Surround Sound Speaker Systems
Atlantic Technology 4400 Speaker System
- Written by Stephen Hornbrook
- Published on 09 November 2009
- Atlantic Technology 4400 Speaker System
- Page 2: Design of the Atlantic Technology 4400 Speaker System
- Page 3: Setup of the Atlantic Technology 4400 Speaker System
- Page 4: The Atlantic Technology 4400 Speaker System In Use
- Page 5: The Atlantic Technology 4400 Speaker System On the Bench
- Page 6: Conclusions About the Atlantic Technology 4400 Speaker System
- Page 7: Addendum to Atlantic Technology 4400 system review - 642eSB THX select subwoofer
- All Pages
Design
The 4400 system has a very subtle design meant to blend in with today's shiny black flat screen HDTV's. Mainly matte black, with piano gloss black side panels. They look nice and match well to my family room system. I read that with previous versions of the 4x00 system, these side panels could be swapped for different finishes, but Atlantic decided not to continue this trend.
The 4400LR and 4400C speakers have two settings, adjustable via switches on the rear panel. One for high frequency roll off (to tone the speaker down in rooms with highly reflective surfaces like hardwood or tiled floors) and one for boundary compensation (which helps to eliminate the negative effects of mounting a box speaker inside a cabinet).
Rather than the 5 way binding posts which have become the norm for speakers in just about every price range, the 4400LR/C use spring loaded binding posts which don't easily accept banana plugs. Luckily, I was able to slide the banana connectors into the spring loaded holes for the LR speakers even though I don't believe they were designed to work that way. For the center channel, due to clearance issue with the cabinet, I had to remove the plugs from my speaker cables (thank god for quality locking banana plugs!) and use bare speaker wire. Not usually a problem, but the holes in the binding posts were not big enough to allow for easy insertion of my 10-gauge Belden cables. Without a direct comparison of binding posts, its impossible to say what affect these posts have on the sound. Just be sure to have a nice set of spade speaker cables if you decide to pick up a 4400 system! I did contact Atlantic Technology regarding their choice of binding posts and their reasoning was the speakers needed adequate clearance for wall mounting.
The 4400SR surround speakers are built a bit differently. The entire cabinet is a very soft matte black finish. They are very solid and well built. The surrounds even use a more standard binding posts which worked perfectly with my banana plugs. On the front is the switch for bipole/dipole setting.
