DIGITAL SOUND FOR YOUR HOME
With today’s digital audio formats, the weakest link in an audio system is the loudspeakers and the way they perform in the space they are used in. For almost 30 years, Miller and Kreisel (M&K) has been designing speaker systems that provide the most precise sound for recording studios.

The company’s innovative use of the most accurate ‘satellite’ speakers possible, coupled with a separate subwoofer adjusted to the acoustic requirements of the room, offers the most consistent playback system available and has become the blueprint for THX-certified speaker systems. Using the same speakers in your home as are used in a recording studio will allow you to hear a film just as the director intended, with all the clarity, detail and effortless dynamics that today’s digital formats provide.

SOUND THROUGHOUT YOUR ROOM
One of the problems with using hi-fi speakers for surround sound is that they only provide their best results at a narrow ‘sweet spot’ in a small area of a room. M&K speakers have been developed for the confined spaces of the recording studio, where an engineer must be able to hear accurate sound evenly, while moving around behind his mixing desk. The same ‘phase-focused’ crossover that is used on M&K’s professional speakers is also used throughout its domestic range, ensuring that you can enjoy the same high quality of sound wherever you are sitting in your room.

MATCHING YOUR SPEAKERS
By far the most important speaker in any surround sound system is the centre speaker. This usually reproduces over 70 per cent of the sound in a film and deals with the information we are best at recognising – human speech. Since the quality of the centre speaker is so critical, M&K does not use cheap versions of its main speakers for this vital task. All the company’s systems use identical left, centre and right speakers to ensure the most accurate playback possible of all elements of a film score, and to guarantee the seamless panning of sounds between the front three speakers – something that is impossible when using different front speakers.

ACOUSTICS AND YOUR ROOM
To guarantee the best quality sound, it is essential to place your loudspeakers in the locations that they are designed to be used in. Conventional hi-fi speakers must be used well away from walls or any other solid surfaces, to avoid ‘boundary effects’ that otherwise make them sound boomy and muffled.

As M&K’s speakers are designed not to play bass, which will be more accurately reproduced with a subwoofer, they may be used against walls and even in cabinetry and still provide excellent sound quality. This is what makes them the choice of professional system designers who must be able to guarantee the sound of a system, without ‘tuning the room’ by moving speakers around. With a minimum of five speakers being required in a surround system, the remarkable consistency of M&K speakers makes it possible to design a system on paper that is certain to give great results when it has been installed.

CHOOSING AND USING REAR SPEAKERS
Front and rear surround speakers are designed to do different jobs. While front speakers have to precisely locate sounds to match what can be seen on the screen, rear speakers should provide audio around the rest of the room. With a system that is correctly designed, this will ensure that the sound can appear to come from any point around you, creating a realistic 360° ‘soundstage’. To achieve this, surround speakers need to fire sound into the room in a completely different way to the front loudspeakers. M&K’s patented ‘tripolar’ speakers surround you in audio by firing sound across the back and sides of the listening position, while also channelling it directly towards you for the localised information that is found in today’s 5.1 digital recordings.

SELECTING A SUBWOOFER
As subwoofers are designed just to reproduce bass, they can produce deeper, more realistic low frequencies than conventional speakers.Using a separate unit for reproducing bass also means that it can then be adjusted for the optimum volume level, crossover point and phase for the room and system that it is being used with. M&K invented subwoofers over 25 years ago, as a method of producing the most accurate bass for use in recording studios. Today, it has dozens of models to choose from to ensure the perfect bass can be achieved in any room.