TUNEFUL TIMBER

f youre in the market for a compact system that covers all the bases, stands out from the crowd and will provide some boasting rights when your mates come round, you could do worse than JVCs EX-A1 micro system. This unit not only sports some handsome speaker enclosures built of cherry wood, but also has wooden speaker drivers. Thats right, the cones are made of bent birch wood. And how is this achieved you ask? Well, with a very Japanese twist; the wood is soaked in Sake to make it pliable for stamping into shape. That may sound like a gimmick, but if you stop and think about it, plenty of acoustic instruments are constructed of wood because of the unique sound qualities. I was keen to see how these wooden drivers sounded, but should rst mention that the EX-A1 is a multi-talented unit equipped to play back high-resolution DVD-Audio discs. With that in mind, I pulled out Natalie Merchants Tigerlily recorded in 96kHz/24-Bit DVD-Audio format for the rst test. On Carnival the JVC produced terric clarity in both Merchants

TONE TESTS

THE NUMBERS

GOLD AWARD

Front ring and front port DRIVER 200mm AMPLIFIER 160W FREQUENCY RESPONSE 35-140Hz DIMENSIONS HXWXD 375x300x390mm WEIGHT 20kg
Ted Gibbons lends his ears to the Sake soaked sounds of JVCs new micro system
vocals and the dominant guitar accompaniment. Down at the bass end of the scale, the sound held up well with good tight notes that stayed musical and avoided any wooliness. This is probably helped by the rear ported speaker enclosures. Of course these are small speakers with just a single driver, so the bass is not going to drive through you in the way a bigger speaker would. The EX-A1 is also a perfectly decent DVD player offering both a quality component video output and progressive scan capabilities. It also provides a virtual surround mode.

EDITORS

CHOICE

OF BASS

ompact and slipping in under the $1000 mark, the CHT-8R is the baby of the Velodyne subwoofer range. However, its reassuring heft of 20kg lets you know its still a contender. With just a 200mm driver, I thought the CHT-8R might be overwhelmed or even a bit redundant in my home system already sporting a pair of big DB Dynamics towers on the front channels, but I was dead wrong. With 160W on tap, this small bass box was not about to play second ddle to anything. Hooking up via the subwoofer pre-out on my receiver and setting the low pass crossover on the Velodyne to 80Hz, I red up the DVD disc of Bad Boys II and sat back to see what the CHT-8R could do. Well, for a small sub, it could do plenty. Bad Boys II is pure mayhem and with the Velodyne turned off, my system produced plenty of excitement on its own. but with the sub turned on, things really started to hit home. My old bungalow started to rattle and hum, and the ying bullets, high speed impacts and gratuitously huge explosions took on a whole new physical dimension. Impressed, I wound the volume up via the Velodynes very handy remote then I really started to enjoy the Velodynes abilities. Bass had real impact and was
Ted Gibbons goes a few rounds with Velodynes punchy CHT-8R subwoofer
JVC EX-A1 Micro System $899
Multi-talented Great audio clarity A little pricey A great all-in-one package
tight and punchy even at high volume, thanks to Velodynes current sensing servo circuit that constantly monitors the performance of the driver based on the signal being sent to it. Very smart. Anti-clipping circuitry and driver over-excursion protection also means you can give the CHT-8R a real workout without fear of overdoing it. The CHT-8R comes with a remote and this offers volume control, a selection of four DSP modes, phase control, a mute button and a night mode to preserve the all-important dynamics at low volume.

CONTACT 0800 GET JVC

Velodyne CHT-8R $999 subwoofer
SUPPORTED FORMATS DVD Video, DVD-R/RW, DVD Audio, CD, CD-R/RW, MP3, JPEG, VCD, SVCD VIDEO OUTPUTS Component, S-Video, composite AUDIO OUTPUTS optical digital, subwoofer, headphone AUDIO INPUT Analogue stereo RCA FM/AM tuner SPEAKERS 80mm birch-wood driver, 30W power handling

Tight punchy bass Remote control Stick on oor spikes Punches far above its weight
CONTACT velodyne@soundgroup.co.nz

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7/28/04 4:12:54 PM