Surround Processor Reviews

Feed your hungry eyes and ears on an attractively entertaining meal of lean on-wall speakers and tender, choice electronics.

Whether by nature or nurture, I'm a speaker guy. I'm more captivated by speakers than any of the associated electronics in a home theater system. As a result of this singular infatuation, I've always believed, as a general rule of thumb, that you should allocate at least half of the total cost of the audio portion of your system to the speakers. I don't know why the math seems to work out that way, but, in my mind, it just does. So what am I to make of a system in which the Primare electronics cost twice as much as the Sequence/REL speaker package?

Turn on, tune in, strap down. I was standing in an area of last year's Home Entertainment Show in New York that had no demonstration rooms anywhere nearby. It started with a boom and a rumble, like the gathering of a distant but powerful storm. It wasn't enough to shake me yet, but it was enough to grab my attention. Then came another boom, another rumble, and enough curiosity that I felt compelled to find a tactful way out of my conversation and make my way toward this growing intensity. Not only could I feel the floor moving under my feet as I got closer, but I even started to believe I was seeing Sheetrock flakes on the floor, steadily gathering into a distinct trail. Soon enough, the rattling of the walls, the low-frequency energy waves hammering my senses, and the shaken but excited looks of people coming the other way told me I had arrived. MiCon Audio, the door announced. Curious, I thought—or tried to think, before another sortie ripped out from inside—and a belief that the door might literally be blown off its hinges began to monopolize my thoughts. Finally, the door opened, and the answer to all of the riddles awaited me inside—but, for that, you'll have to read on.

High-end home theater for the rest of us.

Home theater in 2004 is like America in the 1950s, with a middle class that has steadily been building momentum and now finds itself in the midst of a major breakout. The same philosophy of the good life at a better price that spawned a culture of suburbs and credit-card debt in the '50s is spawning an unprecedented emergence of high-end home theater components at mid-level prices in the '00s.

Lexicon's next generation arrives with a bang.

You can't please everybody, especially in the home theater world. Lexicon came close in 2000 with the release of the MC-12, an end-all pre/pro that carried on the company's tradition of performance but also addressed the few issues that people had with earlier Lexicon controllers like the MC-12's direct predecessor, the MC-1. Almost everyone, myself included, loved the MC-1's sound, tweakability, and just about everything else. As with any high-profile piece, though, people did raise questions about the MC-1—some legitimate, some not. The MC-12 directly addressed the important issues, like the lack of analog bypass and a six-channel input. (Remember that, when the MC-1 debuted, SACD and DVD-Audio were still just a twinkle in the audiophile's eye.) Even many of the peripheral issues, such as aesthetics, got some attention on the MC-12. The only remaining issue was price, as the MC-12 cost a few thousand dollars more than the MC-1. True, but Lexicon didn't replace the MC-1 with the MC-12; they simply provided the MC-12 as another option.

A flagship pre/pro, Arcam's way.

If there's one thing I know about Arcam, it's that they like to do things their own way. Yes, this is a high-end company and, as such, is relatively small—which usually means that they wouldn't have the resources to do major product overhauls or built-from-scratch developments very often. This being Arcam, though, it didn't surprise me when I heard that they were spending gobs of time and money developing a new statement pre/pro for their top-shelf FMJ line. Back in February, I spent some time with their DV27 DVD player—another built-from-the-ground-up effort—and was sincerely impressed, so I was curious to see what these fellows across the pond could accomplish when they set their sights on the world of flagship pre/pros.

Lexicon's long-awaited flagship pre/pro finally hits the shelves.

The rumors about Lexicon's new pre/pro have been swirling about for what seems like an eternity. It can do this. It will have that. It may pour you a straight bourbon if you set it up properly. So, it's with no small amount of anticipation that many await their first glimpse of this new megaprocessor, which has been touted (by the grapevine more than Lexicon) as having all of the performance of the highly respected MC-1 with a few more tricks up its sleeve. While the MC-12's goal is certainly to supplant the MC-1 at the top of the Lexicon line, it's undoubtedly aware of the debt of gratitude it owes its predecessor and ancestors like the DC-1, which laid the foundation for the respect and subsequent anticipation that this model enjoyed long before it ever hit the shelves.