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The Short Form
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| $6,999 (as tested) / ENSEMBLEHD.COM / 800-463-7766 |
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Snapshot
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| The only affordable, fully integrated, custom-style home theater system we’ve seen. The sound and video performance is solid, and it’s fairly easy to operate from a single remote. |
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Plus
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| • Custom look and convenience • Do-it-yourself price • Convincing sound for movies and TV • Solid video performance |
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Minus
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| • No Blu-ray Disc version (yet) • Music performance falls a little flat |
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Key Features
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• Screen/front-speaker module: (3) 1-in horn tweeters, (4) 4 1/2-in woofers; 100-in (diagonal) screen, 76 lb • Projector/surround-speaker assembly: (2) 4-in coaxial speakers; 26 7/8 in wide, 27 1/4 lb • Subwoofer: 10-in woofer, 150-watt amplifier; 14 7/8 in wide, 65 lb • A/V controller: Inputs: (2) HDMI, component-video; AM/FM tuner; 13 1/2 in wide; 7 1/2 lb |
Home theater enthusiasts fall into two classes: custom and do-it-yourself. The custom guys hire an installer to hide their gear in closets or behind false walls of designer fabric, and they have $10,000 touchscreen controllers that are simple enough for a senile Shih Tzu to use. The do-it-yourselfers’ systems look like the returns pile at Best Buy, and no one can operate them except for the guys who set them up.
What separates the two classes is money. Almost everyone would love to have a great-looking system that springs to life at the touch of a button. Sadly, the economics of the custom-installation business have pushed the entry fee to a bare minimum of $20,000, and my installer pals tell me a $50,000 minimum is more common.
Epson’s Ensemble HD is the first system I’ve seen that delivers a custom home theater experience at a price do-it-yourselfers can afford: $6,999 for the version with a 1080p projector, $4,999 for the 720p version. Just as important, it’s incredibly simple to install. The Ensemble HD Web site claims the system can be up and running in as little as 4 hours, but they lie —
the two guys who installed mine did it in 3 hours flat. The crew told me they charge $500 for a standard installation and $1,000 if you want the cables run inside the wall and ceiling. (Of course, your installer’s prices may vary.)
Ensemble HD is a complete home theater rig. Besides the video projector, it includes a 100-inch (diagonal) motorized screen; a 5.1-channel speaker system with 400 total watts of amplification (all amp channels are built into the subwoofer); an A/V controller that includes a surround processor, a DVD player, and an AM/FM tuner; and a few key accessories such as wire channels, a remote control, and a basic equipment rack.
Two strokes of industrial-design genius help to simplify the system. The first is that the front left, center, and right speakers are built into the housing for the screen. The second is that the projector mount holds the two surround speakers. The only thing that sits on the floor is the small gear rack, which can hold the subwoofer, the A/V controller, and one or two additional source components.
The projector is Epson’s PowerLite Home Cinema 1080 UB, a $2,999 piece that’s almost identical to the excellent PowerLite Pro Cinema 1080p I reviewed in July. The speakers were designed by Atlantic Technology, a company known for excellent, affordable home theater sound. The A/V controller is a more advanced version of a nice little unit Sherwood uses in some home-theater-in-a-box systems. (Despite the HD in its name, the Ensemble system doesn’t offer Blu-ray Disc playback, although a separate player can be plugged into one of the A/V controller’s two HDMI 1.3 inputs.)
The Ensemble HD looks good enough to earn an enthusiastic welcome even from your resident decor Nazi. The screen/front-speaker combo hangs inconspicuously from a wall; its simple, rounded design makes it resemble a European air conditioner. Sheets of white perforated metal swathe the projector and surround speakers. The one unsightly element is the equipment rack, which exudes a visual aesthetic that might affront even a Walmart executive.
I loved the Ensemble HD’s setup procedure, which required me to drink coffee and catch up on my e-mail while the installers did all the work.
First, they mounted a bracket for the screen/front-speaker module. Next, they mounted a bracket for the projector and surround speakers. Then the real work began: running the wires.
The wiring is complicated — after all, we’re talking about separate cables for audio, video, control signals, and power —
but it’s streamlined enough to squeeze into slim, paintable on-wall cable channels. (It’ll look even better, however, if your installer runs the wires inside your walls and ceiling.)
The universal remote control handles the audio system, the DVD player, and the projector — and you can turn all three on or off at the touch of a button. It can be programmed to operate additional components, too.
The obvious potential problem with the Ensemble HD is the unusual speaker placement. The screen/speaker unit hangs several feet above the ears of a seated listener. And the two surround speakers hover over the listener instead of hanging from the side walls as they usually would (although you can detach the surrounds from the projector mount and place them as you please). This means that all of the audio except for the bass comes at you from high above instead of coming from somewhere close to ear level.
Remarkably, when I was watching movies and TV, the high front speaker position didn’t bother me a bit. Seconds into whatever I was watching, I’d completely forget I was hearing speakers mounted only a couple of inches from my ceiling. I must commend my brain for doing an awesome job of tying the high-flying dialogue to the images I saw down below it on the screen. Great work, brain!
Hanging from the projector mount, the surround speakers sounded pretty good but couldn’t replicate the enveloping surround effect that side-wall-mounted speakers produce. The scene from the Enchanted Blu-ray Disc where the animated princess is transformed into a real character didn’t quite suck me in the way it does with a conventionally placed set of surround speakers.
The Epson system’s timbral accuracy impressed me, especially considering that placing speakers up at the junction of a wall and ceiling can cause nasty sonic problems. Voices sounded a tad dull at first, but turning the treble up 2 dB through the onscreen tone-control menu fixed that. The 10-inch subwoofer amazed me with its high output; it sounded punchy and precise no matter what I played, yet shook my floor as few subs of its size can do.
The one type of material the Ensemble HD didn’t enliven was music DVDs. When I played Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, Live DVD, the sound was less involving and enveloping than it usually is. I think this is mostly due to the high speaker placement. Also, as with the Pro version of the projector, the fan on the PowerLite Home Cinema 1080 UB is louder than I’d like.
I already discussed the projector’s video performance in my review of the Pro version. But there’s an additional performance area that needs to be addressed here: the video scaler built into the A/V controller, which upconverts standard-definition video and 720p and 1080i high-def video to 1080p. Fortunately, the controller’s Pixelworks scaling chipset passed every test on the Silicon Optix HQV Benchmark DVD and HD HQV Benchmark Blu-ray Disc without a single error — and those results carried over to the movies and TV shows I watched on the system.
The Ensemble HD both performs and looks better than any low-priced custom-installed system I’ve encountered. And the fact that you can get it installed in a few hours at a total cost of about $7,500 puts it in a whole new product category. I can’t really call it custom, and I can’t call it do-it-yourself. I’ll just call it great.