 RBH
Sound Compact Theater Loudspeaker System
When multichannel home theater first started to become
popular, quite a few speaker companies rushed to market "one-box" solutions to
the burgeoning need for additional loudspeakers. The magic price point of $1000 saw
numerous collections of frequency-limited cheap little cabinets (easy to place!)
combined with pathetically under-powered so-called subwoofers that barely reproduced
midbass, let alone actually supplying any deep bass.
That's why HT buffs tend to roll their eyes when you try to
discuss any reasonably priced complete speaker system. The well has been poisoned -- we
all know that's code for crappy sound coming out of miniscule plastic boxes.
If you're a consumer, that's a pity -- after all, choosing
a complete multichannel speaker system is confusing. Besides, we're not all
Rockefellers. Affordable speakers today are, for the most part, better and more natural
sounding than ever -- why shouldn't you be able to buy a home-theater speaker
system that sounds good and doesn't pauperize you?
If you're a manufacturer who actually takes pride in your
work, this looks like a no-win situation. People have been burned and they are suspicious
now of any complete system that's small and reasonably priced. Manufacturers
realize they stand a good chance of being perceived as opportunists if they offer such a
critter, so most of them shy away from even the appearance of doing so.
That makes for a self-fulfilling feedback loop,
however. If all the honest manufacturers refrain from producing high-quality, affordable,
compact, one-brand systems, the only people left selling them will be the people that
ruined the systems' reputation in the first place.
But what if that weren't the case? What if a legitimate
speaker manufacturer decided to leverage its years of experience and economies of scale
into producing a well-designed, solidly constructed multichannel speaker system that was
good looking and sounded great. Oh yeah, and lest we forget, what if the company decided
to price it right in the middle of all those cynical one-box wonders?
In a just world, that system would become the toast of the
town, the wonder of the age, and the jewel in the HT crown. But over here in the real
world, the chances are that everybody would simply assume it was too good to be true and
you'd never even hear about it.
That certainly seems to be the case with RBH Sound’s
CT-5 Compact Theater loudspeaker system.
If it ain't broke don't fix it
Who? That's part of the problem, of course. Roger B.
Hassing (RBH, right?) has been making loudspeakers since 1976 and the company has
extensively investigated the use of aluminum in its midrange and low-frequency drivers.
For years, RBH supplied drivers to McIntosh for its speakers, later developing its own
designs and marketing them exclusively to small specialty shops. These days, most of RBH's
extensive line consists of models that utilize fine veneers, as well as the company's
signature aluminum drivers. The CT-5 takes advantage of the firm's expertise in metal
drivers, but rather than MDF cabinets, the MM-4 and C-4 speakers are cast from metal,
giving them a small, sculpted footprint and extraordinary heft and solidity for such tiny
loudspeakers.
The CT-5 system consists of four MM-4 two-way speakers, one
C-4 center-channel, and an MS-8 subwoofer. It sells for $1099 USD. A 7.1-ready system, the
CT-7, adds two additional MM-4s and sells for $1349.
The soul of the system is RBH's 4" aluminum
midrange/woofer. This driver uses a specially damped, low-mass, stiff cone, coupled to an
extended voice coil and cast basket structure. It is about as robust as they come. In the
MM-4 and C-4, that driver is mated to a 1" ferrofluid-cooled silk-dome tweeter and a
steep-acoustic-slope crossover.
The cabinets, as previously mentioned, are heavy, cast
metal. They are compact (7.25"H by 5"W by 4.5"D for the MM-4; 5"H by
11.75"W by 4.5"D for the C-4) and inert. Their organic shape cuts down on
parallel surfaces (and therefore internal standing waves) and they are fitted with
heavy-duty solid-metal five-way binding posts. The cabinets are pre-fitted with
speaker-bracket connections that fit optional wall brackets, which RBH sells for $40/pair.
Floorstanding pedestals that telescope from 28" to 40" are also available for
$90.
The MS-8 subwoofer has a ported MDF cabinet and two
8" aluminum woofers (one downfiring, one front facing), driven by an internal 200W
amplifier. Like most contemporary subs, the MS-8 accepts line- or speaker-level signals.
The speaker-level input is mated to a 100Hz high-pass filter with no possible adjustment.
The line-level input is mated to a variable high pass, with a control range of 40Hz to
160Hz. The subwoofer's amp can be set to switch on automatically upon receiving a signal,
or you can switch it on and off manually. Acoustic phase and gain can also be adjusted.
In terms of parts and construction quality, the CT-5 is
decidedly top-drawer.
The two prime movers in the universe are Time and Luck
But don't think that means you can just set it and forget
it. To get the best sound out of this system actually takes quite a bit of work. I'm not
complaining, mind you -- most compact surround systems never sound good -- but RBH
packs the CT-5 with only rudimentary set-up instructions and that's a shame.
First, out of the box all the speakers sound a tad muffled
and stiff. You've got to play some music through them before the surrounds loosen up and
everything flows nicely. This isn't a matter of days, thankfully, but of hours. So tune in
a radio station and go do some chores.
Next, you need to spend some time setting up the subwoofer.
The MM-4 and C-4 are extremely small speakers, with only a 4" midrange/woofer, so
it's not surprising they don't extend much -- if any -- below 100Hz. That's okay -- RBH
doesn't bill them as full-range loudspeakers, after all, and that's what subwoofers are
for.
But you need to make sure you have set your system's
surround processor so it recognizes that the speakers are small, otherwise it will
attempt to send them bass they cannot reproduce. When the primary speakers are small, the
processor sends the low frequencies to the sub, which is definitely where you want them in
this case.
But that's not all. If you use the line-level input (which
I strongly recommend for sonic reasons), you'll need to set the woofer's adjustable
high-pass filter. The precise frequency will depend on your room and your taste, but it
will be somewhere between the MS-8's HF limit of 160Hz and the MM-4/C-4's 100Hz -3dB
point. And that's where you have to be really careful.
If you play the MM-4s alone, you'll get clear, almost
phenomenally open sound. No bass, of course, but what they do put out is pretty special.
So you want to preserve that sense of uncluttered openness as much as possible when
dialing-in the MS-8. Each room (and listener!) will dictate a different, skillful blend of
crossover point and subwoofer gain. I probably erred too much on the side of openness, but
I value that a lot, so I rolled off the sub at about 110Hz (hard to be precise with a
continuously variable pot) and turned the gain up until I barely heard the sub on its own,
then I backed off that setting by a little.
This optimized the CT-5 system for music, but it might have
robbed it of a certain amount of rump-rumble in bass-heavy soundtracks. You could
certainly get more bass bloom out of the system than I did, but you'll be trading off some
transparency for it. If deep, pants-flapping bass is non-negotiable, however, the CT-5
system is probably not what you're looking for -- but then, neither is anything else
around $1100.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what
we pretend to be
The Rolling Stones' entire Abkco catalog has just been
remastered on double-layered SACDs and, having received a pre-release promo disc, I have
been using the occasion to remind myself of just how good the band once was. The reason I
have forgotten is, I have not listened to their classic records for a long time, partially
because the existing CDs sound so terrible. Man, do the new Sony SACDs ever take care of
that problem!
I was listening to a sampler taken from the entire
collection one afternoon (The Rolling Stones Remastered [Sony promotional disc
9215-2]), when I had an epiphany concerning the CT-5. I was enjoying myself waay
too much listening to Jagger and Richard playing the string bass (yes, it took both of
them) on "Ruby Tuesday," when it struck me that the CT-5 wasn't a
home-theater-in-a-box masquerading as a high-resolution speaker system, but a hi-rez
speaker masquerading as a HTIB.
Vonnegut got it right, of course, we are what we
pretend to be. And the CT-5 turned out to be a great HTIB -- for real.
Listening to the early Stones, I was reminded of how new
records used to have the crackle of electricity about them. The Beatles, the Stones, and
the Beach Boys in particular seemed to be in an arms race -- only it was the breadth of
the music and the new technology of the studio that were the weapons. So Revolver
begat Pet Sounds which begat Sgt. Pepper which begat Their Satanic
Majesties Request. For music fans, it was like watching the clash of Titans -- and we
loved every minute of it.
The CT-5, of course, had no impact whatsoever on my
nostalgia, but it did reveal how great those recordings sounded (thank you Bob Ludwig!).
They sound alive with details previously obscured by their lackluster mastering, including
revitalized guitar tone and the great sound Bill Wyman consistently coaxed from his bass.
That alone was revelatory.
The CT-5 swings. The open, natural sound of the MM-4/C-4
combo was given flesh and guts by the MS-8.
And it wasn't just music that benefited from that lean,
propulsive energy. Having been mesmerized by George Pal's 1960 The Time Machine
when I was a wee one, I had to see Simon Wells' (H.G.'s great-grandson) remake of
it last winter. As a CGI showcase and a pure action movie, it's not bad, but I missed the
story Wells actually wrote (well, Pal only told part of it, for that
matter).
But the C-5 did precisely what it was supposed to. I could
easily follow the dialogue through the center-channel, even when the ambient sounds from
the left and right mains were high. The subwoofer kept things ominous and moody (and startling!)
and the MM-4 surrounds immersed me in strange new sonic worlds.
After the film was over and I turned on the room lights, I
was again startled when I saw how tiny the MM-4s and C-4 were. In the dark, reproducing
the film, they sounded huge. They definitely made the film's sound match the
picture projected on the FireHawk screen -- life-sized, to say the least.
The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too
dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart
The best way to consider value is, of course, to compare
two relatively similar products and determine which offers better performance. That
slippery "similar" is what hangs me up with the RBH CT-5. For one thing, it's
really hard to compare apples to apples when it comes to HT systems. I recently reviewed
the Unity system, a $1200 HTIB that includes a DVD player, complete A/V receiver, and five
speakers and a subwoofer. It's in the same price range as the CT-5, but the RBH doesn't
have to dilute any of its budget on electronics or playback, so of course its
speakers are more substantial and make fewer compromises. That hardly seems a fair
comparison.
I also recently auditioned the Axiom Epic Grand Master
complete HT multichannel speaker system, which is a lot closer to the CT-5 -- both in
spirit and as a speaker-only multichannel system. The thing is, the Axiom system costs
just over $1500, giving it a lot more budget to work with, so that doesn't seem entirely
fair.
But the RBH is closer in intent to a high-resolution
product like the Axiom system than any $1000 HTIB I've ever heard, so perhaps that's the
right comparison after all.
On DVD soundtracks, such as the flashy and, unfortunately,
slow-moving Romeo Must Die, the Axiom's subwoofer made a big difference in impact.
The sounds that accompanied Jet Li's martial arts sequences had a more distinctly, shall
we say, meaty thump with the EP175 than with the MS-8. I won't say it was more realistic,
since these exaggerated and amplified blows sounded more like someone taking a baseball
bat to a cow carcass in an echo chamber than any punch in real life, but that is
the sound that is on the DVD. The MM-4s and C-4 portrayed the dialogue and other sounds
with an engaging leanness that made for superb intelligibility, and they seemed a trifle
sweeter than the M22Tis. I preferred this sound, but I suspect the Axioms were truer to
the original, since many films have an intentionally bright mix in the dialogue channel.
(To compensate for being projected through a perforated screen, don't you know?)
All things being equal, if I had to choose between the two
systems, I'd choose the Axiom. I assume you would, too. But let's say all things aren't
equal, let's say there's a special circumstance that tilts the playing field -- something
like price for instance.
That's what's so great about the CT-5. It's a serious
speaker system at a price point where no one expects to find one.
History is merely a list of surprises. It can only
prepare us to be surprised yet again
It's ironic. About seven years into the HT era, someone has
finally delivered the product people have been looking for since its inception. Only now,
everybody has stopped looking because most companies got it so spectacularly wrong.
But don't give up -- the $1100 price point is not populated
solely by shameless hucksters and cynical marketers. RBH has proven that at least one
hard-working speaker manufacturer has delivered an honest, well-designed, musically
satisfying multichannel loudspeaker system at a price that goes head-to-head with all the
c.s. (cheap stuff) out there.
If you're looking for such a jewel -- and you're willing to
understand exactly what it can and cannot do -- then the RBH CT-5 Compact Theater is a
long-deferred promise fulfilled at last.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
RBH Sound CT-5 Compact
Theater Loudspeaker System
Price: $1100 USD
Warranty: Five years parts and labor (one year on subwoofer amplifier)
RBH Sound Incorporated
976 North Marshall -- Bldg. 2 Unit 4
Layton, UT 84041
Phone: (800) 543-2205
E-mail: info@rbhsound.com
Website: www.rbhsound.com
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