SV Sound MTS-01 User Manual

test reports

LOGO WITH NO

BACKGROUND SCREEN

Daniel Kumin

soundandvisionmag.com OCTOBER 2008

SVS

MTS home theater speaker system

VS i s a s mall b ut g r ow i n g
direct-to-Web speaker manu­facturer in the unlikely loca-

S

say “unlikely” because I’m an Eastern
Snob, and we expect speaker makers to
take root in places like Boston or Balti­more.) The company first earned its colors
with highly affordable subwoofers that
outperformed most anything in their
class. But SVS has been energetically pok­ing up into the remaining eight octaves of
sound for several years now with high­value bookshelf-speaker designs.

SVS is accelerating this trend with
its newest (and highest-priced) lineup
to date, which consists of the MTS-01
towers, MCS-01 center, and MBS-01 sur­rounds. While the MBS-01s are two-way
designs, the tower and center models are
both “two-and-a-half ways,” in which
one woofer rolls of f above the bottom few
octaves while the ot her woofer’s range
extends all the way up to the tweeter.

Spea king of tweeters, SVS ma ke s a
pretty big deal about the one that’s used in
all three models. It’s a new soft-dome unit
from Denmark’s Scanspeak, and its lead­ing-edge features include the use of an
array of six small magnets in place of the
single large one found in most tweeters.

tion of Youngstown, Ohio. (I

This opens up the air movement, which is
said to reduce unwanted reflections.

The MTS line’s cabinet design is
strictly conventional. This is t he kind of
const ruction that was standard 30 or 40
years ago, with solid, well-braced enclo­sures made from heavy wood-composite
panels. Thoug h biggish and boxy, these
speakers are nonetheless handsome,
nicely finished in real wood veneers and
constr ucted wit h obvious care. The speak­ers also have some contemporary touches,
like a cunning grille ar rangement held in
place by invisible magnets.

SVS rounded out the system by sending
its flagship subwoofer, the PB-13 Ultra —
and I still haven’t forgiven them. Uncrating
and moving this 150-pound behemoth —
literally the size of a small four-burner
range — was no light undertaking. But
the results were worth t he effort.

SETUP

I unpacked the boxes, muscled the speak­ers into place, and connected them. All
three MTS models feature dual-linked
multiway terminals a nd come with both
soft- and hard-cone feet.

Each spea ker has a tweeter-level switch
with 0 and –3-dB settings, which I left at
–3 for a subt le but noticeable reduct ion in

ELECTRONICALLY REPRINTED FROM

treble energy. Each one also comes with a
cylindrical soft-foam “bung” for plugging
each cabinet port so you can convert the
speaker design from bass-reflex (vented)
to more-or-less sealed. Since the MTS­01 and the MCS-01 both have dual ports,
you can re-tune them by leaving one port
plugged and one open.

I spent quite a bit of time experiment­ing with the various bunging combina­tions, and found that each one yielded a
meaningful difference. (SVS obligingly
graphs several examples in the owner’s
manuals.) To cut a long story short: My
room has a modest but well-established
50-Hz rise, so when the tower speakers
were running full-range, they sounded
tighter and more transparent when fully
bunged. Meanwhile, the center speaker
best matched its mates when single­bunged. Bunging really didn’t matter with
the MBS-01 sur rounds since the signal to
those speakers was crossed over to limit
bass reproduction.

MUSIC & MOVIE PERFORMANCE

I keep two different two-way speaker
pairs on hand as sonic reference points.
One pair sounds bright, while the other
is subtly war mer. Auditioned full-range
in stereo, the SVS MTS-01 towers split
the difference between those two sounds
with wonderful precision, being almost
perfectly neutral on the warm-to-cool

The Short Form

Snapshot

These speakers might be big and
slightly old-school-looking, but given
their powerful, superbly neutral full­range sound, who cares?

Plus



:: Neutral, near-full-range towers



:: Awesome subwoofer



:: Solid center- speaker performance

+

Minus



:: Big (especially the sub !)
:: A bit old-fashioned-looking

Price $4,400

–

PHOTO BY TONY CORDOZA

test reports

SVS MTS speaker system

Test Bench

15

10

5

0

decibels (dB)

–5

–10

–15

20 100 1k 10k 20k

hertz (Hz)

L/R ■■34 Hz to 17.1 kHz ±5.1 dB
Center ■■33 Hz to 18.2 k Hz ±6.1 dB

All measurements were taken with the tweeter-level
switch in the 0-dB position. The MTS-01 has a 5-dB
floor-bounce swallow centered at 244 Hz with fairly
significant roughness above that point and a 3 - to 5-

scale and virtually without character in
the ever-sensitive vocal regions. (Lack of
character is a good thing for a speaker; not
so much for a speaker reviewer.)

When combined with the MTS-01’s
superb bass, which sounded pretty much
unfettered to nearly 30 Hz, this made for
an outstanding listen ing experience. Great
recordi ngs, such as guitarist Ralph Town­er’s classic Solstice, were reproduced with
an evenness of timbre and an image depth
rarely found in so affordable a speaker.
SVS’s spiffy tweeter really did shine on
the 12-string-guitar-and-drums duet “Pis­cean Dance,” where drummer Jon Chris­tensen’s stuttering snare and hi-hat and
floating ride cymbals shone with a nota­bly unstressed, no-limit airiness.

While SVS had suggested that I cross
the towers over at 80 Hz to let the mas­sive subwoofer do its thing, I found that
run ni ng t he m full-r an ge a nd crossing
over the system’s center and surrounds
at 60 Hz delivered the best, most cohe­sive sound, particularly on multichannel
music. And pretty glorious sound it was,
too, on a Telarc SACD of the Cincinnati
Symphony Orchestra playing Stravinsky’s
Firebird Suite. The system’s presentation
of massed st rings and hall sound was
simply first-rate, while brass attacks and
inner details like sidewall echoes from

Full lab results at soundandvisionmag.com/SVSMTS

GRAYSCALE

Surro und ■■ 129 Hz to 16.7 kHz ±2.4 dB
Subwoo fer ■■21 Hz to 59 Hz ±1.8 dB

dB elevation between 5 and 9
kHz. The MCS- 01 displayed a
deep, narrow notch just above 3
kHz at every listening angle. But
this notch doesn’t become
severe until ±45º off-axis —
beyond the range of a typical
seating position for viewing mov­ies. The MSB-01 surround chan­nel has a wide radiation pattern
and the smoothest response of
this set. Each speaker’s treble­control switch reduced high fre­quencies above around 3 kHz by
approximately 2 dB. The PB13 ­Ultra is a true subwoofer in that
it will produce significant sound
pressure below 25 Hz. It also
has fantastic bandwidth unifor­mity, producing a 103-dB aver­age SPL over 10 to 62 Hz.
— Tom Nousaine

Befo re Calibrat ion

the glockenspiel sounded consistently
clear and lifelike. Under it all, the PB13­Ultra sub contr ibuted seem ingly limitless,
but controlled a nd unexag gerated, bottom
end. I’ve never heard the Cincinnati’s big
bass drum sound bigger, nor have I hea rd
its climaxes in unison with the tympani
during the “Infernal Dance” scene deliv­ered with deeper impact.

Hidalgo isn’t a very good movie, but
it does offer well-photographed vistas
on Blu-ray Disc, a sweeping James New­ton Howard musical score, and plenty
of action — once you get past the notion
of Aragorn as a cowboy. The SVS system
delivered wholly cinematic soundscapes,
wit h solid spatiality and effortless dynam­ics; indeed, this system sounds better the
louder it plays. Dialogue was uniformly
clear and stable (though maybe not as
tightly locked to the screen as it would
be with the very best speaker systems),
while the L/C/R trio maintained a solid
front during the film’s countless pans of
galloping hooves.

The MBS-01s — located in my usual
surrou nd speaker posit ion on high shelves
flanki ng my listening position and angled
in somewhat toward the rear wall — per­formed su rprisingly well. I never once felt
my attention pulled away from the screen,
though my everyday dipoles clearly

sounded bigger and more amorphous,
which I feel is a vir tue with most movie
soundtracks.

The PB13-Ultra was quite possibly the
best subwoofer I’ve ever had in my sys­tem. It went lower and louder than any
single-piece sub I’ve tried here, and it did
so without producing a hint of excessive
sound on the middle-bass octaves from
60 Hz on up. Even without exploiting any
of its EQ features, the PB13-Ultra easily
awoke r attles in my room that only one
other sub (the JL Audio f112) has found.
And scenes such as the sliding tomb door
in the opening moments of the Stargate
DVD caused it to deliver truly structural
rumbles at cinematic levels.

As with the MTS speakers, the PB13­Ultra has foam bungs for its three cabinet
ports. And it produces enough bass that I
found employing all three bungs to be an
ideal option in my room. Doing so barely
tightened the already well-controlled
sound, and even with its peak 3-Hz level
thus curtailed (a sealed enclosure returns
deeper extension but slightly less peak
loudness higher up the frequency range),
the SVS sub still could play substantially
louder than I could ever demand.

BOTTOM LINE

SVS’s MTS system, complemented by the
PB13-Ultra sub, is as impressive a music
system as it is a home theater one. Any
value-conscious audio seekers who care
more for performance than pedigree, and
for great sound more than mere style,
should look a nd listen no further.

S&V

Key Features

MTS-01 ($1 ,499 a pair)
:: 1-in soft-dome tweeter, two 6

woofers ; 41 x 13 x 10 in; 60 lb

MCS-01 ($599)
:: 1-in soft-dome tweeter, two 6

woofers ; 10 x 24 x 13 in; 39 lb

MBS-01 ($999 a pair)
:: 1-inch soft- dome tweeter, 6

woofer; 16 x 13 x 10 in; 27 lb

PB13-Ultra ($1,599)
:: 13-in proprietary cone woofer; 750-watt

amplifier; 22 x 20

1

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2

x 28 in; 155 lb

SVSOUND.COM :: 877-626-5623

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-in cone

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-in cone

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Copyright © 2008 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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