The picture above isn't so helpful really! But this was a full ATMOS home system in a darkened room, so photography with a phone wasn't very easy. You can see though (if you're up on your German electronic/techno stuff) that the disk playing was the Kraftwerk live blue-ray from a recent tour. The system here was based on the Arcam "G Series Amplification" AVR860 - a reasonably recent new product. I heard it at the Chester show in March and was underwhelmed. But that must've been down to the B&W 800 series speakers, system set up or a bit of both. Because here, with the recently introduced KEF Q Series it put in a superb performance. The Q's are not really very expensive by today's standards but here they were musical, taught, full of non-abrasive top end detail and great fun to listen to. But the biggest attribute of this system / the way it was set up was the completely integrated sound across all the speakers.
Front we had some large floorstanders (£1450) and the centre speaker (£650). Sides and rears were smaller floor standers (£1150), I can't remember if there was a centre rear speaker or not and 2 (£600) subwoofers sat along the side walls between the side and front speakers. £400 Atmos speakers firing upwards to bounce overhead effects off the ceiling. Steering across this lot was stunningly seamless, far better than that achieved by the expensive Reference system elsewhere in the show. We really thought we were going to find a whole rack of top end Arcam processing and separate power amps powering the system - but no, just a single receiver backed up by a small 4 channel power amp for the extra atmos channels.
Superb, resulting in a first for an AV system:
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