I heard, and felt, Victrola’s new ‘soundbase for turntables’ speaker — and this risky idea just might work | Daily Reports Online
When Victrola announced its space-saving new Soundstage speaker for turntables, I had obvious concerns. It’s effectively a soundbase, for people who remember when those were popular for TVs – a slab of a speaker that sits underneath something else, and uses the good internal volume you get from a low-profile but large footprint to deliver deep and impactful sound.
The obvious problem with this plan is: speakers vibrate, and turntables need to be kept steady. Putting the latter on top of the former seems like asking for trouble.
There’s an RCA connection for your turntable, plus a 3.5mm jack, USB-C audio, and Bluetooth – making it a nice modern music center as well as a vinyl addition.
Let’s start with the bass rumble. The Soundstage has a system Victrola calls the ‘Symmetric Drive Woofer’ to deliver bass, and it’s a force-opposed dual-diaphragm bass system, firing up and down simultaneously from a single driver.
It’s very much like the Sonos Sound Motion bass driver used in the Sonos Arc Ultra soundbar (you can read all about the development of that speaker here), in that it’s designed to provide big bass in a small space, but with a force-opposing configuration to avoid vibrations.
Force-opposing speaker systems mean that you have two identical diaphragms facing opposite directions. When speakers play, they push air forward, which means there’s an equal force pushed the other way, into the speaker enclosure, in the form of vibrations. But in a force-opposed system, those vibrations then meet the exact same vibrations coming the other way from the other diaphragm, so they cancel each other out, and you end up with no major shaking at all (or close to it, and the rest can be absorbed by a well-built enclosure).
The double bass driver has the effect of giving this speaker a surprising amount of thump for something not very tall, but placing my hand on the sides, back, and top of the unit, I could barely feel any vibration in it. There is some, but nothing different from what you’d expect if you had your turntable on top of a piece of furniture with two speakers on either side of it.
You can feel a lot more vibration on the front of the unit, where the forward drivers are, but since I couldn’t feel the effect of this heavily on the sides and back, it seems like the bracing and build of the speaker can absorb this well enough without it passing it through to the turntable (which will have some protection against vibration of its own, of course).
Victrola says of the front speakers that a “Balanced Mode Radiator (BMR) technology delivers exceptionally wide, even dispersion, creating a spacious, natural stereo image that stays clear and detailed anywhere in the room” and my experience with this is that there’s very little stereo on offer here, despite these promises – if that’s your priority, you’ve got to go with separate speakers.
But Victrola told me that even dispersion around the room was a big focus for the speaker system, and it absolutely nails this – I moved around to really off-center positions to see if the sound balance would alter drastically and weaken, and actually, it barely changed compared to being right in front of it.
That’s impressive, and makes it super-flexible for listening positions, which again, makes sense for something designed for people with little spare space.
As for the overall sound itself, I would say that it’s quite warm – leaning into vinyl’s tendency that way, perhaps – and trends somewhat bass-ward. Mid-range and treble seemed present and correct enough, but I didn’t get the sense of there being a ton of fine detail and expression from my demo.
Naturally, we’ll reserve judgment until we can test in a proper environment, but my initial impression is that you may get finer hi-fi results from a pair of active stereo speakers matching the $349 price of the Soundstage, but probably less deep bass. It may be a question of choosing the fullness and impact of the sound versus the resolution and imaging.
But in some ways, that dilemma also misses the point: this compactness. This speaker sits under the turntable, with no extra space and no extra components needed. In that way alone, it might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.
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