2002 Products of the Year: SIM2
HT200 DMF Projector and Axiom Audio Epic Grand Master Home-Theater Speaker System
SIM2 HT200 DMF Projector
Axiom Audio Epic Grand Master Home-Theater Speaker System
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And that's a prescription the SIM2 HT200 DMF projector
filled quite handily. Housed within its glamorous, sculptural casing are all the technical
features you could ask for: a full panoply of input options, Faroudja DCDi processing,
sealed optical engine, user-controlled temperature adjustment, and an amazing range of
display adjustability.
All of which means that it adjusts to your needs and
living conditions rather than demanding you do all the adapting which is definitely
not always the case.
But what I liked best about the SIM2 was how clear and
bright its projected image was. It's the closest I've gotten to reproducing in my home the
experience of seeing a film in an Academy theater -- and it's probably a darn-sight
cleaner than what you'll see in the average shopping mall googolplex.
I'll grant that you can get a better image with a CRT
projector with 9" guns and an outboard deinterlacer/scaler, but that'll set you back
as much as 10 times more. Your priorities might very well be different, but I'd gladly
trade that small amount of difference in quality in return for a projector I might
be able to afford. (Assuming I have a few good years so I could get enough ahead that if I
had a few more good years… but I'm speaking theoretically, of course.)
For establishing an extraordinary level of performance and
convenience and keeping its cost ($8595 USD) out of five-figure territory, the SIM2
HT200 DMF projector has earned its designation as onhometheater.com’s 2002 Video
Product of the Year.
As much as we'd all love to own this year's Video Product
of the Year, most of us need to content ourselves with fulfilling less daunting cravings.
One of the most delightful properties of home theater is the way the experience can be
made more expansive through the addition of sound alone. Nice as it is, we don't have to
see a 100" image in order to be drawn into the action we're watching.
This realization has spawned an entire genre of teensy
little speaker systems -- and not all of them sport teensy little price tags, either. What
impressed me most about the Axiom
Audio Epic Grand Master home-theater speaker system was how it balanced its
full-bodied sound with a real-world price sticker: For a paltry $1510, it includes front
left and right channels, a center speaker, two surrounds, and a powered subwoofer.
What's even better is that the system sounds fantastic --
and its surround speakers may even be my favorites at any price!
Thank Ian Colquhoun, Axiom's founder and a seminal figure
in the modern movement of accurately measuring loudspeaker performance. Colquhoun's
marvelous little system may not reproduce the loudest special effects or the very
bottom-most octave of bass information, but at normal volume levels, reproducing the
important stuff -- dialogue, environmental sounds, spatial cues -- it simply cannot be
faulted.
That's where the magic resides and the Axiom Audio Epic
Grand Master is a wizard at delivering it -- and for about the same price as any number of
poorly built, tizzy-sounding embarrassments.
For giving consumers a choice, for presenting us with an
affordable, impeccably engineered loudspeaker system we can afford, and for being true to
the magic, the Axiom Audio Epic Grand Master home-theater speaker system has
earned the title of onhometheater.com 2002 Audio Product of the Year.
For home-theater buffs, 2002 was a very good year.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
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