The Elac Debut A4 Dolby Atmos enabled add-on speaker is a 4″ full midrange upfiring speakers. It is specially designed to reflect sound up to the ceiling and back to your sitting position when you watched a Blu-ray movie featured the new audio format. The Elac Debut A4 is designed to sit atop of your bookshelf speakers or floor standing loudspeakers. The add-on speakers come with a 0.5-inch polymer dome tweeter and a 4-inch woven aramid-fiber cone woofer. It is said on Dolby official website that the upfiring Atmos speakers shouldn’t be higher than half of the ceiling and is recommended to be placed on ear level position.
Elac Debut A4 Upfiring Dolby Atmos Setup
If your amplifier is 9.1.4 AV receivers, it can support front and rear upfiring, means you will have these speakers place atop your floor standing speakers and rear surround speakers. Make sure your front and rear speakers are tilted toward your sitting position before getting into the speaker tuning procedures.
After setup the upfiring speakers, you’ll need to run the speaker calibration to get the accurate speaker’s distance, crossover frequency and speaker levels.
You will need a Dolby Atmos enabled AV receivers. I’m currently using my Yamaha Aventage RX-A860 AV receiver, set the Front Presence setting to Dolby Enabled Speakers and let the YPAO calibration run by itself, it took less than 5 minutes to complete the auto-tuning process. If the add-on modules crossover frequency is set too low, it is recommended to adjust crossover frequency response higher than 100Hz so that get rid the lows and let the subwoofer handle all bass. Now come to the fun part of testing out your new Atmos-enabled speakers.
Hook up your Dolby Atmos Blu-ray and test. Make sure to adjust your sound setting to Straight Mode if you are using Yamaha Aventage series, this mode will enable Atmos. If you select other sound modes, it will play the movie in the default Dolby TrueHD 7.1 sound format and you’ll not be able to get the actual Atmos with the three-dimensional sound field.
Dolby Atmos Speakers Test
You can test your new speakers if you have Transformers: The Last Knight or Gravity Blu-ray. There are a lot of movies can be used to test such as Mad Max Fury Road, Kong Island, Wonder Woman and a lot more.
The most noticeable Dolby Atmos movie effects are when you test out one of the scenes in Transformers: The Last Knight. That was during a scene when Hot Rod used his Time Gun to stop the enemies an created a time stop dome. The effect can be heard clearly above and it was amazing.
All the 4K Blu-ray movies audio format are featured with Dolby Atmos, but you’ll pay slightly more than a normal Blu-ray movie. If your Elac speakers get the correct position, you’ll be able to hear sounds above you and noticed the front staging is wider than before. When it comes to listening music using the highest FLAC quality, the music really came to life with amazing music instruments from the Atmos modules. You’ll hear some instruments came to life from above.
Conclusion, the Elac Debut A4 sound quality is absolutely stunning. Every room and setup are different to get the sound right and creates an amazing 3D dome sound field. In case you can’t hear the sound reflection, try to increase the volume of these speakers. If you are living in high rise residential but not planning to install ceiling speakers or front height mounted, these Dolby Atmos speakers will do its job quite well.
The ELAC A4 Debut Series 4″ Concentric Dolby Atmos Speakers by Andrew Jones (Pair) cost about USD$229 and can be purchased online via on Amazon.
Setup: / 5
Sound Quality: / 5
Value: / 5
Performance: / 5
