Review

Centrix, Esoterix 1 mk2 & Equinox Complete Review - Australian Hi-Fi Best Buys - Australia

01 Sep 1996

If you go to the movies regularly, you may be surprised to learn that you're probably listening to a KRIX speaker system in the theatre. Its KSX-1 Cinema Surround speaker was THX certified in 1993, and the company has designed and supplied a number of major cinema sound installations.

Given the boom in home theatre systems, the announcement of AC-3 for home use and, of course, the Digital Video Disc (DVD), it's not surprising that designer Scott Krix is now concentrating on supplying home theatre speaker systems for the domestic market.

All the A/V packages that are available from Krix are based around the speakers it sells for hi-fi operation and, given the fact that five of AC-3's six channels are capable of full-range reproduction, this is a very sensible approach. For this review, we used a pair of Krix Esoterix speakers for the front-left and front-right speakers, a pair of Equinox speakers for the surround channels and a Centrix for the centre channel. The bass performance of the Esoterix 1 Mk2 is such that we didn't really feel the need for a subwoofer when specifying this system, and mostly didn't miss it when it came to the listening sessions.

The Equipment

The Esoterix 1 MkII is the speaker that'll catch the eye of people who look in on your new home theatre system. A floor-standing speaker of impressive dimensions (955 x 225 x 433 mm HxWxD) its supplied on its own pedestal, and with a gold trim and contrasting veneers. It’s not only functional, but attractive. A three-way design, the midrange driver is positioned immediately above the tweeter to ensure that instruments whose fundamental frequencies travel through the crossover frequency (at a nominal 2.2 kHz) do not appear to 'shift' physically in space. The bass driver is positioned to take advantage of the proximity of the floor, to provide some acoustic loading.

At a time when cabinets are becoming thinner and thinner, with 12 mm even 9 mm wall thicknesses appearing on some famous foreign brands, Krix cabinets are as thick as or thicker than they ever were, with 25 mm board being used not only for the front baffle, but for all panels.

The terminal block at the rear of the cabinet is massive holding, as it does, three pairs of huge, gold plated five-way speaker terminals to facilitate tri-wiring. If you only want to bi-wire, or use just the one set of wires, the terminals can be joined with thick, flat sections of gold plated metal, which is provided. Above the terminal block are two bass reflex ports, each one of which is stuffed with a low density, open cell foam vent plug, to allow more accurate bass tuning in the event that your room places some constraints on speaker positioning. Krix says the Esoterix 1 MklI will perform best without the vent plugs in place, and with the speakers positioned 400 mm from a rear wall. If this puts the speakers too far out into your listening room for your liking, the solution is to push the speakers back towards the wall (but never closer than 150 mm) and insert the resistive vent plugs, to tame the level of bass reflecting from the rear wall.

Wherever you look on the KRIX, you can see attention to detail. The wires from the subassemblies are glued to prevent air leaks, all three drivers are gasketed before being attached to the front baffle and wires are colour coded to avoid confusion. The drivers, although they're affixed with screws rather than the more expensive bolt/captive nut arrangement, are fixed with star headed screws, rather than inferior posidrive types.

Equinox

The Equinox is that rarity amongst small two-way speakers, because it layers a real wood veneer over a 17 mm thick MDF base. The cabinet is small (175x244x295mm WxDxH) and is internally damped by a U shaped wedge of expanded foam, which acts to damp standing waves. The bass reflex cabinet vents to the rear, so you can't mount them on a wall unless you use a bracket that extends a fair distance.

Inside the Equinox you'll find something else that's pretty special that's a real crossover. By 'real' we mean a properly designed eight element crossover using high quality components. The Equinox design is totally shielded, and so can be pushed up right alongside a TV if they're used as either front left/right speakers, or as a centre channel speaker.

The bass driver measures only 97 mm across the cone, resulting in an effective cone area of 73.9 cm2. The cone is made of doped paper, and the roll surround from rubber, so both materials will be quite stable under Australia's unique climatic conditions. (That is, the roll surround won't rot!). The basket is cast from magnesium; the voice coil is 26mm diameter, and the voice coil former is aluminium, so the driver is designed to handle high power.

The Equinox's tweeter is a 25mm doped fabric dome that is assisted by a small amount of horn loading, thanks to the design of the mounting assembly. Its 25 mm diameter voice coil is damped and cooled by ferrofluid, which also increases efficiency.

Centrix

Krix's Centrix is an ultra low magnetic flux leakage design that's in a mirror image cabinet (right down to the bass ports) that has been specially designed to support not only the weight of a television, but also the full extent of the TV's base, so there can be no instability. The fully shielded, cast magnesium frame, paper coned bass/midrange drivers are nominally 130mm in diameter. They cross over to a 25 mm soft dome tweeter at 2.4 kHz. The cabinet is built to the same high standard as the other two speakers, right down to the lacquered genuine Timber Veneer that you'll never see because your TV is sitting on top of it!

Listening Sessions

It's important to make sure the rear ports on the Esoterix are not damped in any way (such as by curtains) and that they 'fire' into identical materials (that is, not a window for one speaker and a brick wall for the other). The bass performance of the Esoterix is something else again. It's very transmission line in character, a hard, flat, dry, bass that seems to warn pianists to make left hand errors at their peril. For home theatre use, you'll be reassured to know that the bass is tight and goes deep. Yes, a subwoofer would fill out the lowest octaves, but you'd only need one (or two) for effects, and certainly not for any musical fare.

Midrange itself is pure and accurate and the highs are glassy and extended, with flutes, violin harmonics, and percussion sounds being reproduced with surprising realism. The tonal match to the Centrix speaker is not, perhaps, perfect, if you want to be really choosy, but we doubt that anyone will ever note anything amiss. We did, however, wonder if Krix makes a shielded centre channel version of the Esoterix?

As surround speakers, the Equinoxes were more than we could ever really want. In fact the Equinoxes are so good that we think many people will just buy two pairs of Equinoxes and a Centrix, with a view to adding a subwoofer.

As surround speakers, our Equinoxes were under worked with either Dolby Pro Logic matrix decoding, or THX, so we pumped some straight digital audio through to see how they performed. The sound quality was amazing. Although the bass extension was somewhat restricted (and could not be otherwise, given the relative sizes of the bass driver and the cabinet), the quality of the bass was remarkable. A part of this is no doubt down to the quality of the bass driver itself, but the solid cabinet is also a factor.

Midrange was clear and life like, with a monitor like sound quality, in that it was neither 'polite' nor 'forward', just clear, accurate and precise. The rendition was unfailingly natural. Spoken voice recordings sounded as if the person was right there in the room and both male and female vocalists' voices were rendered with an etched realism that had us listening to tracks over and over again, marveling at nuances previously unheard, that were now made clear. (Try k.d. Lang's All You Can Eat and listen for the Disclavier ISC-7, for example.)

High frequencies were ringingly true and crisp, and yet this crispness never became a hardness, even after lengthy listening sessions. Particularly impressive was the jazz on Unanimity (Move MD3155) and the Celtic folk on Under The Moon (Green Linnett GLCD 1155). This speaker will have no trouble meeting the demands of AC-3 digital surround.

Conclusion

The Krix Equinox has been acclaimed as the best sub $600 loudspeaker available in Australia, the Esoterix 1 MklI is in a class of its own and the Centrix is a well executed speaker that does everything you could expect of a centre channel.

- Australian Hi-Fi Best Buys - Australia , Greg Borrowman

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