Introduction

Atlantic Technology produces home theater speaker systems that range in price from $900 - $25,000. According to Atlantic Technology, "The goal of home theater isn't to put you in the movie theater; it's to put you in the movie!"

Well, they came very close with their System 2200. This package delivers an impressive experience, while ranging in price from $2,000-$2,600 depending on configuration.

The Design

I had the pleasure of reviewing the 7.1 System 2200 utilizing various genres of music as well as movies. Most of the testing was performed with the 5.1 setup due to room limitations. However, some testing was done with 7.1 which I will discuss later in the article. All of the speakers arrived in perfect condition even though it appeared the UPS had been a little hard on the boxes. They were packaged soundly with double plastic wrapping around the speakers along with foam inserts.

The speakers have excellent craftsmanship. There are black high-gloss side panels on all of the speakers except for the 2200 SR surrounds. Due to the enclosure design (one woofer and tweeter angled to the right and one set angled to the left), there are no side panels for the high-gloss back inserts.

The front speakers have two 4½" graphite loaded polymer woofers and a 1" ferrofluid-cooled, damped soft dome tweeter, while the surround speakers each have two of the same woofers and two of the same tweeters.

The subwoofer grille has a plastic frame, covered by gray cloth. The volume control is at the upper right behind the grille. The location of the level control was not very accessible for testing, so the grille was absent most of the time.

The rest of the speakers have metal grilles that attach magnetically to the enclosures, and this seems to work well. It was very easy to align them, and they looked great installed. They have a semi-transparent quality which allows one to see the drivers, and what audiophile doesn't like to see the hardware in action?

The front channel speakers (2200 LR) and the surround speakers all have keyhole brackets as well as ¼" x 20 threaded posts to handle most applications. I utilized the keyhole brackets for the surrounds but did find that the keyhole size was smaller than my personal surrounds, so I had to use a Dremel^® tool to grind down the screw heads a little for them to fit.

Added Features

There are a several features that are standard on the System 2200 that are rare in this price range. The center channel (2200 C) has two features that help optimize it according to the room acoustics. First, it has a "High Frequency Energy" control which changes the "tilt or roll-off slope" of the tweeter.

This control has 3 settings:

1. "Reverberant" (decreases the high frequency output of the speaker) for rooms with an abundance of reflective surfaces like hardwood floors and glass walls.
2. "Damped Room" (increases slightly the tweeter's output) which can compensate for overly absorbent rooms with lots of soft surfaces.
3. "Average" which worked well for my room which has a combination of large glass windows as well as large couches and carpeting.

Second, it has "Boundary Compensation" or "Normal" toggle switch which is able to "adjust the lower frequency output of the speaker to compensate for the typical sound colorations caused by placing the speaker too close to a TV screen or building it into a wall cabinet". I found the best position for my setting (center channel on a bracket slightly above a 62” DLP) was "Normal".

The surround speakers have both a "Dipole" setting as well as a "Bipole" setting. Atlantic Technology has always focused on multi-channel systems, and they felt that having an option of Dipole was necessary to produce "minimal localization".

I found that the dipole setting worked very well at allowing the soundstage to blend seamlessly. My Wife was also impressed with the seamless sound production. The Bipole setting changed the soundstage by focusing it more distinctly at each surround speaker as opposed to blending it.

It would be nice if the selectable controls were easier to access. Once the speakers are on the wall, it can be difficult to reach the Dipole/Bipole switch, and if the center channel is built into the wall, it can be hard to access its controls too, since all of them are next to the speaker terminals. This challenge is obviously not limited to these speakers alone.

Click Here to Go to Part II.