Miller & Kreisel Sound Introduces Surround-55 Tripole Speaker
,Thursday, February 24, 2000
Miller & Kreisel Sound Introduces Surround-55 Tripole Speaker
Miller & Kreisel Sound (M&K) has announced the long-awaited introduction of the Surround-55, the company’s second Tripole surround channel speaker. Priced at only $699/pr., the Surround-55 is the smallest and most economical speaker with M&K’s exclusive Tripole design. The Surround-55’s ability to perform well in a variety of room conditions, along with its very high level of performance, make it ideal for playback of all surround material, whether Pro-Logic , 5.1, 6.1, EX, 7.1, or enhanced music mode sources.
What makes the Tripole concept so unique is its ability to give even “illumination” of sound throughout the listening room, enveloping listeners while providing directional information for good imaging, regardless of where listeners are in the room. To achieve this unique sonic feat, the Surround-55 operates as if it were two speakers: first a near-ideal point source direct radiator (on its front baffle), with an M&K Phase-Focused crossover feeding its 5 1/4-inch woofer and 1-inch soft-dome tweeter. The second is a dipole speaker using two unique 3-inch paper cone mid-tweeters treated with a special damping compound. These drivers achieve optimum phase and sonic coherency, as well as a very smooth and transparent sound from 300 Hz through the critical midrange and above, due, in part, to their operating without any midrange crossover.
The Surround-55 uses the same tweeter as M&K’s reference THX speakers, with a full Phase-Focused crossover and the same 5 1/4-inch woofer as the recently-introduced LCR-750THX. The proprietary Phase Focused crossover technology is computer-designed to give an extremely coherent response over a wide and controlled listening window (including the vertical plane, which is critical when surround speakers are located above listeners’ heads). This very complex and unique crossover was critically tuned through both psychoacoustic analysis and complex computer time-domain analysis to achieve a uniform timbre balance throughout the listening room.
The Tripole’s imaging coherency is optimized for placement ranging up to two feet above or below the listener’s ears, with the front tweeter always closer to the listener than the front woofer.