Review

Epicentrix Complete Review - The Sydney Morning Herald

12 Jun 2007

The centre-channel speaker is the most important in any home theatre system, yet most people buy the smallest, cheapest one they can and then wonder why their movies don't sound as good as they do at the cinema.

in a conventional stereo system, the left and right channel speakers do all the work. In a home theatre system, they do almost nothing. If your AV receiver is properly set up, it redirects about 80 per cent of the sound that would normally go to the front left and right speakers to the centre channel speaker.

In theory, a properly designed centre channel speaker should be almost twice as big as the left and right speakers because it's doing nearly twice the work. In practice, the centre channel is the same size or smaller because the marketing guys have overhauled the engineers. It's just too hard to sell a properly designed centre channel speaker. It seems that size is important, after all.

Krix's Epicentrix proves the marketing guys don't always win. It's magnificently large: nearly a metre wide, 360mm deep and 218mm high. It has four 150mm bass drivers, a 150mm midrange driver and a 26mm tweeter. The beauty of the cabinet being so big is it's large enough to support a full-sized plasma screen or wide-screen LCD TV.

Unfortunately, you can't put it underneath an ordinary television set because the drivers in the Epicentrix are not shielded, so their magnetic fields would cause severe picture distortion.

The sound of the Epicentrix is so rich and powerful there's almost no need for left and right channel speakers at all, or perhaps just small ones for the off-screen action. I used Krix Neuphonix speakers as left and right channels and a Seismix subwoofer. The sound from this combination was a lot better than what I hear at my local cinema.

5 Stars.

- The Sydney Morning Herald - Australia , Greg Borrowman

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