A Desktop Home Theater System with a Kick By Darryl Wilkinson May 2, 2006 — You'll laugh, as I did, the first time you hear about JVC's sake-soaked wood cone speakers. Soaking speakers in sake? Sufferin' succotash! Say it isn't so, Sam.

Alliteration aside, the EX-A10, JVC's new bedroom/small-room "theater-like" performance system does indeed feature a pair of bi-amplified two-way speakers that include a tweeter and a 3 3/16-inch sake-soaked wood cone mid/bass driver for each. JVC says the mid/bass cones are made from a solid sheet of wood - the "ideal speaker material" - in order to give the speakers a "warm, natural sound".

As you might guess (or maybe not if you haven't spent much time thinking about it), it's pretty darn difficult to bend a solid sheet of wood into a cone shape without having it snap, crackle, and pop on you. Evidently, someone at JVC took this as a real challenge and spent 20 years trying to figure out how to do it. Somehow (I'm sure it was as the engineers were just about to give up and were drowning their sorrows in a bottle of sake) someone in the lab spilled his sake on the wood sheet and - eureka! - the sake solution was discovered.

In addition to the special speakers, the EX-A10 includes a receiver and matching DVD player. The receiver has JVC's Hybrid Feedback digital amplifier with 30 watts for the mid/bass drivers and 20 watts dedicated to the tweeters. The DVD player plays both DVD-Video and DVD-Audio discs, and the system provides two-channel decoding of Dolby Digital and DTS discs. (Which means it not a full-blown 5.1-channel system, but it's hard to fit that kind of package on a bookshelf.) There's also a built-in AM/FM tuner with a clock and timer so the system can be used as a very expensive alarm clock. The remote control has a sliding door that hides the lesser-used buttons.

Nice to see in a small system, the video outputs include composite, S-video, and component. Previously announced in January of this year, the EX-A10 is now available. JVC says it'll cost you "about $1,000".