Fluance XL8 Home Theater System Review
I can safely say that I'm a fan of Fluance Audio. I have had the opportunity to review a fair number of their products from sound bases, to turntables, to active and passive speakers. Through them, all there is one common thread. Fluance makes some of the best bang-for-your-buck HiFi on the market today. So naturally, when I got word that Fluance was sending some more product my way I was excited. This new product came in the form of Fluance's newly minted Reference Series speakers. The XL8 line to be exact. It sits sandwiched between their Higher-end 'Signature' and their entry-level 'Elite' product lines.
Introduction
The new Reference Series lineup consists of four new, speaker options including floor-standing tower speakers (XL8F), bookshelf speakers (XL8S), a center channel speaker (XL8C), and bipolar speakers (XL8BP), which have all been re-developed to deliver 'the ultimate sound experience for the home'. This review is focused on the XL8F, XL8S, and XL8C speakers. I've decided to review the XL8F and XL8S in a Hifi setting as well. I had previously reviewed Fluance's top-of-the-range Signature Hifi Two-Way Bookshelf Surround Sound Speakers and was impressed by how much sound I got for very little money. I also thought that having them as surrounds would be an amazing upgrade to a Home Theater system. The reference series sits just below them, shares the same tweeter and costs almost the same, so from face value, there shouldn't be much air between them.
Design
The Reference series speakers come in either a Black Ash or Walnut wood veneer Cabinet finish. The faces of the speaker all share white drivers and a black gloss finish with magnetic grills. What grabbed my attention most is the fact that the speakers appear to be seamless in appearance. For this price, I didn't expect it.
The Reference Series uses white woven glass fiber drivers that provide vibrational damping and optimal linear movement resulting in a faithful reproduction of original recordings. These drivers are said to reveal the most subtle sounds and expressions of individual instruments, but also great for giving dialogue a more natural and life-like tonality. All speakers in the reference lineup share the same neodymium silk dome tweeters—which are incidentally used in their range-topping Signature series—for consistent, crisp, natural high frequencies and spacious off-axis dispersion.
Fluance employed a super inert cabinet design for this new iteration of the Reference Series. Each speaker is well put together and holds up at even the most neighbor unfriendly volumes. The Center (XL8C) and Bipolar surrounds (XL8BP) feature a sealed cabinet while the Floorstanding XL8F's and Bookshelf/ Surround XL8S's feature vented bass-reflex designs for controlled low-frequency bass response.
