While integrators tend to avoid home theatre in a box style packages, this new system from Pioneer could be ideal for budget conscious clients. Stephen Dawson explains.

Don’t we all wish we had a few tens of thousands of dollars to devote towards our home theatre loudspeaker system? Sadly, most of us don’t. But with sensible shopping you can acquire a surprisingly competent 5.1 channel speaker pack at a very reasonable price. Combine that with a low to mid-price home theatre receiver and you can be more than half way to the performance of the very best of systems.

The Pioneer FS52PACK is a 5.1 channel speaker package clearly designed for that purpose. You can tell because despite the low price, they are branded with the name of Andrew Jones, the chief loudspeaker engineer for Pioneer. The application of his name suggests that they have been engineered for the best sound quality within the constraints of cost.

Drivers and construction
The package consists of a pair of floorstanding front loudspeakers, a pair of small surround speakers, a centre channel and an active subwoofer. All the main speakers look rather classy in their black ash finish and feature cabinets that curve at the sides (or top and bottom for the centre channel) as they go from front to back. The centre channel overcomes the inevitable stability problems resulting from a curved underside by the simple expedient of being supplied with a pair of shaped rubber straps that sit underneath it. Even on the angled stand I use for centre channel speakers it was very stable.

They all have removable grilles and each of the passive speakers carry a pair of gold-plated binding posts, allowing for the use of thick cabling, but not for bi-wiring.

All the units are of a bass reflex design, with ports on the front for the subwoofer, but on the rear for all the speakers. That should be taken into account when positioning them: some room behind and around the centre and surround speakers is required to allow the ports to operate properly.

The front floorstanders are reasonably slim – 202mm wide – and come with a separate plinth which you bolt to the bottom using the supplied hardware. No provision has been made for the use of speaker spikes.

These carry a 25mm soft dome tweeter near the top – at 810mm from the floor it is close to ear level for the typical couch-seated adult – with a 133 midrange under that and two 133mm woofers further down the stack. Pioneer has set the crossover points at 3kHz and 250Hz.

The nominal impedance of these – and the other speakers – is 6Ω. That should allow them to draw the best output power from low to mid-priced receivers without overstressing them.

The centre and surround speakers use the same tweeter but are two-way models, employing 102mm bass/midrange drivers – two for the centre channel. Their crossover point is 3kHz.

The subwoofer is physically quite large, standing 360mm wide, 493mm tall and 435mm deep, and packs a 300mm driver, which scores a respectable 200W of power. The amplifier and electronics is kind of bolted onto the back of the wooden enclosure, rather than incorporated into it, but placed in a corner you shouldn’t notice. What you can see, even through the black grille cloth, is the startling white of the driver cone.

While small subwoofers are often preferred for reasons of room décor, when it comes to low cost models a largish enclosure with a largish driver is the way to go for performance. It costs a lot to get deep, strong bass out of a small sub.

Sound
Setting up the speaker system my receiver – a Pioneer SC-LX87 as it happens – delivered its test tones in its customary way, and to my surprise the broadband noise appeared surprisingly weighty, even from the diminutive rear speakers. The bass balance was really rather good.

Unfortunately the receiver took that to mean that they could all be set to ‘Large’, which is what it did. But that’s silly because while the bass that the centre and surround channel speakers produced is indeed nicely balanced, it is not extended. You need to have all the bass below about 60 hertz go off to the subwoofer for best performance. I changed the speaker size settings and had the receiver run an automatic calibration on the rest.

Later, switching the digital EQ on and off there was not an enormous amount of difference between the two in tonal balance. With it on there was a touch more mid treble – which tended to bring out the tape hiss on older music recordings. With EQ off, the system leaned a little towards a mellow English sound on music, largely natural, with a pleasing restraint.

Sticking with the stereo music, there was one thing missing: deep bass. After a while I went back into the receiver calibration and set the front left and right speakers to ‘Small’ as well with a 50Hz crossover, so that the deep bass would all go to the subwoofer, and re-ran the calibration.

That did the trick. The sound filled out, thoroughly rounded, with a musical bass underpinning that made it very satisfying.

The stereo imaging was rather good with excellent left/right precision and even a respectable amount of depth in the front sound stage.

When I wanted the music loud I had to rotate the volume knob rather more clockwise than with my usual loudspeaker system, thanks primarily to the lower sensitivity of the speakers. That said the system did go cleanly to quite high levels, even in stereo mode. At the higher end there was a touch of dynamic range compression – the drums didn’t poke out above the mix as much, as though the limits of the system had been reached, and a touch of harshness crept into the upper midrange. The main limitation was a slight loss of control, as though the drivers continued to perhaps ring a touch between the music impulses. That washed out the sense of silence between the sounds, the feeling that you’re hearing the music and only the music that the best loudspeakers produce.

But that was at bit of an extreme. At more sensible levels they were rather sweet sounding speakers.

When it comes to surround sound, it’s a good idea to go for the most difficult movies for testing purposes. Michael Mann’s 1995 crime drama Heat is just about the best that there is. Chapter 32 is the incredible extended street shootout with stacks of finely located, but explosive sounds as guns of different calibres and styles fire from all directions. The crashing of bullets into the bodies of cars was stunning. The sound of firing itself was just a tiny bit compressed, but nonetheless strong enough to impress and thoroughly involve the viewer. I should note to get a fully thrilling performance I wound the volume control of the Pioneer receiver up to an indicated 0 on the scale. The speakers seemed quite happy with this.

Later in Chapter 49 I was expected the airport runway scene to be a less powerful than usual because of its reliance on gobs of bass as the cop and the robber negotiate taxiing passenger jets. But the subwoofer of this system actually delivered a wonderfully intense level of bass. It didn’t quite shake the room with the subsonics my regular sub delivers, but subjectively, there wasn’t that much in it.

That was pretty intriguing. Since Pioneer hadn’t provided any frequency response specifications for the subwoofer I measured it in my room. With the crossover in the receiver set to 50 hertz, the subwoofer was perfectly happy to go all the way down to just 27 hertz (using my usual +/-6dB range). With a fuller range it was still good for 36 hertz, and close enough to 32 hertz.

I often write that a 5.1 channel speaker system is fine, but let down somewhat by the .1 part of it. With the Pioneer FS52PACK system, that most definitely is not the case.

Conclusion
Pioneer has taken the opportunity with the FS52PACK 5.1 channel speaker system to design with a bias towards high quality sound. If your home theatre budget puts you in the market for speakers priced around $1,299, you really should have a listen to this system.