NHT VS-2 Centre Speaker

The VS-2 has a horizontal woofer-tweeter-woofer design. The back of its gloss-black cabinet sports dual fiveway binding-post connectors and a clever post that adjusts to tilt the cabinet so that it aims directly toward the listening area. It is a good-looking speaker, and I particularly like the way its nicely finished grille cloth stands slightly away from the cabinet's front panel.

The VS-2 delivered dam good response all along the main couch seats, +/-4 dB from 83 Hz to 20 kHz directly on-axis and +3 dB from 82 Hz to 14 kHz at 30 degrees off to the side. As with many of the speakers in this comparison, the response tilted upward slightly with increasing frequency. At 45 degrees off-axis the output developed a deep, wide hole from 600 Hz to 3 kHz.

The VS-2's sound consequently exhibited a compressed quality with a loss of detail from the wing chair, though it managed to keep the response trough from blatantly coloring vocals. Moving to less extreme angles improved matters greatly. The speaker sounded quite natural on vocals, if a little bright, from any location on the couch. This sealed system had its system resonance at 90 Hz, and the impedance hit a low of 6.2 ohms at 180 Hz. Like NHT, we'd call it an 8-ohm speaker. Sensitivity hit the spec dead-on at 88 dB, and the VS-2 had no trouble matching our anchor speaker bass lick for bass lick. Go with Pro Logic's Wide mode when you can.