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Review 1 of 2
Price Paid:
$70.00
from eBay Summary:
This unit originally sold for around $1500 and had a reputation for obvious quality, sonic cleanliness, and for being THE state-of-the-art Dolby Pro-Logic decoder for the home theater early-adopters in the early 90's. If I recall right, the contemporary audio press couldn't bring themselves to openly endorse its' "enhancements" for music. Being a pure analog audio-only guy, a non-TV viewer and hating digital sound as I did, I couldn't have cared less. That was then...
I bought this thing on eBay originally to use as a remote volume control in my shop. To test, I plugged it into my "vintage" 2-channel system (nice vinyl setup, Threshold, Thiel) and started playing with the controls. Three weeks later, when I finally got the zillion interactive adjustments screwed down right, I realized I can't live without it.
The basic mode I use (with 2 speakers in their normal positions) is "Panorama," a general purpose crosstalk-cancelling affair. The extremely thorough, clear owner's manual says this effect can be uncanny on certain recoreded material containing ample spatial information. It certainly is! The effect is very hard to describe in words but, on recordings for which it works well, it seems to communicate more information from the recording, increases the image size and sharpens it's definition. The image floats well beyond and away from the speakers. It can sound very lovely sometimes and always sounds decent.
When I mute the effect, the soundfield snaps back to the ordinary 2-channel I've listened to and loved for 20 years. And it sounds awful! Dead and closed-in compared to the enhanced stuff.
The Lexicon contributes a little noise (hiss and a bit of weird crackling, at very, very low levels). I can't hear any digital artifacts, I presume because of the fine, close-tolerance construction and possibly that the D/A and A/D run on the same clock.
You program the unit to describe your speaker arrangement- it is capable of driving 8 speakers plus 2 discrete subwoofers. My next project is to add suround speakers.
Note that this unit is not really useful for home theater any longer, since it accepts only 2-channel analog inputs. MSB does advertise a modification to add a set of discrete 6-channel analog inputs. That might make a cool multichannel SACD playback setup, on the cheap.
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