Tested: RSL Speaker Systems 5.1 Theater System
The SoCal speaker kings are back — and performing above their size and price point once again
RSL Speaker Systems is the current manifestation of Rogersound Labs, a SoCal company that goes back a few years — 30 or so, in fact. Like many speaker makers, RSL got its start through garage tinkering, in this case by Howard Rodgers, owner of a well-known retail chain of the same name. (How the “d” got dropped from the company name is a story for another day.)
Despite a long, successful run, the original RSL, again like many other speaker companies, eventually faded away. But after regaining rights to the company name just last year, the firm was reincarnated after a long hiatus by its founder and his family.
The first fruit of this resurrection is the system before us, which includes all three of the “new” RSL’s non-in-wall designs: the CG4, a compact two-way monitor about the size of a 5-pound bag of sugar; the CG24, a dual-woofer version for the center channel; and the Speedwoofer 10, a 10-inch powered subwoofer.
All three speakers exploit a patent-pending enclosure design that RSL calls Compression Guide technology. This, Rodgers tells us, is a “new wrinkle” on vented enclosures that is said to dramatically reduce the cabinet-signature “boxiness” Rodgers hears from most small-box designs. (The cabinet is internally divided, to about the three-quarters mark, by a slanted internal plenum, though Rodgers told me it is not a transmission-line design per se.)
A bit unusually, the CG4 has a “tweeter-under” layout, with the woofer sitting above the tweeter (assuming you place them right-side-up!) — a sensible arrangement for a very small speaker where the acoustical center (the woofer, more or less) might otherwise be too low. Anyway, there’s no law saying tweeters must always be on top; the in-phase lobe of radiation (which you want directed toward your ears) is a function as much of crossover design as of geometry.
