A full home Dolby Atmos-capable home theatre speaker requires 11 loudspeakers plus a subwoofer. Four of those loudspeakers must be overhead. Or do they? Their sound must appear to be coming from overhead. Dolby Laboratories, though, in recognition of domestic realities, came up with an alternative to cutting ceiling holes. That alternative is Atmos-enabled loudspeakers.

So far, these have been rare. My only experience with these before coming to this system has been a set of KEF R-50 speakers, which are designed to sit on your regular speakers, at Dolby’s headquarters in San Francisco.

But what if you’re buying a totally new system so there’s no need to plonk extra little speakers on existing ones? That’s what US loudspeaker maker Triad offers with its InRoom Silver LR-H speakers. The company supplied four of these plus a matching InRoom Silver Centre speaker and two InRoom Silver Subs, along with their matching amplifiers.

The Equipment

The point of the Atmos enabled speakers is to have ‘height’ sound without actually having to have physically high speakers. So these speakers have drivers installed into the top that shoot upwards, although angled somewhat towards the listening area. This is achieved by having the top plate into which the top drivers are mounted angled at 20º, sloping down from the rear towards the front. However, the front baffle of the speaker extends up to nearly the same height as sides and rear of the enclosure, thereby reducing any direct line-of-sight sound from these drivers to the ear.

There is, however, plenty of diffused and reflected sound, a fair bit of it coming from the ceiling. It isn’t entirely dependent upon that. The Dolby processing – one Dolby spokesperson jokingly referred to it as ‘Dolby Special Sauce’ (or perhaps Source) – also makes sound coming from this driver have audible characteristics that trick the ear into thinking it is coming from on-high.

In this case, the Silver LR-H speaker has four 3” full range drivers, with powerful neodymium magnets, installed into those upwards firing panels. With four loudspeakers, that makes for 16 drivers all told.

This kind of arrangement should effectively increase the directionality of the sound, producing somewhat of a beaming effect in the direction in which the drivers are pointed, which is to say towards the ceiling.

The main drivers on the Silver LR-H speakers face forwards, with a 25mm fabric dome tweeter at the centre of the enclosure and with a 165mm bass/midrange above it and another below it in a vertical symmetrical arrangement. This approximates a ‘point source’ sound effect.

The enclosures were sealed. There were two sets of gold-plated binding posts, one for the Atmos top panel and the other for the main drivers.

Both top and front grilles were perforated metal. The review speakers were finished in a paintable black vinyl, but plenty of other finishes are also available including a variety of wood grains. Indeed, you can have them finished in any Dulux catalogue colour as part of the price, or at extra cost with a veneer to match any supplied sample. The other speakers and subs have the same finish options.

The Silver Centre speaker has the same three main speakers, but no Atmos section of course. It was likewise a sealed enclosure, with a single pair of binding posts.

The subwoofers were unusual in being passive, but with a custom amplifier in a separate rack-mountable casing. The 12” subwoofer hints at its capabilities by its sheer weight. Despite lacking a built in amplifier, it weighs just under 30kg. Yet again, the enclosure is sealed. The only connection is a pair of binding posts.

Triad was a bit light-on with the specifications, but noted that its BASH technology provides 600W of ‘Class A/B performance and near Class D efficiency’ and that its set-up and calibration features comply with CEDIA’s CEB-22 recommendations. You see, it isn’t merely an amplifier but a pretty impressive digital signal processor as well. A credit-card sized remote is provided with the subwoofer amplifier.

Installation

Triad supplied the system with two pairs of stands for the Silver LR-H speakers. In the end I stuck with my own stands, which are known (to me) quantities. I installed the five main speakers in the standard positions and the subwoofer in the same corner in which I always install subwoofers. I stuck with one of them. I had resolved to make room and install the other one should it seem necessary, but it soon became apparent that even one was capable of rendering significant damage to my office, just through acoustic force.

Even though a standalone DSP amp is shared with a number of Triad’s many subwoofer models, the amplifier is finely tuned to the subwoofer. The first thing you do after connecting it and powering it up is work through a setup menu, the first step of which is to specify which model of subwoofer is connected.

This gets the DSP into the right mode to optimise performance of that subwoofer. There is a wealth of useful settings. You can choose how it (by ‘it’ I mean the DSP/amp) is to be automatically switched on (external trigger, auto signal detect or manual), the sensitivity of the auto-on feature, the switch-off time, the volume level (of course) and the preset sound mode. But drill down and there are even more powerful features. You can set the mode for location in the room (including the corner), the low pass filter to the sub, a high pass filter for the sound passed through to the unit to go onto the main speakers, and – here’s something unusual – a high pass filter for the subwoofer itself.

High powered, extremely capable subwoofers can be problematic. There’s often significant infrasonic content in movies, and even sound music recordings, which can be, literally, moving in the sense of pounding your body. Unfortunately these frequencies penetrate most room materials and can travel a long way, upsetting neighbours. With this subwoofer you can tell it you don’t want it to reproduce sounds below 10Hz, 15Hz, 20Hz and so on up to 100Hz (that’s overkill). Set it at 25Hz or 30Hz and you’re far less likely to attract local ire.

I was interested to see what the receiver’s automatic calibration system would make of these speakers. Note: an Atmos-capable home theatre receiver needs to be told what kind of height speakers you’re using because it needs to process the sound accordingly.

The Denon receiver – the current model AVR-X7200W – supports a mix of ceiling, Atmos-enabled and front height speakers. Of course, I set all four to Atmos-enabled. The receiver set the Atmos section of the front speakers to a 0.12m greater distance than their main drivers, and to 0.15m for the two surround speakers. In both cases that’s much less than the path would have been if it were determined as going from speaker to ceiling and then bouncing down to the listener. Presumably the ‘Dolby Special Sauce/Source’ processing allows for this since it’s almost inconceivable that the a speaker could be produced which does not deliver at least some of its sound more or less directly, rather than by bouncing from the ceiling.

Do note that all the speakers are rated at 4Ω nominal impedance, and are thus unsuitable for use with some home theatre receivers.

Performance

I made a mistake initially. I was listening to music and due to a mistaken setting in the receiver the subwoofer had been switched out and all the music was coming from the main speakers. And, truth it, it was pretty mediocre. When I realised what was going on, I fixed the setting so now the subwoofer was handling bass below 80Hz, and suddenly the Silver LR-H speakers became astonishingly fine listening units.

I should have realised. Many speakers with an apparently similar driver complement are specified to deliver down to 40Hz or below. Clearly Triad has designed this to cover from 80Hz and up, leaving the stuff below that to the sub. The deep material being fed into the speakers was just muddying them.

Without the mud, though, they were detailed, clean and capable of great volume levels. In a sense the sound they produced was almost laboratory-like, imposing no particular signature on it, no particular ‘personality’, but delivering the sound of the recording in what seemed to be eerily close to what was actually recorded.

But I must turn to movie sound. First, Dolby Atmos. I employed my very small collection of Atmos encoded discs – two testers from Dolby: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The purist in my wants to say that you should go for ceiling speakers to get the best from the height channels on these discs. But in reality, if there was any diminishing of the overhead, all-directional effect due to the use of these speakers, it was acoustically invisible to me. The specific noises on a number of the Dolby test tracks were in their proper positions and as precisely rendered as they are when the system is running my four ceiling loudspeakers.

Those discs exhausted, I thought I’d see if Michael Mann’s 1995 movie Heat would deliver some height content, given that the street battle and airport scenes still stand as among the best movie audio even delivered. I switched on Dolby Surround (which extracts height information from the 5.1 channel mix and sends it up to the relevant height channels). There wasn’t much on the street battle, but it did serve to demonstrate the impact that this system was capable of delivering. Impact, yet control. In the airport scene the room dutifully rumbled, brought to life by the Silver Sub, and here there was some clear height as aircraft passed overhead.

Finally, I went to my favourite Dolby Surround test disc, the Gus Van Sant 1998 remake of Psycho. For all its weaknesses, the sound design is first class. As Marion Crane is approaching Bates’ Motel, the crashing sound of the rain on the car roof was perfect, overhead, each droplet defined in space.

Conclusion

Who needs ceiling speakers in a home theatre? It turns out, Dolby Atmos-enabled speakers do just about as good a job. At least if we can judge by the Triad InRoom Silver LR-H speakers. And even without Atmos, these are first class loudspeakers.