ENCLAVE AUDIO CINEHOME PRO WIRELESS HOME THEATER SYSTEM

WHEN I WAS a trade reporter many years ago, I wrote an article about the skyrocketing sales of packaged home theater audio systems. Inside each box was a rudimentary A/ V receiver, five or six speakers (typically compact satellites in plastic cabinets), colorcoded speaker cables, and graphic instructions to get things hooked up. The article’s big takeaway was that the brands selling these (Sony, Panasonic, et. al.) had discovered that many buyers either left the rear surround speakers in the box or wired them up and placed them on top of the front left- and right-channel speakers. (Hey—the more speakers the better, right?) The bottom line was that nobody wanted those damn cables running along the walls to the back of the room. So, the most demonstrable benefit of having a surround-sound system—surround sound—was eschewed by consumers who’d actually paid for it. Eventually, the audio industry just called it a day for those box systems and invented the soundbar.

The WISA protocol used by Enclave sends up to 24/96 multichannel audio over a 5 GHZ wireless network.

Which brings us to the Enclave Audio Cinehome PRO, a 5.1-channel wireless home theater system that fully eliminates the need to run speaker cables to the rear surrounds— or any speakers—and does so with superb reliability. At $1,600 it’s not cheap, but it does offer substantial build and sound quality, and is the first Wisa-wireless powered home theater system to achieve THX certification. (I’ll say more on WISA in a moment.)

Enclave may be an unfamiliar name, though some readers will

recall Sound & Vision’s 2016 review of the company’s CineHome HD WISA system (see soundandvision.com). That model was replaced last year by two redesigned systems, the Cinehome PRO and the $1,100 Cinehome II. The key differences beside THX certification in the PRO are the height of the thin, column-style satellite speakers and the system’s total number of drivers (23.6 inches vs. 15.75 inches; 14 drivers total vs. 12), the driver size for the powered sub (10-inch vs. 8-inch), and the design of the surrounds (bipoles in the Cinehome II).

Both systems are tagged on Enclave’s website as the “Cinehub” edition, a reference to the small, 7 x 1.6 x 5.1-inch (W x H x D) black box that serves as the system’s brain and connection point for source components. The Cinehub has three inputs on it: an EARC/ Arc-enabled HDMI port, a Toslink optical, and an analog stereo mini-jack. There’s also Bluetooth for streaming music from your smartphone.

The Cinehome PRO’S speakers are solid and offer a modern design in matte black with brushed silver top or end caps (metal on the LCRS, plastic on the surrounds). The front LCR cabinets are made of MDF, while the rear surrounds are a high-density molded plastic; both materials emitted a nonresonant, confidence-inducing thunk on a knuckle-rap test. Each of the nearly two-feet-tall front-channel LCRS has a pair of 3-inch paper-composite midwoofer drivers surrounding a 1-inch cloth dome tweeter in a classic D’appolito array; there’s also a pair of forwardfacing ports to improve the bass response. The surrounds are shorter at about 16 inches and feature a single matching midwoofer and tweeter, along with a single port. Each speaker contains its own built-in class-d amplifiers, with no power rating specified. But a key advantage of any multi-driver powered speaker is that engineers are able to use digital crossovers and processing to fine-tune the sound in a way that’s not possible when designing conventional passive speakers for which the amplifier match is unknown. The subwoofer uses a 10-inch paper-composite cone supported by a hidden downfiring port.

Each speaker in the system requires a connection to 110-volt AC power. And that’s it—the audio signals are handled using WISA wireless communication. WISA stands for Wireless Speaker & Audio, an association of hardware manufacturers embracing the same wireless communication standard that allows an audio link of up to 24-bit/96khz resolution with near-zero latency across as many as seven channels plus the ability to support up to 5.1.2 Dolby Atmos. The system generates its own wireless network in the 5 GHZ band to avoid interference from traditional household Wi-fi.

The WISA standard has a good track record for signal quality and reliability; several big brands now sell interchangeable Wisa-enabled products, including Klipsch, Bang & Olufsen, Harman Kardon, and Tv-maker LG.

In the case of the Cinehome PRO, the Cinehub sends uncompressed 24-bit/48khz hi-res audio to the individual speakers, and it supports stereo or multichannel soundtracks encoded in Dolby Pro Logic, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS 5.1, or standard uncompressed LPCM. The Dolby Truehd and DTS-HD formats, which offer higher 24-bit/96khz resoution, are not supported. But given the likely target customer for this product— not the demanding enthusiast—it’s hard to imagine those formats being missed.

Noticeably absent from the box is a conventional remote control. In its place Enclave has an app that automatically configures the setup and allows full operation. It also has a Settings page that lets you tune speaker levels and distance to optimize the surround bubble as you’d do on any AVR. The app was intuitive and worked reliably, though if you utilize the Cinehub’s HDMI-ARC connection (and your display’s HDMI-CEC functions work correctly), you should be able to use your TV’S remote to control volume day-to-day. Still, that won’t work if you’re using the Cinehub’s optical or analog input or need to switch among these, and having to keep a smartphone handy to boot an app just to turn the system on or off or control volume is a pain—and not something most family members will embrace. As another alternative, the Cinehub will respond to Harmony universal remotes, and the small remote supplied with Enclave’s first-gen system is available as a $15 accessory. But the remote should rightfully ship with a system at this price, and there could ideally be an IR learning function to teach the Cinehub to respond to a TV or set-top box remote regardless of the input used—something Enclave says it’s working on for a future firmware update.

SETUP

It took way longer to just position the Cinehome speakers for my audition than it did to fire up the app and get the system working. Except for the squat center channel, the speakers are intended for vertical orientation and have a small footprint that makes them somewhat unstable—something to consider if you have toddlers. I set the left and right channels on speaker stands straddling my 100-inch projection screen and put the rear surrounds behind my couch on another set of stands that situated them at ear height. I locked each of the columns down using a couple of strips of super-sticky double-sided 3M foam tape intended for outdoor signage (15-pound strength). The center speaker went on a stand below the screen and the sub in my usual spot in the front right corner of the room. All the speakers and Cinehub were fed off a couple of power outlets on the same 15-amp circuit in my studio, which simultaneously powered my projector and source components, a space heater, and all the LED room lighting. Even with the system running full tilt I never tripped the breaker.

Once the app is downloaded and active and the speakers

situated, you just fire up each speaker with the switch on the back, connect the Cinehub’s HDMI port to the HDMI-ARC connection on your TV using the supplied HDMI cable, and turn on the Cinehub to begin automatic pairing. Within a minute or so the Cinehub wirelessly pairs with all the channels and communicates its role to the TV, which then knows to send it the audio stream from any connected source. After that, I spent a few minutes setting speaker distances and levels with an SPL meter. The printed system documentation mentions a helpful pink noise generator in the app for setting levels, though no instruction on where to find it; you can activate it for each speaker by tapping its graphic representation in the virtual speaker layout.

If you have multiple HDMI sources, it is assumed your TV will do the switching. One caveat is that the single ARCenabled HDMI port on the Cinehub required to connect with your display chews up your TV’S HDMI-ARC port, leaving it unavailable for a source component. This left me with just two usable HDMIS for my cable box and UHD Blu-ray player. If I’d wanted to also hook up a game console, the workaround would be to feed the Cinehub’s optical digital input directly from the console or just default to the display’s optical digital output for all sources. The optical connection will still carry the highest resolution bitstreams the system can decode, so this should not impact performance in any meaningful way.

PERFORMANCE

I spent many hours watching TV and Blu-ray movies with the Cinehome PRO and also played some stereo CDS (remember those?) with my Oppo disc player. It’s helpful that the Enclave app will always show you what signal type the system is receiving and whether it’s playing back in Dolby Pro Logic (which can be switched off for straight PCM stereo), Dolby Digital, or DTS.

I quickly noticed that the system is voiced to tame bright soundtracks, with a clean and smooth midrange mated with laid-back highs that make for easy, palatable listening with very loud action movies. True to its THX certification, the Cinehome PRO played these without breaking a sweat. At a 10-foot distance in my nearly 3,000 cubic foot studio space (though with a low, 6.25-foot ceiling), the system hit 103 db peaks on my SPL meter at max volume setting with barely any strain. This is one of the benefits of having on-board class-d amplification with its own power supply and (I assume) effective limiting circuitry in every satellite. And I should mention that the wireless connections to all the speakers were solid as a rock for my entire audition, and never suffered sync issues with the video.

Big action flicks like

Aquaman were a great match for the Enclave system, and with the speaker distances and levels properly set it delivered a wide and tall soundstage up front and a coherent sound bubble. Even at high volume, when Arthur and King Orm dueled with their tritons in a giant underwater amphitheater, the clashing and scraping of the metal weapons against each other and the rocks, their groans and grunts, and the cheering crowd noises came through with detail intact but without any fatiguing, abrasive edge. The bass from the subwoofer wasn’t as taut as from my own day-to-day ported 10-incher (a Revel B10 that costs almost as much as this whole system), but it had plenty of juice and provided a very present and solid foundation for effects. The Blu-ray for this title has both a

7.1 Dolby Truehd track (which defaults on the Enclave to Dolby Digital Plus), and a 5.1 DTS-HD track (which plays here as core DTS). Switching back and forth reminded me of how much fuller and dynamic DTS soundtracks typically sound.

The only weapons brandished in La La Land are musical instruments, but the Cinehome PRO was just as impressive here. The movie’s Dolby Digital soundtrack opens with car horns blaring all around on an LA highway ramp, which leads to dozens of dancers leaping from their stalled cars and performing “Another Day of Sun,” a rousing number that begins with a lone voice and builds to a crescendo chorus featuring a calypso band in the back of a box truck. It was a delight on the Enclave, with a convincing surround envelope, well-delineated voices from the ensemble, natural timbre for the instruments, and the same super-effective dynamics. Even more striking was the emotional rendering of Mia (Emma Stone) singing “Audition (The Fools Who Dream),” a gorgeously sparse ballad whose emotional effect counts on a subtle and slow dynamic build and smooth, detailed reproduction of Stone’s delicate soprano.

I listened to a few reference CDS in straight two-channel stereo with the sub. It sounded great, but on familiar music tracks I could tell that the system’s polite high end and smooth voicing made it less open in the midrange and noticeably less detailed up top than my reference speakers, a pair of very neutral Revel M16 bookshelf monitors. Still, the

sound was pleasant and highly dimensional, delivering a wide and tall soundstage with just a bit less depth than the M16s in direct A/B comparisons. Here again, the sonics benefitted from the system’s dynamic capabilities. “Moten Swing” from Count Basie and His Atomic Band: Complete Live at the Crescendo 1958 starts out kind of quiet and then wakes you up with a truly heart-stopping horn blast at about a minute in. I watched my SPL meter jump from 72 db to 95 db in an instant on this peak, with total authority and not a hint of compression from the system. But neither the Count’s piano notes nor the tapped cymbal had the body or detailed shimmer I’m used to hearing. Big, close-miked vocals, such as John Mayer’s on “Still Feel Like Your Man” from The Search for Everything, riveted my attention on the Enclave with their size and immediacy, but sounded a touch more veiled and didn’t come alive as they do on a more open and extended system. I tried processing the stereo PCM audio through the system’s Dolby Pro Logic decoder; it resulted in multichannel sound, but added some noticeable veiling, even with the DPL Music preset. Stereo playback was far more open and clean-sounding.

CONCLUSION

Enclave’s Cinehome PRO is designed to bring the experience of true surround sound to TV and movie watchers who want something better than a soundbar, but require simplified set-up, easy operation, and/or a Wisa-quality wireless connection to the rear speakers (at least). The system meets those goals with aplomb, and it constitutes a superb all-in-one 5.1 solution that delivers powerful Thx-certified dynamics.

On the other hand, absent those needs, one has to ask what might be gained in either performance or utility with a conventional 5.1 speaker kit and AVR combo for the same $1,600 price. There are some very wellreviewed 5.1 speaker systems with 10-inch subs in the $1,000 to $1,200 range, to which one could mate a fairly powerful 5.1-channel or 7.1-channel receiver for $500 or less. That AVR will come with full HDMI switching for several 4K source components, support of the more advanced Dolby Truehd and DTS-HD soundtracks as well as hi-res music formats, various wireless audio options including built-in streaming apps, and maybe automatic room correction. The satellite speakers in that price range will be smaller than the Cinehome PRO’S and may not play quite as loud or be voiced quite as smoothly as a more neutral and potentially revealing system. But unless your room is very large, you’re bound to get more than enough volume.

That said, you’re now back to a discrete system with all the set-up and operational complexity— not to mention wires—that the Cinehome PRO was built to avoid. So, your own value quotient here comes from a highly personal calculation. For those who abhor complexity or hate the aesthetics of a halfdozen cables snaking around the room, the benefits and high level of performance of Enclave’s Cinehome PRO might just be the only alternative to the confined sonics of a soundbar. What’s that worth to ya?