Game and Movie Audio Performance
The most important tests were the movie and gaming tests, because it’s obvious that you buy a surround system primarily for those two applications. Because of that, I am inclined to say that though the 7100s are not perfect at musical reproduction, they are strong enough in that area that they fulfill the needs of a multimedia set. This is further evidenced by the fact that the speakers are phenomenal in movies :P.
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| S4 7100s on White |
We don’t have an ADS2000 or other external decoder on hand here, so we were stuck with listening to 4 channel downmixed audio from WinDVD. Regardless, the audio was first class. When compared to the Boston Acoustics BA4800, the 7100 offered a more robust and exciting bass performance, and managed to throw a good center channel, thanks to its added center speaker. The BA4800 had a smoother response and better audio clarity, but the 7100 manages an even deeper audio field. The two are finely balanced on the edge of a knife, and both are excellent systems. In true Dolby Digital, the 7100s would have an even better center channel, and I am eager to test this in the future. The sound was very enveloping, and front to rear pans were beautifully matched. It was easy to set these speakers up with a solid movie like End of Days and then watch people’s jaws drop as they experience one of the best movie experiences one can get on a computer.
In games, the sound was equally exciting and the challenge was in deciding whether we preferred the BA4800 or the 7100.
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| Satelites and the Control Module |
The reason why these two become such good comparisons is because they are almost identically priced on the net at around $159-165. In the end, the 7100 turned up a slight edge because in gaming, enveloping soundstage and solidity of the bass become the earmarks of immersion, and the 7100s excelled ever the slightly more in overall surround qualities, while also maintaining a more powerful, if less clean, bass output. Of course once the action started, we weren’t in much of a position to argue the slight lack of upper end detail, and all the games played extremely well, with aggressive punch and superb surround effects.
There was some concern from people who know about the minor design limitations of the 7100 that should be addressed. In brief, the 7100 is incapable of filtering out bass frequencies from the rear channels in 4.1 mode. This means that any sound effects in the rear channels will NOT get the benefit of boost from the subwoofer. 3D Soundsurge noticed this as a significant limitation in the system, but I didn’t find that it disturbed me much in most situations. There IS a lack of tone matching across pans if there is a lot of bass involved, but this is something you are not likely to notice right away. It IS there though. In full Dolby Digital mode, this problem doesn’t exist at all – in fact, this problem exists BECAUSE of the support for so many different modes.
Basically, because the engineers were faced with the problem of supporting Dolby Digital, Dolby Pro Logic, 4.1 and stereo input modes, they aimed towards making sure that the Dolby Digital and surround modes worked the best. From what I understand, the fact that Dolby Digital uses a discrete channel (the LFE channel, or Low Frequency Effects channel) for the subwoofer, it posed a sort of design challenge when switching from mode to mode. An unfortunate side effect is that rear sounds do not get filtered through the subwoofer. This is something that MidiLand is aware of, and I think in the future they will address this type of concern in new product lines - just don't expect them to really change the design of the 7100s yet.
This situation is sort of unique to the 7100 because other popular surround speakers such as the Cambridge Soundworks DTT2500, the BA4800s, and the revered Klipsch ProMedias do NOT focus on Dolby Digital capabilities. What situations might be directly affected by this limitation? Well in gaming you can imagine that any explosions or high impact sounds that come from directly behind you won’t sound very impressive. In an action game like Quake 3 this may not be a very important issue, since you’re too busy avoiding a nice fraggin’, but slower paced and more immersion based games like Metal Gear Solid would be more affected because of your intense attachment to the surrounding noises.
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