Yamaha recently joined the growing crowd of electronics companies attempting to mash a home theater system into a slim rectangle that sits beneath your TV. The company’s first offering in the sound platform genre, the SRT-1000, may follow the basic sound platform formula, but it also takes its own path. That path includes a larger form factor, which allows the platform to support today’s ever expanding flat screen displays — up to 88 pounds worth — as well as more premium construction than most, relying on an MDF cabinet, as opposed to a plastic chassis.
The system also stands apart do to its employment of Yamaha’s proprietary Sound Projection technology, which utilizes a collection of small drivers the company calls “beams,” along with digital signal processing to bounce sound of the walls of your listening room in a 5.1 channel configuration. Specifically, the SRT-1000 deploys a team of 8 beam drivers that are each 1.125-inches in diameter, along with dual oval 1.5 x 4-inch midrange drivers, and dual 3.25-inch down-firing subwoofers along the bottom. The system is driven by 136 watts of total power.
Connections for the SRT-1000 include dual digital Optical inputs, a digital Coaxial input, an analog RCA input, wireless Bluetooth connection, and even a subwoofer output. While it doesn’t have HDMI with ARC support to automatically follow your TV’s remote, it does have the ability to learn your remote’s basic functions. It also offers basic surround sound codecs, including Dolby Digital, and DTS Digital Surround.
For all its wiles, the SRT-1000 begs a premium price of $500, rising above many competing sound platforms by as much as $200. That said, in the right setting, the SRT-1000 can offer a lot more surround sound mimicry than you’ll find in the majority of sound platforms we’ve encountered, and provides much better sound performance than what you’ll get from your TV alone.
