Phase Technology DCB-1.0-LR, DCB-SURR, DCB-5.0-C, DCB-112-SUB, DCB-210-SUB Brochure

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"It's one of the few
systems that can
make you worry that
your own ears are the
weak link in the sonic chain."

"Identical outstanding
performance no matter
which room you install it in."

"If you can afford it, buy it."

"Phase Technology's
dARTS is, without a
doubt, one of the best
systems I've heard."

Phase Technology dARTS

DCB1.0-LCR
Speaker System

Reviewed Inside

MIDRANGE

$$–$$$

from the

test bench

There’s nothing unusual about

a father who’s eager to show off
pictures of his kids and rave about
how great they are.This is one of
those moments, except Ken
Hecht, the president of Phase Tech­nology, isn’t showing me pictures
(I’m getting a real-life look), nor is
he exaggerating how good these
particular offspring are. In truth,
we’re not talking about little

people at all.
What Hecht
is so proud to
show me is a
very spe­cial—I know,
that’s what
they all say—
home theater

speaker system
he’s been dream­ing about and
working on for
the better part of
15 years. It’s a
system that, he
tells me, “will
make any room
sound like the
best theater in
the country.” As
if that weren’t
enough, he
claims that the
system can
expand the sweet
spot from the
typical single-

pair-of-ears hot
seat to an area large enough for half
a dozen or more people to sit com­fortably and enjoy a movie. He’s
christened the system with the
name Digital Audio Reference The­ater System, or dARTS for short.
(Thankfully, his real children have
names that roll a little more easily
off the tongue.)

Hecht is definitely not new to the
speaker business. His legendary
father, Bill Hecht, founded Phase
Tech’s parent company, United
Speaker Systems, in 1955 and
began building speakers for Avery
Fisher (another legendary name).
In 1967, the elder Hecht patented
the soft dome tweeter—one
of the most widely used speaker
drivers in this part of the solar sys­tem. From the beginning, United

Speaker Systems has built, and con­tinues to build, speakers for a sur­prising number of well-known
companies. (Modesty—and legal
agreements—prevent them from
saying exactly which ones.) In addi­tion to the company’s storied
history, they’re one of the last ver­tically integrated speaker manufac­turers in the country that makes
everything, including the compo­nent drivers and crossovers, and
assembles it all in-house.

With this kind of pedigree, what
took the younger Hecht so long
to achieve his dream? The short
answer is,he’s not so good at math.

It’s a Numbers Game

That’s not really fair. No one has
been good enough at the math—
until recently. You’re probably
familiar with all the problems that
things like walls, floors, and ceil­ings can cause when you play a set
of speakers in your room. Sonic
reflections conspire to ruin the
sense of depth and imaging. Room
modes play havoc with the fre­quency response. Change your
location in the room, and all the
variables change—and so does
your experience of the perfor­mance. All of these problems are
excruciatingly difficult to control
because they’re not merely related
to frequency; they’re also highly
time dependent.

Creating a system that sounds
the same regardless of the room in
which you install it and, at the same

BY DARRYL WILKINSON

Why settle for a sweet spot when you can have a sweet room?

Phase Technology dARTS

DCB1.0-LCR Speaker System

Home Theater / October 2006 > www.hometheatermag.com