Test Report: Steinway Lyngdorf S-Series Audio System

When the economy tanked in 2007, a funny thing happened in high-end audio: Many manufacturers prospered by creating even higher-priced products. As a speaker reviewer, I lack the economics chops to explain this turn of events, but I can tell you it has spawned some fascinating audio gear.

Take, for example, Steinway Lyngdorf ’s S-Series, built to be the Bugatti Veyron of compact home theater systems.

 At $58,400 for the whole system, this is clearly no home theater in a box. Nor is the S-Series merely a bunch of mundane components dolled up with fancy finishes and half-inch-thick aluminum faceplates. No, the S-Series costs a small fortune in large part because it’s one of the most technically advanced audio systems you can buy.

Peter Lyngdorf, the mastermind behind Steinway Lyngdorf, is one of the few manufacturers in high-end audio who shows no reluctance to adopt advanced technology. As a result, the S-Series employs high-efficiency, switching-type amplification, a technology Lyngdorf helped pioneer more than a decade ago with his TacT amplifiers. It uses the company’s own RoomPerfect processing to correct for room acoustics problems. More digital signal processing fine-tunes each speaker’s performance. The components communicate through the Steinway Lyngdorf Digital Link, a proprietary, high-resolution audio interface.

The key component in the S-Series is the S-15 satellite speaker, which stands 10 inches high. The S-15 can sit on a stand or hang on a wall. An Air Motion Transformer (AMT) ribbon tweeter handles the highs; it’s similar to tweeters found on recent speakers from GoldenEar Technology and MartinLogan. To increase ambience, sound waves coming from the back of the tweeter bounce off an angled reflector and out through the rubber-string grilles on the speaker’s sides. The AMT sits above a 5.25-inch woofer. Thick slabs of aluminum form the enclosure.

Lows are handled by the LS Boundary Woofer, a medium-density fiberboard box housing two 12-inch woofers. It can be used freestanding, but it’s mainly intended to be built into a wall or a piece of furniture. Steinway Lyngdorf designed the LS specifically for corner mounting, thus the “Boundary Woofer” tag.

The system requires an audio processor — the SP-1 for stereo or the P1 for surround — and enough of the company’s A1 stereo amps to power all the S-15s and LSs in the system. My 5.1 review system included five S-15s, four LSs, five A1s, and one P1, although Steinway Lyngdorf technician Henrik Jørgensen told me he could have used just two LSs in my room. The added woofers and amp brought the “as tested” price of the system to $72,200. But no worries: Perhaps the S-Series’s inconspicuous design will dissuade the Occupy movement from camping out on your front lawn.

The P1 has the capabilities of a typical surround processor, including video and audio switching plus recent variants of DTS and Dolby (although not height-channel technologies such as Dolby Pro Logic IIz and DTS Neo:X). It also has eight-channel Room Perfect processing. What it doesn’t have is a display, so you need to have a TV connected to adjust many of its functions. It also lacks video scaling.

The round remote has such an air of luxury that it could almost inspire an Occupy protest on its own. The chrome (or gold) ring around the edge is the volume control. This heavy metal ring spins with a soft, gratifying whir. Six buttons let you control power and mute as well as access various sound modes and the onscreen menu system. A small conventional remote is also provided.

Setup

You can’t set up your own Steinway Lyngdorf system; dealer installation is required, using a special remote. Jørgensen hung the three front speakers and two surround speakers on my walls, and placed the subwoofers in two stacks in the front corners of my room. All connections between the amps and processor used the Steinway Lyngdorf Digital Link.

After plugging everything in and configuring the inputs for my source devices, Jørgensen activated RoomPerfect setup. He used a test microphone in different positions while the system emitted test tones to adjust itself for my room.

Jørgensen provided three RoomPerfect settings: Global (for multiple listeners), Focus (optimized for my listening chair), and Bypass. He suggested that I use Global for most material, saying that it usually sounds about as good as (and sometimes better than) Focus.

Performance

Although Jørgensen checked the system’s operation by playing music so loud I had to leave the room, I still wasn’t convinced the S-15s would deliver the kind of oomph needed in a large home theater. So my first test was a Vudu stream of Real Steel, a movie that combines cool robot boxing with sappy dialogue.

I found that the S-Series easily reproduced the massive footfalls and powerful punches of the robots, with incredible impact and no audible distortion even when I cranked the system way, way up. The S-Series also exhibited a compelling “acoustic bubble” effect, giving me a great sense of the spaces in which the action took place.

The sappy, dialogue-driven parts of Real Steel might have proved more challenging due to the system’s unusually high subwoofer crossover point: 300 Hz, compared with 80 Hz for most systems. My worry was that the Steel dialogue might sound unnaturally full because it would be coming in part from the LS woofers. However, even though I was listening for this flaw, I never noticed it in 5.1 material from Blu-ray Discs and DVDs, nor with stereo CDs and LPs.

You really get the payoff of the S-Series’s advanced technology when you play stereo music. “It’s weird to hear a sound with so little identifiable character,” I wrote in my notes when I played Holly Cole’s “Train Song,” one of my go-to test tracks ever since it was released 17 years ago on her Temptation album.

While the mids certainly impressed me — the vocalists from my test CD all sounded as natural as I’ve ever heard them sound — I was really blown away by the bass and treble. The bass sounded distinct, powerful, and incredibly even from note to note; most systems are lucky to achieve two of those goals. The treble rang out with incredible clarity without sounding in any way exaggerated, edgy, or distorted.

My most stirring moment with the system came when I played “The Holy Man,” from the World Saxophone Quartet’s Metamorphosis. This track features four saxophonists soloing simultaneously over rambunctious African percussion. The S-Series gave me the most distinct sonic image of each saxophonist that I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard this track on at least 1,000 audio systems.

With stereo music, RoomPerfect seemed to kill the treble detail and the punch in the bass, so I bypassed it. With movie soundtracks, I usually liked the sound best in Focus mode. Compared with the Global mode, its more radical taming of my room’s flaws delivered a more realistic reproduction of explosions and impacts, and its smoothing effect on the treble made dialogue (which often isn’t well recorded) sound more natural.

Bottom Line

For the price of Steinway Lyngdorf ’s S-Series, you could have your choice of any number of great home theater audio systems. What’s special about this one? It sounds amazing; it’s the only small system I’ve heard that’s muscular enough to rock out a large media room; and it has a cool remote that would look right at home on Paul Allen’s yacht.

Extended Test Bench

Frequency response

• satellite (Global mode) 186 Hz to 20 kHz ±6.7 dB
• satellite (Focus mode) 191 Hz to 20 kHz ±6.7 dB
• satellite (Bypass mode) 215 Hz to 20 kHz ±7.8 dB
• subwoofer 23 to 92 Hz ±3 dB

Bass output, subwoofer (CEA-2010 standard)

Bass limits

• satellite                                                  88.9 dB at 40 Hz

Because the S-15 satellite and LS subwoofer are designed as part of a system including electronics and DSP, and not intended to be used on their own, I had to depart in some ways from my usual measurement methods. I measured both driven by the Steinway Lyngdorf electronics, so the DSP correction was active. I also ran several in-room measurements of the system in its different modes.

For the S-15, the frequency response curve shown here represents the average of results at 0°, ±10°, ±20°, and ±30°, all performed with a Clio FW audio analyzer. Because the S-15 is designed primarily for wall-mounting, I mounted the speaker on an ersatz wall, a 2-by-4-foot sheet of plywood attached to a stand and mounted on my measurement turntable. The microphone was placed on-axis with the tweeter (the position where I got the flattest response) at a distance of 2 meters. The measurements were taken using quasi-anechoic technique (with Clio in MLS mode) above 250 Hz and close-miking of the S-15’s woofer (with Clio in log chirp mode) below 250 Hz. For the LS subwoofer, I performed a ground plane measurement to get the total bass output of the two woofers. All results were imported into a LinearX LMS analyzer for post-processing. The S-15’s measurement was normalized to 0 dB at 1 kHz, and the LS’s so that its peak output was +3 dB. All curves were smoothed to 1/12th octave.

Even though I wasn’t able to recalibrate RoomPerfect for the measurement environment, Focus and Global still gave me smoother measured results from the S-15 than the Bypass setting did; apparently the compensation for wall-mounting that RoomPerfect applied in my listening room also yielded benefits when I mounted the S-15 on my ersatz measuring wall. The S-15’s measurements are obviously marred by that dip at 530 Hz, which is an unavoidable cancellation effect caused by the wall-mounting. (Because it’s a cancellation effect, or “suckout,” it can’t be corrected through equalization; any additional energy pumped into that band would simply be canceled.) Without that cancellation dip, the measurements are better: ±6.0 dB in Bypass, ±4.6 dB in Global, and ±4.8 dB in Focus.

Another performance parameter that DSP can’t do much to correct is off-axis response, and it’s here that the S-15 really excels, showing almost no change in response at angles out to ±30°. At ±45°, the midrange response is reduced by max -5.9 dB between 800 Hz and 2.5 kHz (that’s the dispersion of the woofer narrowing as frequency rises), but overall response at this angle is actually flatter than it is on-axis. Although the treble response gets a little ragged at angles of ±30° or greater, it remains essentially flat relative to the midrange and bass, which is unusual — typically, treble response is greatly reduced at ±45° and ±60°, but not so in the case of the S-15. That’s the rear tweeter reflector working, I assume.

You can tell from the frequency response chart that the S-15’s bass extension is limited, but the robust woofer still delivers useful output all the way down at 40 Hz. However, the system’s 300-Hz crossover point doesn’t capitalize on the little woofer’s muscle.

Although the S-15’s sensitivity and impedance are irrelevant because the speaker is not available on its own, I measured them anyway out of curiosity. Impedance runs below 5 ohms between 210 Hz and 570 Hz and again above 4.5 kHz, and hits a low of 2.7 ohms at 11 kHz with a phase angle of -19°. Sensitivity (average of quasi-anechoic measurement from 300 Hz to 10 kHz at 1 meter at 0° with a 2.83-volt RMS signal) is a little above average at 90.3 dB.

The LS Boundary Woofer’s frequency response when driven by the Steinway Lyngdorf processor and amplifiers shows good low-frequency extension, but an unusual “shelving” effect from about 100 to 235 Hz; I assume this curve is chosen in order to deliver substantial bass output while also delivering enough high-frequency response to make the 300-Hz crossover.

Speaking of the high crossover point (which in most good home theater systems would be set at 80 Hz), Lyngdorf provided an interesting technical explanation of why it didn’t result in bloated voices as it normally would. He said the sound quality resulted from excellent impulse response — the woofers’ ability to produce high output immediately yet also stop producing output the moment the signal ends. “If you don’t have good impulse response, you can easily hear woofer placement because the woofer keeps playing after the music stops,” he said.

He noted that the corner placement of the woofers is essential for good impulse response. “Corner placement delivers a unified wavefront coming from the corner, rather than the more chaotic result you’d get with the woofer placed elsewhere,” he said. “Think of when you make a splash in the corner of a pool. The waves go out uniformly from the corner.”

I did once hear the bloated voices I feared, when I streamed Battlestar Galactica episodes (the Edward James Olmos version, not the Lorne Greene one) from Netflix, processed through Dolby Pro Logic II in the P1. Given that the flaw never occurred with 5.1 or stereo material, I suspected it might be due to a software bug in the PLII implementation. After checking on a different S-Series system, Lyngdorf confirmed what I heard in PLII and stated that “it will be very simple to fix the issue.”

CEA-2010 output measurements for the subwoofer were taken at 2 meters and then scaled up +6 dB per CEA-2010 requirements so that they are equivalent to 1-meter results. An L appears next to those measurements in which maximum output was dictated by the amplifier’s internal limiter. I measured a single subwoofer; figure on roughly 6 dB of additional output (depending on room acoustics) when a second subwoofer is added. At press time, the CEA had instituted changes to the CEA-2010 standard but had yet to publish them; however, I do know that the new standard requires averaging in pascals rather than in decibels, so that’s the procedure I followed here. Averaged using pascals (the new method) and decibels (the old method), the subwoofer’s output is: low bass 120.6 dB/120.6 dB, ultra-low bass 107.2 dB/106.8 dB. That’s pretty kick-ass for a modestly sized subwoofer like the LS.

My in-room spectrum analysis of the system (shown in the accompanying chart) indicated that RoomPerfect’s compensation, at least from a magnitude standpoint, is conservative. (These measurements were taken with the mike in my listening chair positioned at ear height, using pink noise and the Clio FW in FFT mode. Results are normalized at 1 kHz.) You can see the results in Bypass (blue trace), Global (purple trace), and Focus (green trace) modes. The biggest difference is in the bass correction, where Focus was aggressive (and effective) in taming my room’s prominent 40-Hz axial mode.

The system also includes various sound modes designed to suit certain types of material. I decided against using my very limited space in the print review to cover these because they’re not a major feature and, as with most such modes, I didn’t find them useful. But I went ahead and measured them, and you can see the results in the attached chart. The frequency response measured about the same in Neutral, Movie, and Music modes. Relative to the Neutral mode, Action, Action+Movies, and Dance modes added 6.0 dB of bass boost measured at 38 Hz, the frequency of maximum boost, while Rock mode added 3.6 dB. There’s also some modest contouring between 2 kHz and 4 kHz; Action mode boosts by a maximum of 0.6 dB in this region, while Rock mode attenuates by 1.1 dB. — B.B.