samsung's screen. It has no tilt adjustment built in, and only one rubber foot (the front edge has molded-in hard feet), but I dialed in the substantial uptilt I needed using a couple of stick-on feet I had lying around. The ProMonitors for the surround channels went on my high shelves flanking the listening position, angled back to bounce off the rear wall as I usually do with direct-radiating surrounds.
Acoustical balancing was a bit more involved. First, I found that all three front speakers benefited greatly from a little tilt: Rocking them back on their heels several degrees made important improvements, opening and defining the upper mids and airing up the treble. Proper adjustment of the subwoofer level and crossover also proved absolutely critical.
After initial meter balancing, the system sounded a bit disappointing: heavy in the mid-bass and not particularly impressive down low. What a transformation was won by an hour or so of fiddling! I finished with a superb blend almost entirely free of boom or bloat and with surprising deep-bass extension. But too much sub level (or too high a crossover) and the Definitives could sound "woofy" or a bit bloated (and the sub would localize); too little or too low and they could become gaunt.
Small differences of even 1 dB in sub level made very obvious changes, as did experimentation with crossover settings. I settled on a 75-Hz crossover from my flexible processor, with 6-dB high-pass and 24-dB/low-pass curves — which, as it happens, is pretty much what Definitive's own circuits yield if you use the sub's speaker-level inputs instead of the LFE/line connection I employed. The fixed 80-Hz filters of many inexpensive receivers, which use 12-dB/24-dB per-octave filter slopes, should also work quite well.
MUSIC PERFORMANCE A brief session with the ProMonitors playing full-range alone confirmed that they don't produce enough bass for satisfying sound on their own — but that nonetheless they play amazingly loud without obvious distress. These are strictly satellite speakers, but they do go lower and louder than I'd have guessed on sight.
With the system tweaked and tailored, I started as usual with stereo listening, finding a generally neutral, open sound with a slightly warm cast to male vocals and a pleasant, easy-to-listen-to treble that was open and fairly airy without any excess bite or sizzle. Clean, well-recorded CDs like Ani DiFranco's Reprieve were very pleasing and surprisingly high-end-sounding, with modest depth, some genuine transparency, and considerably more weight and impact from the below-50-Hz region than I'd expected. The solo acoustic bass that opens the disc ("Hypnotized") was tight and realistically woody but still had plenty of heft for its occasional ventures below 60 Hz or so. The Definitive system also displayed arresting clarity on stuff like the explosively compressed, crystalline Dobro (or whatever that is) that enters, startlingly, a bit later.
The ProMonitors (and ProCenter, for that matter) could play cleanly far louder than I expected — about as loud as plenty of much larger small-bookshelf speakers I've heard. In fact, their tweeters ran out of headroom (resulting in hardness and "shriekiness") at about the same time as at their woofers (flatulating, and "tup-tupping" on transients), which is quite rare among mini-sats of this size. And since the Definitives' tweeter is no slouch, this was rather loud indeed.
MOVIE PERFORMANCE The little Definitives' performance on even demanding movie soundtracks was, if anything, even more pleasing. Collateral may be no Citizen Kane, but it's an expertly made movie in technical terms, and the ProMonitors handled it with relative ease. From moderate to fairly loud volume — say, about 6 dB below commercial-cinema reference level — I never once came out of the story because of a sonic shortcoming.
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The Short Form |
| Price $1,099 (AS TESTED) / definitivetech.com / 410-363-7148 |
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Snapshot
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| A must-hear for those who insist on a very small, accessibly priced system. |
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Plus
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| •Excellent overall tonality •Good bass output, extension •Surprising volume potential |
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Minus
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| •Needs careful setup. (But don't they all?) •Center shifts tone at off-axis seats |
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Key Features
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| ProMonitor 800 •($250/pair) 1-in dome tweeter; 4.5-in woofer; 4.5-in passive radiator; 8.4 in high; 4 lb ProCenter 1000 •($200) 1-in dome tweeter; (2) 4.5-in woofers; (2) 4.5-in passive radiators; 5 in high; 8 lb ProSub 800 •($399) 8-in driver; 8-in passive radiator; 300-watt RMS amplifier; 12.5 x 14.3 x 13.5 in; 41 lb •Finish: Gloss-black, matte-white, silver. Subwoofer: Black ash or white vinyl |
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Test Bench
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| This system has smooth response blemished primarily by a depression centered just below 1 kHz. The subwoofer's high-frequency response to 150 Hz mates well with the limited bass of the upper-channel speakers. It has good low-end extension for a small sub, delivering true 25-Hz output, but only at 76 dB, revealing its dynamic limitations. It averaged 95 dB from 25 to 62 Hz, and put out 103.7 dB max SPL at 62 Hz, all at less than 10% distortion. — Tom Nousaine Full Lab Results |
I was also very happy with the ProMonitors handling the surround channels. When angled well back to reflect sound from the rear wall as I've described, the little 800s worked particularly well for plain, non-dipole two-way surrounds. (Truly small two-ways like these always seem to work well in this configuration, probably because their small-diameter woofers have wide enough dispersion to avoid the "beaming" that might otherwise help the ear localize them.)
Despite its diminutive, roughly 6-gallon form (smaller than a Texan's lid!), the ProSub 800 proved a worthy support. This little sub produced ample, reasonably even output considerably lower than many other inexpensive 8-inchers (about 35 Hz or so), rolling off fairly quickly below that point. And it played unexpectedly loudly and cleanly: The Definitive would become a bit "grumbly" at very high levels, but thanks no doubt to intelligently engineered limiting circuits, I had to push it to ludicrous settings, well beyond THX-reference from the overall system, to elicit gross rattles or thumps. It had plenty of bottom for the thumping of Collateral's climactic club scene, which indeed the full system delivered in fine, loudly enveloping, smoothly claustrophobic fashion. That said, the ProSub 800 doesn't have the bottom-octave grunt for fully cinematic deep-bass — the near-infrasonic content of a T. rex footfall or the underpinnings of the ram's-horn calls of those War of the Worlds thingies — but it does impressively just the same. (Reality check: This is a $399 subwoofer. And there's a 10-inch , $499 ProSub 1000 that might well do better still.)
BOTTOM LINE The Definitive Technology ProCinema 800 home theater speaker system is a marvelously high-value setup for smaller rooms — and even some not-all-that-small ones. If you've simply got to have really small and (by serious home theater standards) really inexpensive speakers, I don't think you can do very much better.
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