EMP Speakers at the 2012 Audioholics Get Together

We walked into the first room which was the EMP room and the first thing we saw was that they were playing Battleship - which if you have or haven't seen it, well, it's like a long series of explosions that lasts about 2 hours. It's the perfect movie to show off what a 5.1 system can do with respect to directionality, soundstage, bass response and overall system coherence. We also enjoyed hearing the clear dialogue which we could credit to the excellent EMP Impression E56Ci Center Channel.

Let me back up and tell you a little bit about this system that we demoed. First of all we had the E55Ti Tower speakers, which we are very familiar with and have reviewed. The surrounds were the E55Wi surrounds. Bass was powered by the new ES1010i powered subwoofer, which uses a dual 10-inch poly-matrix cone driver and goes down to a conservative 35Hz (even lower when you take into account the in-room response gains). The sub uses dual down-firing ports and is driven by a 250 Watt amplifier. 

But the price on these speakers is what really blew us away.

The E55Ti towers retail for $795/pair, the E56Ci center is $449 and the surrounds are $499/pair. The subwoofer, which we thought was certainly going to be over $1000, is just $499. The prices of these speakers are unbelievable. Of course, at the show EMP was practically ripping themselves off with how much a discount they were offering.

The demo was given on a Servertson 93" screen via an Epson Home Cinema 6020UB projector. All of the sound was generated from an Oppo Blu-ray player running through an RX-A1020 receiver. This is just an $1100 receiver, so the demo was really showing off what you could really accomplish with just a reasonable budget. If you think the sound you get from a television is doing your movie-watching justice, you need to demo a system like this.

We also listened to some music tracks and soundstage was great, with instrumentation panned wide and not terribly localizable to the speaker itself, which fairly disappeared into the room. Piano and drums were particularly realistic, with ample midrange response - typically a difficult area for more budget-minded systems.

The RBH Sound guys also showed off their EP1 noise isolating earphones. These I picked up at the 2012 CEDIA Expo to try out. They retail for $150 and it's really like taking an entire speaker system on the road with you. Bass response is excellent and balance is stellar. This room was a lot of fun and we can't wait to see what else EMP and RBH Sound have in store in the future.