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GoldenEar Technology Does Dolby Atmos Right with In-Ceiling Speakers and Powered Towers

By Chris Boylan

If there is one over-riding theme for audio at CEDIA Expo 2014, it's the emergence of Dolby Atmos for the home. No less than eleven different booths are showing off Atmos for the home in various flavors and price points. GoldenEar Technology doesn't have any new speakers designed specifically for Atmos, but it turns out, you don't need to. Getting good sound in a Dolby Atmos system is not much different from getting good sound in a traditional surround system, but with the addition of a few speakers above the listener to establish the height portion of the soundfield. GoldenEar just happens to offer a suite of tower speakers and in-ceiling speakers which work quite well for Dolby Atmos. And that's what they are showing off at CEDIA Expo in Denver this week.

For standard surround, the system was comprised of a pair of Triton One towers up front ($2,499.99 each), a SuperCenter XL ($799.99), and a pair of Triton Two towers in the rear ($1499.99/each). The Triton towers include built-in powered subwoofers, which were jointly driven both from the LFE output of the preamp and via the speaker level input from the amplifiers. For Dolby Atmos, they needed to add at least two height speakers, but chose to use four of their Invisa HTR 7000 in-ceiling speaker ($499.99/each). This could be called a "5.1.4" configuration (five surround, one LFE, four height), or you could also call it 5.4.4 since there were technically four subwoofers driven by the LFE output. Dolby Atmos decoding was done with an Integra DHC-80.6 preamp feeding Pass Labs and NAD amplifiers.

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GoldenEar's Dolby Atmos demo featured the Triton One towers with built-in powered subwoofers.

Unlike some competitive in-ceiling speakers which fire straight downward, the Invisa in-ceiling models are angled toward the listening area with around 90 degrees of dispersion. This makes speaker placement a bit more particular but accodring to company founder, Sandy Gross, this creates a more uniform soundfield for the height channels and prevents the hot-spotting you can get with traditional downward-firing ceiling speakers.

Playing clips and trailers from the Dolby Atmos test disc, the GoldenEar system created an impressive three-dimensional soundstage, with excellent dynamic range and detail. The bass response was both extended and nicely balanced around the room thanks to the use of the four integrated powered subwoofers. I didn't listen to any two-channel content on the system, but I'll definitely be stopping back by the booth for more.

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The components of GoldenEar's Dolby Atmos demo system included Triton One the Triton Two towers, a SuperCenter XL and four in-ceiling Invisa 7000 speakers.

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