ECA-4 & ECA-44 Setup and Installation

Introduction

Home theater has hit the mainstream and the majority of the general public has embraced it as a conditional “must have” item to pair up with a new flat panel display in the family room. What seems more critical today however is space efficiency and room décor. Gone are the big heavy CRT tube televisions of yesterday and so are the big box speakers. In my experience I have found most people willing to take the plunge into home theater provided that it met two conditions: affordable and unobtrusive. Bose at one time cornered the market with their “cubed” speaker system. Audiophiles may shiver at the mere mention of the “B” word on Audioholics but you have to pay kudos to them at being the first to launch such a product to the marketplace and defining a new speaker category which helped bring home theater into the mainstream. Since then numerous other brands have offered their solutions to the marketplace often exceeding the performance and value of the Bose, but not at such a comparable size or nifty mounting capability. Enter EMP (a division of RBH Sound). Their approach was to offer the smallest high value package possible without sacrificing performance. The question remaining is will they pass the WAF test while satisfying the audio enthusiast? Read on to find out.

Product Overview

The EMP speakers are housed in an all aluminum cast enclosure and sport a superlative 4” aluminum woofer and 1” soft dome tweeter. They employ binding posts and can be wall or ceiling mounted via their optional rotating bracket system or placed on slim line stands. EMP offers both options as an additional accessory item. Due to their small size, the fact that they are sealed design, they have a relatively low sensitivity rating of 85dB / 1 watt for the ECA-4 and 88dB/ 1 watt for the ECA-44, so I highly recommend pairing this system with a good honest rated 100wpc receiver to get the most out of them in larger listening spaces.

Set-Up & Installation

The review system was installed at my neighbor's house who is quite a music enthusiast but has strict WAF requirements to have no visible boxes messing with the room décor of their living room. It was actually his idea to ceiling mount all speakers but the center channel. I convinced him to mount the ECA-44 center channel on the wall just above his flat panel display using two EMP speaker brackets for better integration with his display.

Installation was a breeze using the EMP EMB speaker brackets which are sold separately in pairs for roughly $80. The mounting brackets are made of quality constructed rigid plastic and come with all of the necessary hardware for installation. The two piece ball and collar bracket system allows you to disengage the bracket in order to install the mounting portion (collar) to any wall or ceiling simply by screwing into the stud. The remaining ball portion is than attached to the back of the speaker and snapped into place in the mounted collar portion. The swivel design allows the speaker to be directed to the optimum listening position and a safety wire completes the installation and ensures if the speaker somehow dislodges from the mount, it won’t come crashing down. While I felt these were quality brackets, $80 is steep and makes a big difference in the overall price of the system. If these are the speakers you're interested in, you'll want to keep this cost in mind as aftermarket brackets likely won't work with these speakers.

Editorial Note: Setting the Right System Crossover Point

Realizing the physical cabinet size, bass alignment and driver compliment severely limit their bass output, I crossed over all of these speakers at 120Hz and fed info below that to the dual RBH Sound TS-10A subwoofers. Its important to note when configuring a system like this with a crossover point above 80Hz, bass starts becoming more directional making it imperative that you select the proper location for the subwoofer(s). In this instance, up front and away from the listening area is the way to go. If you can afford to have dual subs (preferably run in stereo) this will really help smooth out the system bass response for the entire listening area as well as help integrate the splice between the satellite speakers and the subwoofers.

Editorial Note: Placement Guidelines

When installing these speakers, I suggest you take mental note of coverage area and the best way to achieve a direct path of sound to that area. Placing speakers too high will reduce the fidelity and weaken the high frequency reproduction as you will be listening to the speaker too far off axis. Thus if you must place the speakers in such a position, it is highly recommended that you swivel them down towards the listening area ensuring the tweeter is firing directly at the seats. Try to place the front speakers further apart than just the width of the display (if your significant other will allow it). In order to get the biggest possible soundstage and best imaging, they should be about 80-90% apart as the distance between their central plane and the listening area (IE. if you are sitting 10ft from the display, the speakers should be about 8-9 feet apart). The closer you can get the center channel to the display the better to give the illusion that the voices are coming directly from the picture. This is why I convinced my friend NOT to ceiling mount his center channel.

Equipment Used

The receiver utilized was the very potent, high bang for the buck Yamaha RX-V659 paired with the Denon DVD-1930CI Universal DVD player. The speaker cables and A/V interconnects were all Impact Acoustics Sonicwave. The subwoofer(s) were a pair of RBH Sound TS-10A’s and the display was a 46” Sony Bravia LCD.