Sound & Vision Magazine - Definitive Technology Mythos SSA-50 soundbar speaker

The Short Form

$1,099 / DEFINITIVETECH.COM / 410-363-7148

Snapshot

The SSA-50's ability to deliver surprisingly satisfying surround sound without lots of speakers and wires makes it perfect for bedrooms, vacation homes, and media rooms.

Plus

• Big, enveloping sound
• Sleek, discreet look
• Plays plenty loud

Minus

• Still requires a receiver and five cables

Key Features

•(3) 4 1/2-in woofers with coincident- array 1-inch aluminum-dome tweeters; (2) 4 1/2-in full-range drivers; (4) 3 1/4-in full-range drivers; 46 1/4 x 5 3/8 x 4 1/4 in; 31 lb

When highbrow artists loan their talents to lowbrow productions, magic often follows. Think Philip Seymour Hoffman's turn as the bad guy in Mission: Impossible III. Paul Giamatti's portrayal of a sleazy gangster in Shoot 'Em Up. Or Definitive Technology's new Mythos SSA-50 Solo Surround Array speaker.

Like Hoffman and Giamatti, Definitive Technology enjoys an elevated reputation among the cognoscenti, who revere it for speakers that blend technical innovation with conservative, no-nonsense engineering. Although the company's products enjoy broad popularity, they're sold primarily through specialty dealers.

So it comes as a surprise to see the emergence of its Solo Surround Array. This type of product is better known as a soundbar, a single speaker that reproduces all five main channels of a typical surround system. Most soundbars are built by mass-market companies for a non-enthusiast customer; many audiophiles would tell you that these speakers are for people who are too cheap, lazy, or disinterested to put in a real surround system. When I heard that Definitive was designing a soundbar, I had to know: Could the company's formula of serious engineering, high-quality materials, and solid construction turn one of these compromised products into a conqueror? Or would Definitive's engineers merely be casting pearls before . . . well, you know what I mean.

Lift the SSA-50, and you realize it's no mass-market soundbar. The cabinet is made from extruded aluminum, and it's packed with a dozen speaker drivers. The whole shebang weighs in at a hefty 31 pounds. Many soundbars use electronic trickery to make you think you're listening to five separate speakers placed all around the room. The SSA-50 takes a more natural approach. It actually does incorporate five channels: front left, center, and right and rear left and right. It even has five separate sets of binding posts, one for each "speaker."

Why have a dozen drivers when fewer would be sufficient for five channels? Because the SSA-50's Spatial Array technology uses those extra drivers to trick you into thinking you're hearing surround speakers.

The key principle behind Spatial Array is interaural crosstalk cancellation, a technology that's been around for decades. The idea is that your brain identifies the location of a sound source based in part on the delayed arrival of sound at the ear that's further away from the source. Spatial Array uses two drivers each for the left and right front and the left and right surround channels, with each pair of drivers separated by approximately the same distance as the spread between your ears. Sound from the opposite channel is phase-inverted and then fed to one of the drivers; for example, sound from the left surround channel is fed to one of the right surround drivers. Thanks to the extra drivers and the phase manipulation, the SSA-50 essentially prevents your left ear from hearing the direct sound from the right surround speaker. This effect helps free the sound from the confines of the speaker cabinet.

Spatial Array also employs filtering to mimic the effect that the outer part of your ear has on sounds coming from behind you. The result of all the extra drivers and filtering is sound that doesn't seem to originate from a single speaker under your TV.

Definitive sized the SSA-50 to suit flat-panel TVs measuring 50 inches or larger. It's available in gloss-black or brushed-aluminum finishes. A smaller version for 42-inch sets, the SSA-42, uses the same basic configuration as the SSA-50 but with smaller drivers.

SETUP

Definitive includes a wall-mounting bracket with the SSA-50 plus a couple of little leveling feet that allow the speaker to sit atop a table or stand. The soundbar is inherently easy to install because you don't have to make that dreaded wire run to the back of the room for surround speakers.

The easiest setup solution is to put the SSA-50 and the TV on a stand, with your receiver and sources underneath. But your best bet aesthetically is a full on-wall installation, which is what I did (albeit with a few wires temporarily hanging out). The cool thing about the on-wall setup is that all you see is a screen with a small speaker below; there's nothing to distract you from the visual presentation.

The SSA-50 is designed to be used with a subwoofer. I paired it with Definitive's ProSub 800 ($399), an 8-inch model we previously profiled. The ProSub 800 proved an ideal match for the SSA-50.

You don't need to do any channel balancing or delay adjustment in your A/V receiver. Just set all the speaker distances and the levels for the three front channels the same, and then crank up the surround channels 5 to 7 dB. This doesn't give you that annoying effect you get when people crank their surround speakers too high because the SSA-50 is designed to deliver a realistic presentation at these elevated levels.

MOVIE PERFORMANCE

My impression of the SSA-50 might be best expressed by the fact that sometimes, when I played a scene from a DVD or a Blu-ray Disc to ferret out some aspect of the speaker's performance, I forgot I was supposed to be testing the product and ended up watching the movie all the way through. It's not that the SSA-50 dazzled me. In fact, it's just the opposite. The sound was so satisfying and natural that I rarely noticed it.

Let's get this out of the way first: The SSA-50 doesn't sound like a standard 5.1-channel speaker system. It only hints at surround effects, which means you probably won't think sounds are coming from behind you. When I played my favorite surround-sound test — the tiger-attack scene from Apocalypse Now — the birds that are supposed to circle my head seemed to confine their flight to the front half of the room. But while it's not wraparound sound, it is spacious and involving. And the spaciousness doesn't disappear if you move off the speaker's center axis; when I moved to the side of my couch, the sound was perhaps 90% as good as it was from dead center.

I noticed a hint of "cupped hands" coloration in voices from time to time, but the effect never distracted me, and I doubt that any conventional 5.1 system in this price range could do dramatically better. I haven't heard every soundbar on the market, but I haven't heard another that has such a natural sound.

Plus, you can really crank this thing. Even in a fairly large room, the pairing of the SSA-50 and the ProSub 800 played free of noticeable distortion at levels several dB higher than what most people could tolerate for long.

MUSIC PERFORMANCE

Although soundbars are built for movies, not music, the SSA-50 does hook up to your receiver, so at some point you'd probably want to listen to music through it. While you won't sit on your couch marveling at the sound, it's adequate for light listening. From a tonal standpoint, the stereo sound is a bit dull, and the soundstage isn't terribly wide. Playing music, the SSA-50 sounds more like a good table radio than a good hi-fi system.

BOTTOM LINE

Definitive Technology stresses that the SSA-50 isn't a replacement for a 5.1 system, but I disagree. I know it can't replace all 5.1 systems, but it could replace a lot of them. In a media room or a bedroom, the compact chassis and the ease of installation actually make the SSA-50 more desirable than a conventional system. It just goes to show you: Pay attention to the fundamentals of sound quality, and the rest will follow.

TEST BENCH

The only channel in the SSA-50 that doesn't employ filtering and crosstalk cancellation is the center channel, so that's the one we measured. When the speaker is on a stand, the response is reasonably smooth, with a few severe peaks and dips above 8 kHz. Place the speaker against a wall, and a big dip centered at 560 Hz appears. Off-axis performance of the center channel is excellent. The impedance drops low in all channels, and sensitivity isn't high, so don't try to drive the SSA-50 with some $200 A/V receiver.

IN THE LAB

Frequency response (at 2 meters)
Center channel (stand-mounted) 54 Hz to 20 kHz ±4.4 dB
Center channel (wall-mounted) 54 Hz to 20 kHz ±5.0 dB

Sensitivity (SPL at 1 meter with 2.8 volts of pink-noise input)
center channel 88 dB
left/right channels 89 dB
surround channels 84 dB

Impedance (minimum/nominal)
center channel 3.9/5
left/right channels 3.7/5.5
surround channels 4.0/5.5

The frequency-response curve in the graph is weighted to reflect how sound arrives at a listener's ears with normal speaker placement. All measurements were made at 2 meters. The SSA-50 was measured first on a 6-foot stand, which gives quasi-anechoic results to about 200 Hz including full effects of cabinet diffraction and front panel reflections. Then we measured it with its back flat atop a sheet of drywall on the ground to simulate the acoustic effects of wall-mounting. In both cases, response of the woofer was close-miked and spliced to the quasi-anechoic response.

These measurements apply only to the center channel. Because of the HRTF filtering and crosstalk cancellation used in the left, right, left surround, and right surround channels, there's no point in measuring them — you have to have a brain in the chain to interpret the sonic cues.

Frequency response of the center speaker is not bad for a concentric configuration with the tweeter hovering above the woofer. The response on a stand is a bit smoother, with a mild recess in the midrange and lower treble (from 2.5 kHz to 10.5 kHz) and a pronounced peak at 11.7 kHz. The curve looks similar for the quasi-wall-mount measurement, although broad peaks appear centered at about 340 Hz and 1.1 kHz, with a big dip centered at 560 Hz. Thus, the SSA-50 sounds good against a wall, but should sound even better if you place it on a TV stand. Thanks to the concentric driver arrangement, off-axis performance is outstanding, with nary a difference below 10 kHz at 30° off-axis. In fact, at 20° and 30° off-axis, the performance above 10 kHz is actually better, because that 11.7 kHz peak disappears.

Are you dying to know how the other channels measure? OK, I'll spill the beans: The left and right channels run ±9.4 dB, the left and right surrounds ±19.5 dB. That's mostly due to the effect of the cross-cancellation. In your brain, you don't hear all that unevenness. Sadly, microphones don't have brains.

The impedance of the various speakers incorporated in the SSA-50 runs surprisingly low, given that this product will almost certainly be used with a relatively inexpensive receiver. However, the impedance phase response is forgiving, rarely exceeding plus or minus 30 degrees. But the sensitivity is just average in the front channels and quite low in the surround channels, so the SSA-50 definitely demands a decent receiver to power it.