Altec Lansing ATP3 Speaker System Review

Author : Wayne Date : 5th February 2001

3DVelocity would like to thank Altec Lansing UK, and in particular Steve Durrant, for their invaluable help and generosity in supplying this product for review.

 

What you get:

Starting right at the start (where else), the box is adorned with all the standard fayre. You know the drill, a smattering of arty pics and a mass of technical specs in various languages. Opening the box, if I'm honest, left me a little disappointed. Sure the satellite speakers are stylish, but they're just so small! The Sub on the other hand was an altogether more impressive beast, solid, heavy, and with enough curves and grills to make Porsche jealous. "There's been a mistake surely!" I thought, "there's no way on earth these rather insubstantial looking satellite speakers are going to compliment the rumbles and thuds from that Sub unit" ...........Even now I've a lot to learn about prejudging things. Also in the box is the cable needed to connect the Sub into your soundcard. This is the only separate cable you need, as the other two are built into the satellites.

The satellites themselves stand at around 9.5 inches tall, and at their widest, if I exclude the domed base, they measure in at 2 inches. Thickness varies from top to bottom, but disregarding the small port down by the base, it never really hits 0.5 of an inch. The domed base of the satellites comes in just short of 4.5 inches and accounts for the vast majority of their size.

The image above shows the right hand unit, which is identical to the left other than it housing the various controls. At the top you can see the cut outs for the two 28mm microdrivers (or tweeters as they're better known).

Towards the bottom are the three dials used to control the output. Let's immediately chalk up some bonus points here for the inclusion not only of a combined volume/power dial, but also a Treble and Bass adjustment. No more crawling under the desk looking for the on-sub bass adjustment is an immediate plus in my book! Above the volume control is the small green LED power indicator, which it won't surprise you to hear goes off when you turn the volume control fully counterclockwise to its power off position. One small gripe is that there are no markings around the volume dial to let you set it to a specific position each time you switch on, and though the Treble and Bass dials do have a molded indicator on them, there's no corresponding scales around them. As I said, it's minor thing, but it's a "thing" nonetheless.

So how can these satellites possibly hope to fill in all the missing midrange frequencies between the Subwoofer's throaty lows and the tweeters' shrill chirps? The answer lies cunningly hidden in that domed base.

If we take a look at its lower regions (please!, there's no need for that), we see a 3inch downward firing midrange/upper bass speaker just waiting for its chance to shine......and boy does it.

The Subwoofer on the other hand is a more traditional design, though still stylish enough for you not to want to hide it under your desk. Constructed from 0.5 inch MDF, the enclosure is both rigid and reasonably airtight. and this undoubtedly adds to its outstanding performance. I'm not going to get into a full audiophile rant here, but a little info on why using MDF rather than plastic is an advantage is called for.

When a speaker operates it creates sound by moving a rigid cone in and out at the specified frequency thus creating pressure waves in the air which are picked up by the ears as sound. The problem is that in addition to creating a pressure wave on its forward stroke, a speaker also creates a wave of the same characteristics on its backwards stroke too. On mid/high frequency speakers the two waves usually combine pretty well, but on lower frequency (bass) speakers, the out of phase wave created on the backward stroke has the effect of canceling out the original.

The only way around this problem is to "trap" the sound created from the back of the speaker in some kind of enclosure. There are many ways of doing this, but the infinite baffle is for another article some day :) What is usually done is to enclose the bass speaker in a cabinet of some kind, then fill that cabinet with sound deadening material, often fibreglass. If you remember your physics classes, you'll know that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another, so where does this sound go? Well basically, the sound deadening material will convert a lot of it into heat. The rest has only 2 options, either it works its way back through the cone and out, which deteriorates sound quality, or it vibrates the enclosure setting up an entirely new sound wave by making the enclosure act like a second speaker. If that sounds great, you need to remember that the enclosure won't vibrate at the same frequency as the bass speaker itself, so it in effect creates a "wrong" note that sits on top of the correct one. This is known as "colouring" the sound, and is one of the most annoying traits a bass speaker can possess. So as you can see, the sturdier the enclosure, the less chance it will vibrate and colour the sound. This enclosure also needs to be airtight in theory, as any "leaks" would also cause a shifted sound to be created.

Phew!! did you get all that? In simple terms, sturdy enclosures, particularly wooden ones (or MDF in this case) tend to perform better. Ok, let's take a look at the Sub.

The top is actually perfectly rectangular, I just took this picture at a slight angle for some strange reason, maybe because there wasn't much else I could say about it, unless I mention the Altec Lansing logo on the molding there, but I'm grasping at straws here. Let's flip her over.......

The large grill over to the right there is where the 6.5inch downward firing bass speaker sits. As bass is non directional, it doesn't actually matter which way if points, and as the wavelength of a bass sound is so long, it remains pretty unaffected by things like carpet and furnishings. However, you may have heard the phrase "corner loading" used to describe bass speaker placement. What this means is that by placing your sub in a corner of the room, it has two walls with which to bounce the sound out into the open rather than having it disperse through 360degrees over to where nobody is sat. At the very least you should try to position the sub against a wall, probably under your desk, but if you have a corner there too, then use it for optimum bass response.

 

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