STEREO REVIEW’S SOUND & VISION
Test report BY RICH WARREN
http://www.definitivetech.com/reviews/BP2006TLSV/BP2006TL_SV.htmlBP 2006TL Home Theater Speaker System
"The highest praise any speaker system can garner” equels dominate movie and home theater screens: Star Trek surpassed The Godfather in generations, and Star Wars bent space and time into prequels. So why not sequels for home theater speakers, too? The BP2006TL continues Definitive Technology’s tradition of producing bipolar, floor-standing speakers with built-in powered subwoofers. To create a home theater system around the 2006TLs, I used Def Tech’s new
CLR 2300 speaker to handle the center channel — it also contains a powered sub — and a pair of small BP 2X bipolar speakers for the surrounds.
The 2006TL columns stand about waist high and are cloaked in a black knit “sock” with lac- quered black end caps. Less than a foot deep and half as wide, they occupy minimal floor spaceand could ease some domestic disputes about placing floor-standing speakers. Within each col- umn resides pairs of front- and rear-firing tweet- ers and midrange drivers, wired in phase to create a bipolar radiation pattern (out of phase would be dipolar). The 8-inch subwoofer, powered by a 250-watt amplifier, has its own transmission-line, slot-loaded subenclosure, which is designed to enhance low-bass performance. Each 2006TL has a low-frequency level control in back
The CLR 2300, half as long as the 2006TL is high, has the same enclosure styling, though it’s not bipolar. It can be positioned vertically or hor- izontally, and I set it vertically on the floor under my TV. It holds a front-firing tweeter, two midrange drivers, and an 8-inch subwoofer pow- ered by a 150-watt amplifier. The subwoofer sections of the front speakers accept signals either from the speaker outputs of an amplifier or receiver or from the line-level out- puts of a preamp or processor. While in theory line-level signals are slightly cleaner, I used the speaker-level inputs for the sake of convenience, just as most people are likely to do. The BP 2X surrounds come in white or black trapezoidal enclosures and include wall-mounting plates. Each speaker has two woofer/tweeter complements, which fire in phase in opposite directions.
Whether you call the BP 2006TL and CLR 2300 prequels or sequels, they beat most Hollywood efforts, where second and third out- ings often fall shy of the originals. In fact, this $2,300 system could persuade you to buy the 2006TL instead of one of the company’s earlier and more expensive tower models as your “main” L/R speaker. I moved out my $7,000 reference speaker system and spent a week with the Def Tech combo, which I’ll call the 2006TL system from this point on. I fed it Dolby Digital DVDs of shoot ’em up adventures and three-hankie love stories, jazz and pop videos, some store- bought CDs and a few CD-Rs that I burned from acoustic studio recordings I produced for radio.
