test report
BY RICH WARREN
Definitive Technology
BP 2002TL Home Theater Speaker System
STEREO REVIEW’S
SOUND & VISION
ot even Mr. Freeze, from the DVD
Batman & Robin, could chill the Definitive
Technology BP 2002TL home theater speaker
system. It effortlessly reproduced the sonic
sensations that director Joel Schumacher
hurled at it in the Dolby Digital presentation.
When the lights came up, I expected to see a
Batmobile impaled in the wall of my home theater.
Almost as unnerving, the starring monolith in Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey looked like an early pro-
totype of the left and right front towers of the BP 2002TL
system. Fortunately, Definitive Technology speakers come
from Maryland, not Jupiter, and its towers will look far more
attractive in your living room than the movie monolith.
Definitive dresses all the speakers in the system in acousti-
cally transparent stretchy black or white knit sleeves, with
black lacquer or glossy cherry-veneer end caps on the three
front speakers. It’s a simple but very classy design. Should
your cats decide to use the towers as scratching posts, the
covers can be replaced easily and inexpensively. Definitive
also provides user-installed carpet spikes.
Each left and right tower has a side-firing subwoofer
powered by a built-in 250-watt amplifier. On the front and
rear panels are four woofers for the upper bass and
midrange and a pair of aluminum-dome tweeters. The
C/L/R 2500 center-channel speaker contains a 150-watt
amplifier for its upward-firing subwoofer, complemented by
a pair of woofers and a tweeter in a D’Appolito array. (That
arrangement, which centers the tweeter between the
woofers, is often used in horizontally oriented center-chan-
nel speakers to limit their horizontal dispersion, which
would otherwise be too wide.) The trapezoidal BP2X sur-
rounds each have a pair of woofers and a pair of aluminum-
dome tweeters, and they can be positioned horizontally or
vertically, firing up and down or front and back.
Every speaker in this system except the center is bipolar,
with the paired front/back drivers firing in phase in opposite
directions (as opposed to a dipolar system, in which they fire
out of phase).
The company offers a variety of possible wiring schemes
for the front speakers, but for my listening tests I chose the
easiest method, and likely the one most people will use: dri-
ving them from the speaker outputs of my amplifier. The
towers also provide a separate low-frequency effects (LFE)
input for greater control of the deep bass if desired. The user
PHOTO BY TONY CORDOZA
N
Reprinted from the December 1999 issue of STEREO REVIEW’S SOUND & VISION magazine.
Copyright © 1999 by Hachette Filipacchi Magazine Inc. All Rights Reserved.
“The grandeur filled the room”
“My considerably more expensive
reference system sounded shallow
in comparison.”
“The speakers integrated superbly
into a seamless system with perfect
timbre-matching”
