Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity - Best of Awards 2020
The RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker combines the convenience of a soundbar with the performance of a premium speaker delivering the left, right and center channels of a surround audio system. Available in custom widths and measuring only 1 5/8 inches deep, it’s the perfect solution for multi-use media rooms.

RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker

There are a multitude of soundbars on the market, many of which will not satisfy even casual audiophiles. Some users prefer to provide their own processor, receiver or amplifier and for them, only a passive soundbar will do. The RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker delivers convenience in a slim cabinet that’s only 1 5/8 inches thick and comes in custom widths from 47 to 73¼ inches to fit under any flat-panel TV or a small to medium-sized projection screen. RBH delivers high performance too with its inverted-cone midrange drivers and aluminum-domed tweeters with textured phase plugs. Simple installation and hookup make it a great solution for multi-use media rooms where large cabinet speakers aren’t desired.

Highlights

The RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker

  • Passive LCR on-wall speaker
  • Just 1 5/8 inches thick
  • MDF construction with sealed chambers for each channel
  • Includes easy mounting instructions with hardware and template included
  • Available in widths from 47 to 73¼ inches
  • Solid build quality with magnetic grill
Introduction

There are many media room and theater environments where large cabinet speakers are impractical. Spouse-acceptance-factor aside, it doesn’t always make sense to dedicate floor or shelf space to boxes that require breathing room to sound their best. Soundbars are a great solution to this problem and they come in two major categories, active and passive. Active bars include all the necessary electronics along with at least three speaker channels making additional components like amplifiers and processors, or receivers, unnecessary. The one flaw in this approach is that designers need to balance the internal space requirements for said electronics with the level of performance they’re trying to achieve. As always in audio, size matters.

The solution to this is a passive soundbar which simply encloses at least three speakers and can be connected to the electronics of the user’s choice. This greatly increases the performance potential because there is no limit to what can be used to drive the speaker array. It also makes slim cabinets possible and that’s what RBH provides with its Ultra-3 On-Wall Soundbar Speaker. It comes in any width from 47 to 73¼ inches but regardless of the chosen size, it’s just 1 5/8 inches thick. With a simple keyhole mount and included hardware, you can attach it to a wall where it will likely be thinner than your television.

For review today, I have a 64-inch model installed in my theater under the projection screen. Let’s take a look.

RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker REVIEW SPECIFICATIONS
System Type:

On-wall/LCR Soundbar Speaker

Frequency Response:

100Hz-20kHz (±3dB)

Sensitivity:

84dB (2.83V @ 1 Meter)

Recommended Power:

20-120 Watts

Woofers:

6x 4″ inverted aluminum cone

Tweeter:

3x 1″ aluminum diaphragm neodymium magnet with textured phase plug

Crossover Frequency:

3000 Hz

Crossover Slope:

12dB/Octave

Impedance:

8 Ohms x3

Cabinet/Color:

MDF/matte textured black with high-gloss end accent caps

Grille:

black fabric, magnetic attachment

Finished Dimensions:

Width (custom fit from): 48″ to 73.25″, Height: 6.6875″, Depth: 1.625″

Distance Between Keyholes:

14.625″ (372mm)

Weight:

15.8 lbs (73.25″ Wide), 12.5 lbs (63″ Wide), 9.5 lbs (47″ Wide)

MSRP:

$1231.95

Warranty:

5 Years

Company:

RBH Sound

SECRETS Tags:

RBH, soundbar, on-wall speaker, LCR speaker, home theater, Soundbar Speaker – 2020

Design

RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker

Unpacking the RBH On-Wall Soundbar Speaker reveals a solidly-built bar that is surprisingly thin. In fact, it’s the slimmest soundbar I’ve yet encountered. It feels as though it’s solid and indeed, rapping on the cabinet produces a completely dead sound. But it is, in fact, hollow, made from premium MDF and covered with a textured black vinyl applique that does not reflect light. The end caps are finished in high-gloss black, only a thin strip of which is visible from the front.

RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker Grill-Off

The grill is in one piece and covered with an acoustically-inert cloth. Though the Ultra-3 looks good naked, the grill’s frame is fairly thick and serves to isolate the individual drivers for a more focused sound. Though the difference isn’t huge, I thought it sounded better with the grill in place. Removing it brightened the sound somewhat. And you’ll want to leave it on to cover up the ingenious connection system. Rather than putting the binding posts in back or underneath, RBH has placed stout spring terminals in the front with a small slot to pass the wires through. This allows one to either fish the speaker cables through the wall or run them out the bottom (or top) to their final destination at your equipment rack.

Secrets Sponsor

Connecting the wires was slightly challenging as the space is very tight. The holes in the spring posts will accommodate up to 12-gauge wire and it should be fairly flexible. I used Belden cable with thick filament that is quite stiff and had difficulty getting everything hooked up. A more flexible cable would have been much easier to install in my case.

RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker Wiring Diagram

One super-cool feature I discovered when perusing the manual is the ability to make the soundbar into a single speaker. It would make an ideal wide-dispersion center channel when used this way. By jumpering the connections according to the diagram, then hooking up a single pair to the center posts, you have all the drivers working as a single channel, almost like a line array.

RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker Drivers

The mid-range woofers are an inverted design, unique to RBH, made from lightweight aluminum. They are specifically designed to operate in a low-volume enclosure and provide the same performance as RBH’s regular aluminum cone with a diaphragm that’s just 0.8” deep. Since the cabinet is sealed, you’ll want to add a subwoofer for low-end frequencies. RBH rates the Ultra-3 to 100Hz and I have no reason to doubt that figure. While the sound is strong to the lower limit, there isn’t much slam in loud explosions or in the kick of a bass drum. What you do get a lot of is dispersion. This is the advantage of an inverted driver; the sound is delivered in a much wider cone than a traditionally-positioned transducer. Concerns about lobing and crosstalk between drivers were quickly allayed when I listened to them. Though the three channels seem close together physically, they are miles apart spatially. The soundstage from this soundbar is impressively large in both width and height.

The tweeters are also an RBH design featuring aluminum domes with textured phase plugs. This approach addresses the harshness that can sometimes result from plain metal dome tweeters. My initial impressions were of smooth silky highs with no excessive edge or forwardness.

RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker Ultra-1

If you want to create a full 5.1 or 7.1 system using Ultra speakers, RBH offers the Ultra-1 on-wall speaker that is also 1 5/8 inches thick and uses the same drivers in an 18 x 6½ inch cabinet. It also shares the same slick wire connection system and easy-to-use keyhole mounts in back. To fill out the low end, RBH also sells a number of in-wall subwoofers in addition to traditional cabinet models.

For the review, I set the Ultra-3 soundbar up on a pair of stands, directly beneath my projection screen. I wired the three channels to an Emotiva XPA-5 power amp controlled by an Integra DHC 80.1 surround processor. I kept my Axiom QS8 surrounds in place along with an Axiom EP800 subwoofer. The LCR crossover was set to 110Hz and no EQ or room correction was engaged.

In Use

RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker Sarah Conner

The Ultra-3 manual recommends a 10-15-hour break-in period to help loosen up the driver surrounds and allow the soundbar to reach its full potential in the lower frequency range. I found this to be true as the speaker sounds a bit sibilant straight out of the box. I watched a few episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and played a number of CDs and indeed, the bass improved after about a week of casual listening. I left the LCR crossover set at 110Hz which seemed the best choice when paired with an Axiom EP800 subwoofer which is flat up to 150Hz. While this configuration worked well, I suspect a smaller sub, or better, two smaller subs, would be a better match for the Ultra-3. That way, the directional frequencies between 80 and 110Hz would carry more spatial information. But once I became accustomed to the setup, I found little to complain about.

Detail abounds in both dialog and background effects. Sarah Conner is a nicely-transferred Blu-ray but its soundtrack is compressed Dolby Digital. I heard a few muddled highs in the center channel which I’ll attribute to the Ultra-3 tweeter’s accuracy. This is a neutral speaker that won’t make the source material sound any better or worse. It simply delivers it without coloration or alteration. And that’s something I always look for. During scenes with gunfire, there were no harsh artifacts and the effect was quite realistic.

RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker Movies

Wanting to check out something with better audio, I went for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. This film opens first with a fantastic sweep that descends into the lowest frequencies. The Ultra-3 played the upper and mid-range portions with ease smoothly handing off the sound to my sub which then proceeded to rattle the room. Moving on to the first battle sequence, the slam from sound effects was nicely balanced between the soundbar and surround channels. The dialog was clean and clear and well-focused at the center of the screen.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi showed off the Ultra-3’s musicality with the classic John Williams opening fanfare lighting up my theater for at least the 500th time. This Blu-ray has a somewhat polite mix, but I had no issues turning up the volume. The soundbar will play clean and undistorted at very high levels. In fact, I never found its limit. You can play this speaker as loud as you want in small to medium-sized rooms.

Secrets Sponsor

I also wanted to listen to some music through the Ultra-3, imagining that many users will want to play audio selections in their multi-use media room and not just watch movies. To that end, I started with a few live performances of my favorite bassoon concertos. This is where I could really hear the Ultra-3’s soundstage and ability to project the venue’s space and dimension. Since the concerts were played by me, I had a strong sense of how they sounded live versus recorded. RBH has really created an accurate and neutral speaker here. Detail is superb with clear separations between instruments and textures. Even lower quality recordings avoided descending into mush.

RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker Music CDs

To sample the best quality CD I could find, I selected Valerie Gergiev’s recording of Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony on SACD. The reverb in the hall is quite prominent making this a very wet-sounding rendition. The Ultra-3 projected a tremendous soundstage which maintained its integrity when I got up and walked around the room. There was almost no change in sound regardless of where I stood, and that was with my ears about three feet above the speaker axis. The Ultra-3 will not have its listeners fighting over the sweet spot because it will accommodate at least five or six people.

I said earlier that the Ultra-3 would not make average recordings sound above-average. This is a completely neutral speaker. That was proved to me when I played selections from Styx’s Pieces of Eight. Though the recording is not overly compressed in its digital form, it is small-sounding. The soundbar still managed to flesh out all its detail and I certainly enjoyed listening to the entire album. But if you want to hear its full potential, you’ll need to supply quality content.

My personal benchmark for rock recording quality is any Foo Fighters album from Wasting Light onward. That’s the point where Dave Grohl built his 606 Studio and acquired the legendary Neve mixing console from Sound City when it closed in 2011. These albums are recorded entirely in the analog realm, only going digital in post-production. And the Ultra-3 made it easy to tell the difference. The soundstage opened up as instruments were added in “Something From Nothing”, the first track on Sonic Highways. No matter how many guitars were layered, often as many as six, each instrument could be clearly heard. At ear-splitting volume levels, that definition remained strong. It seems there is no upper limit for this soundbar. I pushed it hard and it came back for more.

Conclusions

RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall LCR Soundbar Speaker Review

The RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall Soundbar Speaker has no equal at its value-oriented price point of $: $1231.95. It delivers fantastic performance and when matched with surrounds and a sub, guarantees a great listening experience.

Likes
  • Incredibly detailed sound
  • Plays loud without distortion
  • Premium build quality
  • Clever hookup and mounting system with all hardware included
Would Like To See
  • I have no complaints

The RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall Soundbar Speaker impressed me in many ways. Its well thought out form factor is a huge win. At only 1 5/8 inches thick, you’ll have no trouble tucking it discreetly under your TV or projection screen. Since it’s available in custom widths, you can make it look like part of the room with ease. I loved the clever connection system with its hidden terminals. The only challenge there is you must use fairly flexible wire to make it work. And the build quality is first-rate. At the value-oriented price of $1231.95, you are getting a premium speaker that will deliver great sound for the long term.

Sound is also in the premium category. It makes no pretense about delivering massive bass. RBH rates it down to 100Hz and that’s what I experienced. To enjoy the full range of sound from your system, you’ll want to add a subwoofer and surround speakers. Of course, RBH has plenty of excellent choices in their line to make that happen. For the Ultra-3 to render more bass would require greater size, that’s simple physics. What the Ultra-3 delivers best is detail and volume. I was amazed at its finesse and delicacy with the quietest passages and equally impressed when it delivered a clean loud explosion or gunshot. And its music prowess was something I didn’t expect. Very few soundbars could be called musical but the Ultra-3 most certainly is.

And this is the case for passive soundbars. While there are some great products that wrap speakers, processing, and amplification in a single package, the best audio will come from something like the Ultra-3 where the user supplies their own electronics and adds the necessary surround and subwoofer channels. As part of a complete 5.1 or 7.1 home theater system the RBH Ultra-3 On-Wall Soundbar Speaker has few equals, and I suspect none at this price point. It receives my highest recommendation.