SPEAKERS WITH A PURPOSE

Elementi explains that the speakers themselves are also different partly because of how they have been designed for precise purposes within a home cinema. The Firefly, for example (pictured second from the right below) has an unusual waveguide with 120° horizontal dispersion and 40° degree vertical, and comes as standard with a bracket that can angle the speaker at 20° to the wall.

“So the speaker audio tracks the wall and then outward to 120 degrees,” notes Wavetrain’s David Moseley, who has already been involved in the design of a number of new home cinemas using the Elementi range. “That makes the Firefly perfect for front wides or surround channels, because the coverage is so wide, and means you can get much closer to the speaker because it’s not going to be such a point source in your ear. Yet it’s still high output — it can be used as a front LCR, where a very wide horizontal dispersion means the integration between the three front speakers is going to be seamless even for a big screen. Whereas with a narrow dispersion speaker behind a large screen you might have to add a couple more and do five across the front for a uniform sound field.”

Topping the Fire range is the Fire-Dragon, which Elementi tells us will hit reference levels at 25 metres, making it suited to rooms of any size, where other manufacturers would struggle, and even in commercial cinemas. Another full-on design is the Kola subwoofer (named after the deepest hole in the Earth), featuring single or dual 24-inch drivers delivering from 10 to 100Hz under 2200W of power.