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The Short Form
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| $499 / ZVOXAUDIO.COM |
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Snapshot
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| The Zvox Z-Base 500 is the best solution to date for simple home theater sound — one that everyone in the family can easily use and enjoy |
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Plus
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| • Good dialogue reproduction • Convincing surround effect • Possibly the only home theater audio system an average person could figure out |
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Minus
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| • Hard-to-gauge adjustment levels • Sounds a little quiet with some Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks |
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Key Features
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• (5) 2-in midrange/tweeters, 5½-in woofer • 60 watts total power • (2) stereo audio inputs; subwoofer output • 3½ x 28 x 14½ in, 19 lb |
So who came up with this profound proverb? Emerson? Nope. Thoreau? Nope. Actually, it was Butterworth — that is, me. But any acclaim should go to the object that inspired my insight: Zvox’s Z-Base 550, an affordable home theater sound system that’s so simple it might be impossible to mess up. This 31⁄2-inch-high box is meant to fit right under the base of a flat-panel TV, yet it incorporates all the speakers and amplifiers you need for home theater sound. And the Z-Base works as if it were built into your TV.
The magic lies in the Z-Base’s minimalism. It connects to the variable-level audio outputs of a TV, so the TV’s volume up/down buttons will control the Z-Base’s volume level. You plug your source devices — such as a DVD player or a cable box — into the TV, and the TV routes the sound to one of the Z-Base’s two stereo analog-audio inputs.
The front of the unit has five 2-inch drivers, with three grouped side-by-side in the middle. All three get a mono signal, a combination of the left and right channels. The center driver gets the full spectrum of midrange and treble, while the drivers immediately flanking it receive a little less treble, in order to keep them from interfering with the center driver.
The remaining 2-inch drivers are positioned at the far left and right of the front baffle. The far-left driver gets the full left-channel signal, plus a phase-inverted and frequency-filtered version of the right-channel signal. The far-right driver gets the full right-channel signal plus an inverted/filtered version of the left-channel signal. The resulting mix of these out-of-phase, filtered signals tricks your brain into thinking it’s hearing sound from several feet to the left and right of the Z-Base — and even from the sides of the room and behind your head.
Lots of manufacturers have used this “crosstalk cancellation” technique over the years, perhaps most notably Polk with its Stereo Dimensional Array technology. Zvox’s name for it is PhaseCue. The company’s president, Tom Hannaher, says PhaseCue’s “secret sauce” is the amount of opposite-channel signal that’s mixed in, and the way in which it’s filtered.
A woofer on the bottom provides bass. Zvox includes a tiny remote that controls power, volume, mute, PhaseCue level, woofer level, and treble. If your TV has variable audio output, you’ll only need this remote for setup and occasional tweaking. There’s also a subwoofer output (a full-range mono signal) for those who demand even more bass.
SETUP
From a physical standpoint, installation of the Z-Base couldn’t be much simpler: Just stick it under your TV. Zvox says the Z-Base will support most 32- to 47-inch TVs, but you can go bigger as long as the TV weighs less than 90 pounds. Because the box’s front is nearly featureless, it looks like part of the furniture.
Hookup is just as easy: Connect the included pair of audio cables from the TV’s variable-audio output to either of the Z-Base’s inputs. According to Hannaher, the second input is mainly intended for use with an iPod or other digital music player.
There’s no display on the front, just a single blue LED. It’s easy to adjust the volume, PhaseCue, woofer, and treble by ear, but finding out what settings you’re using is tougher. The blue LED blinks when you hit a button on the remote. But when you get to the bottom or the top of the adjustment scale, the LED stops blinking. There are nine adjustment steps for PhaseCue, woofer, and treble. So you can run each adjustment all the way down, then count the number of times you hit the button on the remote.
The PhaseCue control adjusts the balance between the center and the left and right drivers. Turn it all the way down, and almost all of the sound will come from the center speakers. Turn it full up, and you’ll get an extreme, unnatural-sounding surround effect. As you turn the effect up, it can start to drown out the dialogue coming from the center speakers. With a receiver, you can calibrate this balance so you know it’s right. With the Z-Base, you have to trust your ears.
PERFORMANCE
Any system like the Z-Base has one major hurdle to clear with potential buyers: It has to sound better than the speakers built into a typical TV. It’s obvious on first listen that the Z-Base does. Compared with the speakers in the two TVs I own, the Z-Base delivered clearer dialogue, far deeper bass, and a much greater sense of envelopment.
The battle scenes in Tropic Thunder (Dream-Works) convinced me of the Z-Base’s worth. Explosions and gunshots seemed to come from actual left and right speakers sitting a couple of feet to either side of the TV, and the sound engulfed my listening chair. The effect was more convincing than I’ve heard from two-speaker surround-emulation technologies such as SRS and Dolby Virtual Speaker. It also produced a wider sweet spot. The effect sounded best when I was sitting directly in front of the Z-Base, but it didn’t change dramatically when I moved a few feet to the side.
The Z-Base delivered surprisingly smooth dialogue. From the reedy accent that real actor Jay Baruchel used to play onscreen actor Kevin Sandusky (in turn playing a soldier named Brooklyn) to the guttural growl Robert Downey, Jr., adopted to play Australian actor Kirk Lazarus (in turn playing Sgt. Osiris), every voice in Tropic Thunder sounded reasonably natural, without overt tonal coloration. The vocal sound was a bit thin relative to what you’d hear from a good conventional center speaker, and with no dedicated tweeter to convey the high frequencies, it lacked a sense of breath. Still, it was a gigantic improvement over any built-in TV speaker I’ve heard.
The woofer’s output balances well with the 2-inch drivers. I wouldn’t describe it as punchy or powerful, but there’s enough bass that I never once felt the need to add a subwoofer. Unless you crank the woofer level control all the way up, it never booms or distorts.
Given a stereo or a Dolby Digital 2.0 mix, the Z-Base 550 has enough output to cover a large bedroom or a small living room. But with some Dolby Digital 5.1-channel soundtracks, downmixed to stereo inside the DVD player to feed the Z-Base, the volume was too low for my taste even when I turned it all they way up. The preamp circuitry could use about 6 dB more gain.
BOTTOM LINE
The Z-Base is as foolproof as a home theater audio system can get, and it delivers satisfying sound that won’t leave you wishing you’d instead bought a home theater in a box. For the 90% of people out there who can’t (or don’t want to) figure out the 100-plus connections on a typical A/V receiver, the Z-Base is the ideal route to simplicity — and therefore happiness.
TEST BENCH
Bass limits (lowest frequency and maximum SPL with limit of 10% distortion at 2 meters in a large room)
50 Hz at 92.9 dB
97.4 dB average SPL from 50 Hz to 80 Hz
100.4 dB maximum SPL at 63 Hz
B andwidth uniformity: 95%
Maximum full-band output:
Approximately 94 dB (at 2 meters)
The frequency-response graph is weighted to reflect how sound arrives at a listener's ears with normal speaker placement. Measurements were made from the center channel at 2 meters to include full effects of cabinet diffraction and front-panel reflections, and averaged across a 20ş listening window. A mono signal was fed to both channels, the PhaseCue control was turned down all the way, and the subwoofer and treble controls were left at their factory settings. Response of the woofer and port was measured with a microphone positioned about 1 inch away. The combination of these bass-response measurements was then scaled and spliced to the quasi-anechoic response.
These measurements apply only to the center channel. Because of the crosstalk cancellation filtering used in the left and right channels, there’s no point in measuring them, as their response has been intentionally altered to fool the ear into thinking it’s hearing surround sound.
The ±5.7 dB response from 60 Hz to 13.2 kHz isn’t terribly smooth taken on its own. There’s an obvious gap in the response between the woofer/port and the 2-inch drivers. The gap, which falls roughly between 180 Hz and 1 kHz, is the reason that voices can sound subjectively thin through the Z-Base 550. There’s also a sharp peak of about 10.1 dB centered at 15 kHz. However, response is fairly smooth through the middle to upper vocal range ; the range between 1 kHz and 13 kHz seems to fall in the “sweet spot” of the 2-inch drivers. Off-axis response is surprisingly smooth for a triple-driver arrangement, the only significant error being a peak at 6 kHz that appears at angles of 20ş and greater. The treble control alters the response significantly at frequencies of about 2 kHz and higher; its response is ±6 dB at frequency of 9 kHz and higher.
The woofer’s response is pretty good for its size, probably because of the Z-Base 550’s ample internal space. It delivers usable bass response down to 50 Hz, where it hits 92.9 dB at 2 meters with 10% distortion; at our next measurement point, 45 Hz, the response at 10% distortion drops by 11.3 dB. Maximum output is 100.4 dB at 63 Hz, more than enough to fill out the Z-Base 550’s sound. At such high output levels, some extraneous noise — likely rattles from the cabinet and grille — intrudes, but I never experienced these problems during normal listening.
Although almost all of the home theater speakers and electronics reviewed in Sound & Vision can deliver satisfying volume in a typical living room, that’s not a safe assumption with a device like the Z-Base 550. I decided to measure its overall output to get a realistic idea of what it can do in a typical bedroom. I played various types of music, turned up the level to the point where I could hear distortion, then backed the volume down a touch. I then measured the peak output using an SPL meter with peak hold. At 2 meters, results ranged from 90 dB to 94 dB, depending on the recording. Most conventional home theater gear can play at least 10 dB louder, but the Z-Base 550’s output is adequate for light entertainment in small to medium-size rooms.