Digital Trends

Kenwood HTB-506 October 26th, 2003 | by Yongki Go

The rear panel of the VR-707 Receiver

The six satellite speakers of the HTB-506 have plain black-ash box appearance with black cloth grills. They consist of two bookshelf front speakers, a small center channel, and three small surround speakers. All the speakers are of acoustic suspension design. Each of the front and center speakers have a 1" super dome tweeter and two 4" woofers, and they are magnetically shielded.  The surround speaker uses a 1" balanced dome tweeter and a 4" woofer. A built-in wall-mount bracket can be found on each of the surround speakers. The build quality is not bad, but is just average, typical to what you'd expect in a $500 complete system. Unlike typical audiophile quality speakers, they are quite light and for sure they won't pass the knocking test, as when you knock on them, they don't sound well-damped. Of course, corner has to be cut somewhere for Kenwood to be able to offer this system at this very affordable price.

The SW-37HT powered subwoofer that is included in the system matches the appearance of the satellite speakers. It has an 8" driver driven by 150 W amplifier in a bass-reflex enclosure. All the usual subwoofer controls can be found on the back, such as volume control, crossover setting, crossover filter switch, auto on/off switch, and main power switch. No phase control is provided, but with such a small and easily moveable subwoofer, this doesn't pose a serious limitation. This subwoofer only accepts mono line level input, and a basic subwoofer cable is included.

A set of color-coded speaker wires at about 10 ft long for each channel is also provided. They are the type of speaker wire you can easily find in your hardware store. You can, of course, replace them with a better type of wire, but you have to remember that the spring-clip speaker connectors on the VR-707 receiver and on the HTB-506 speakers can only accept a maximum of 16 gauge of wire thickness.