 Athena Technologies Micra Home-Theater Speaker System
The world is divided into two types
of people: those who like to make things as difficult as possible and those who like to
keep things simple. Of course, all of the first type think they're the second.
Me? Hey, I choose to write about hi-fi and A/V equipment
for a living. I really know how to make life difficult for myself.
But I dream about having an uncomplicated life. The problem
is, I've become accustomed to the finer things in life -- stuff like really high-quality
sound to go with my state-of-the-art video system -- and everybody knows that takes a lot
of cash, not to mention a lot of work to set up.
Athena Technologies just may have provided me -- and
gazillions of other people -- with the perfect solution to that little dilemma. The Micra
surround-sound loudspeaker system is a five-speaker/powered-subwoofer package that takes
all the hard work out of system set up. And it sells for $549 USD total.
And its sound?
Simply unbelievable.
Teach us Delight in simple things
Athena Technologies is a division of the giant Canadian
loudspeaker manufacturer API, which means that it has big-time resources at its disposal
(not to mention the NRC, Canada's gift to the audiophiles of the world). It also has Gord
Van Kessel as its chief engineer; Van Kessel is the man who designed Athena's SCT
speakers, as well as its Audition and Point 5 systems.
Subwoofers are sort of an API specialty -- the company has
been manufacturing them since the 1980s and "goes deeper/plays louder" is an
in-house rallying cry. In the Micra, the company decided to up the ante for affordable
systems-in-a-box, and Gord Van Kessel was the man for the job. As one admirer confided,
"Gord could design a great-sounding subwoofer in his sleep."
Good thing, too -- the Micra's heart and soul is its M225
powered subwoofer. That article took Athena over a year to develop, not because of
anything Van Kessel built in -- internally, it is based on Athena's very well-received
Audition AS-P300 -- but because the design team wanted it to be a knockout. It is. Its
17"H by 9.5"W by 12.75"D black cabinet towers on a quartet of cone
"tiptoes," and sports a titanium-colored lozenge on the front, containing a
large flared port, a handsome level dial, and a red power LED.
Around back, things are equally simple: there's a low-level
RCA input, a pair of speaker-level inputs, an on/off switch, and a hard-wired power cord.
But the M225 is fancy on the inside. It sports a pre-set
filter system that divides the low-end sounds from the rest of the frequency range and
shunts them to the unit's 75W RMS (225W peak) MOSFET class-AB amplifier. The down-firing
8" injection-molded cone is a long-throw design, driven by a 20-ounce magnet. The
cabinet itself is solidly constructed from MDF and, with its front-firing vent, is
expressly tuned to mate with the MS satellites. Athena claims the M225 delivers usable
sound from below 30Hz to 100Hz -- and they ought to know, being one of the few speaker
manufacturers to have their own anechoic chamber for measurement.
The MS satellites (you get four) are tiny, 7"H
by 4.5"W by 4.75"D. Their cabinets are injection-molded resin with a bulge in
the middle (like me) from the 3.5" driver Athena packs in. Those woofers feature a
9-ounce magnet, which is pretty hefty for a speaker that size. The MSes also contain a
0.5" textile tweeter with a neodymium magnet structure.
The MSes are kinda cute in a curvy, friendly sort of way.
What makes 'em really nifty is the simple piece of bent metal attached at the back.
It’s a mounting bracket and it's brilliant in a simple fashion -- it allows you to
attach the MSes to a wall, ceiling, or low shelf with a single screw. Change the
bracket’s orientation and you can aim the speakers at pretty much any angle or
direction you require.
 The MC center-channel is like a double
MS -- it sports two 3.5" woofers flanking a centrally mounted 0.5" fabric
tweeter. Like the MSes, it has a nifty little bracket thingy around back -- this one
designed to allow you to tilt the speaker for mounting above or below the monitor. Two
MSes and an MC would look simply smashing flanking a wall-mounted plasma display.
The package includes speaker cables for the satellites and
center-channel -- you'll need to supply your own interconnect or speaker cable for the
subwoofer.
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith
Did I mention that the Micra is stone simple to set up? You
could leave it at plug'n'play. Just connect everything to your A/V receiver and
you'll get good sound.
Guaranteed.
But, like most finely tuned pieces of high-performance kit,
if you spend a little time tweaking the system, the Micra is capable of sounding even
better.
And doing that is pretty simple, too. Every A/V
receiver has a set-up menu that allows you to direct the signals to the individual
speakers. Most of them allow you to specify whether you are using small or large
loudspeakers -- meaning whether your speakers have deep bass or not. Obviously, the MSes
aren't large speakers; they offer robust sound considering their size, but still, we're
talking about a 3.5" woofer here. So specify small speakers, which will route all the
low bass (below 80Hz, generally) to the subwoofer, which can reproduce it.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
If you have a tape measure -- and you're up to it -- you
can go a little further. Measure the distance between your favorite viewing (and
listening) position and the front three loudspeakers. Ideally, it should be the same for
all three, which places them in a shallow arc in front of you -- unless you did mount them
flanking a wall-mounted flatscreen monitor, in which case, fudge a little. Enter that
distance into the set-up menu's "distance" setting. Now measure the distance
from your seat and the surround speakers and enter that distance. Relax now; the hard part
is over.
Now the fun begins.
If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents
After I did that extremely taxing "comprehensive"
set-up procedure, I popped my brand new copy of 28 Days Later into my DVD player
and settled down for a nice entertaining afternoon of blood-spewing zombies.
Holy moly! All that sound was coming from those l'il
suckers?
I giggled with glee. Then I had the stuffing scared out of
me. What an intense movie, due, in no small part, to the incredible job of the
sound-effects crew. There were jet flyovers and jarring noises and the sound of an army of
rats fleeing from a horde of rage-infested living corpses -- actually, I've never heard
that one, but it sure sounded real to me.
My wife, who hates horror movies, walked through the room
on an errand. She stopped short, looked at the miniscule Micras and shook her head in
disbelief.
What's surprising isn't really how small they are -- it's
how big they sound. There are tons of speakers-in-a-box on sale these days and most
of them assume that just because you don't have a lot of money to spend on home-theater
gear, you must not have a working pair of ears either. There's not much cheer in most
cheap'n'cheerful speaker systems.
 The Micras aren't like those guys. They
sound really good. Not just good for the money, but good.
There's real bass, for instance, which there almost never
is in HTIBs (home theaters in a box). During the jet flyovers in 28 Days Later, I
managed to shake the walls of my 350-square-foot listening room. No, the M225 didn't quite
match the tight bottom-end extension of my reference Polk PSW650, but that sub costs half
as much again as the entire Micra system. The M225 delivers solid, satisfying bass
down to 30Hz, even in a largish listening room like mine. That's impressive.
I found the satellites and center-channel equally
impressive. They're small, true, but they don't act small. They are voiced to
deliver the midrange in a natural manner and extend into the high frequencies with a
smooth clarity that simply delivers the information without undue emphasis. In other
words, what they do reproduce, they reproduce well -- and they don't shout or
screech like most inexpensive minimonitors.
Of course, you probably wouldn't want to listen to
full-range music on the MSes without a subwoofer, but since Athena only sells them with
the M225 subwoofer, you can't fault 'em for that.
It must also be noted that the speakers pick up some
acoustic gain from mounting them in a near-boundary position -- like, say, on their
built-in brackets on the wall or ceiling.
Gord Van Kessel is a very smart man.
He's got good ears, too. One of the biggest pleasures about
the Micra system was the way that the MSes and the MC integrate with one another. The
center-channel is far more important in a home-theater system than most people credit --
it has to present the dialogue clearly and comprehensibly and it also has to reproduce all
of the sound effects that the other speakers do. It should also match the left and right
front speakers tonally (some people insist it should match all the other speakers
tonally). It also has to fit on top of, or below, the monitor and produce all its
assigned sounds without interfering with the left and right front speakers.
That's a lot to expect from any loudspeaker, and
it's the reason that so many high-end manufacturers produce complex, expensive
high-performance center-channel loudspeakers. (If you scoff at the importance of the
center-channel in home-theater applications, just unplug it and watch a movie sometime --
it's not quite the same as just hitting mute, but it's the next best [worst]
thing in terms of knowing what's going on.)
Precisely because the center-channel is first among equals
in an HT setup, Athena gave it two woofers (there are dispersion and orientation issues as
well, of course -- but we like to keep things simple, right?). This helps present voices
and environmental sounds in a natural manner. It also helps prevent that
center-of-the-screen specificity that a small speaker can give those sounds. One of the
points of surround sound is to keep the soundfield as big as possible, and the
MS/MC combo does that very well indeed.
I was watching Cast Away recently and was struck
once again by how important the sound was in creating both the sense of Tom Hanks'
isolation and his insignificance in the face of the power of nature. Yes, the big storms
and the fury of the elements were impressive -- as they needed to be -- but it was the
sound of the surf, the susurration of the wind, the rustle of the palm fronds, and even
the sense of all that atmospheric weight that truly transported me out of Brooklyn and
into remote Oceana.
Subtle, you say? Yes, in a sense, it was. I wouldn't have
thought of it, but sound-effects editor Ken Fischer did -- and it's an extremely important
element in the film's emotional impact. If those sounds weren't there -- or if they
weren't reproduced accurately -- Cast Away would devolve into its capsule
description rather than the moving experience it really is.
The Micra system delivered that emotional journey.
My tastes are simple -- I am always satisfied with the
best
I once had a job writing product evaluations for a national
e-retailer, which means I have heard more cheap'n'cheerful HTIBs than anybody who
cares passionately about sound quality should endure. Some of them were not that bad;
most of them were. Yet, considering how little they cost, it seemed like bullying to hold
them to too high a sonic standard. What could you expect for $500?
Quite a bit, apparently.
Athena really has upped the ante with the Micra. It sounds
good, looks good, and it works straight out of the box.
Simply irresistible.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
Athena Technologies Micra Home-Theater Speaker
System
Price: $549.99 USD.
Warranty: Five years parts and labor (one year on electronic components).
Audio Products International Corp.
3641 McNicoll Ave
Toronto Ontario M1X 1G5
Canada
Phone: (416) 321-1800
Fax: (416) 321-1500
E-mail: supportcan@athenaspeakers.com
Web: www.athenaspeakers.com
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