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JULY/AUGUST 2002
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athena TECHNOLOGIES ® athena TECHNOLOGIES Point 5 System Review
® Point 5 System Review
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“The athena athena Point Point 5 5 Systems Systems delivers delivers olympian olympian sound sound at at a a very mortal mortal price.”
price.”

Greek mythology holds that Athena,
PHOTOS BY TONY CORDOZA
test report BY RICH WARREN
Athena
Point 5 Home Theater Speaker System
goddess of wisdom, sprang fully
formed from the head of Zeus, king
of the gods. In this case, Athena
Technologies, maker of this Point
5 system, leapt fully developed
from Audio Products International, the
parent of notable speaker brands Energy
and Mirage.
Except for size, the Point 5 resembles a
conventional subwoofer/satellite system.
Where the satellites in most such systems
are about the width and height of a paperback
epic, the magnetically shielded S.5
satellites are closer to the size of a hardbound
novel, and the full-size C.5 center
speaker might not even fit atop a small TV.
On the other hand, the P.5 powered subwoofer
is slightly smaller than the norm,
and Athena suggests placing it at least a
few inches away from walls since it has a
down-firing driver (little feet keep it off the
floor) and a front-firing port.
When you buy the Point 5 system, you
have a couple of finish options. The S.5
fast facts
satellites come with cherry woodgrain vinyl
or high-gloss black cabinets, black or
silver baffles, and gray cloth grilles. The
subwoofer has front-mounted controls and
is finished in basic black vinyl with knit
cloth side panels. All six speakers have
large, sturdy binding posts that are set too
far apart for dual banana plugs.
The S.5 enclosures have an unusually
large, deep port in back that extends almost
all the way inside to the tweeter. Below
that is a large slotted bulge that accepts a
supplied wall-mounting bracket that lets
you aim the speaker either horizontally or
vertically; the bulge keeps the port away
from the wall. Athena also offers ST.5
stands ($89 a pair), waist-high hollow tubes
that ideally should be filled with sand. They
have massive bases and small mounting
plates on top; screws hold the speakers
onto the plates.
The subwoofer has a couple of unusual
switches. The first is a mode switch that selects
between S.5 and SUB. Select the S.5
position, and the sub automatically sets the
S.5 C.5 P.5
(L/R satellites) (center) (subwoofer)
TWEETER 1-inch dome 1-inch dome —
MIDRANGE 4-inch cone two 4-inch cones —
WOOFER — — 8-inch cone
ENCLOSURE ported ported ported
POWER — — 75 watts
INPUTS gold-plated gold-plated speaker-level binding
binding posts binding posts posts, line-level RCA
DIMENSIONS 5 3 ⁄ 4 x 8 1 ⁄ 2 x 6 1 ⁄ 4 15 x 5 5 ⁄ 8 x 6 1 ⁄ 4 10 x 13 1 ⁄ 4 x 13 1 ⁄ 2
(WxHxD) inches inches inches
WEIGHT 6 pounds 9 1 ⁄ 2 pounds 15 pounds
FINISH high-gloss black with high-gloss black with black vinyl, black
silver or black baffle silver or black baffle; cloth side panels
or cherry with black dark gray cloth grille
baffle; dark gray
cloth grille
PRICE $175 a pair $175 each $275 each
Total: $800
MANUFACTURER Athena Technologies, Dept. S&V, 3642 McNicoll Ave., Toronto, Ontario
M1X 1G5; www.athenaspeakers.com; 416-321-1800

test report
The Athena speakers realistically conveyed the subtle
sound effects and dialogue in The Contender.
optimal crossover and a preset equalization
curve for the Point 5 system, bypassing the
Bass Range control. The Bass Level control
remains functional. The SUB position
is for use with other satellite speakers. The
second switch lets you select Audio or Video
playback. Audio is said to provide a flat
frequency response for music playback;
the Video position boosts the bass for movie
soundtracks. You can connect the P.5 using
either a line-level signal from your receiver
or processor’s subwoofer/LFE (lowfrequency-effects)
output or speaker-level
signals from the left/right front-channel
outputs. I chose the former hookup.
Athena’s 31-page manual devotes three
pages of text to each of a multitude of languages,
leaving the setup diagrams for the
last three pages. Only in
the diagrams will you find
the recommended Dolby
Digital bass-management
settings, and it would be
easy to overlook them, as
I did initially. But it would
be a great mistake because
unlike many other
sub/sat systems, the Point
5 is designed to give best
results when you set all
the main-channel speakers
to “large.” The manual
does not suggest where to
set the crossover frequency
for the subwoofer/LFE
output, so I consulted an
Athena product manager,
who suggested 120 Hz.
I set up the Point 5 system
in my 10 x 12-foot
home theater, with the front S.5 satellites
on stands about 6 inches to either side of
my 42-inch Toshiba widescreen TV, the
C.5 center perched on top of the set, and
the S.5 surrounds on small wall shelves
just above and behind the listening position.
I placed the P.5 subwoofer about 5
inches from a side wall and a couple of
feet in front of the rear wall of the room.
Placing it closer to the side wall made it
too boomy. I powered the satellites with
my Denon AVR-2802 receiver, which also
performed the Dolby Digital decoding.
I started my listening session with the
DVD of The Contender (DreamWorks),
Rod Lurie’s gripping film about Washington
politics with a stellar performance by
Joan Allen. It opens with the song “Ring of
Fire,” performed by Jeff Bridges and Kim
Carnes over a throbbing bass line. Its rendition
by the Point 5 system was hot. Then
a car goes barreling off a high bridge into a
deep river, and the system made one heck
of a splash — I almost ran for my Gortex
slicker. Later on, the presidential helicopter
seemed to be lifting my home theater
off its foundations. A well-miked helicopter
stresses a speaker from the very low
bass (the thump, thump, thump of the rotors
and pulse of the engine) to the highfrequency
scream of the jet turbine and the
whirring of the blades. The Point 5 brought
me closer to a flight on Marine One than
I’ll probably experience in real life.
Clinks of glasses at cocktail parties and
slamming car doors testified to the system’s
deftness with brief, sudden sounds,
while the scrape of a pen on paper and the
rustling of clothes showed how well it conveyed
ongoing sonic details. A particularly
telling scene finds Allen’s character venting
steam by shooting hoops, and the reverberant
empty court, the hollow thunk of
the dribble, and the sound of the ball hitting
the rim all rang true. The basketball
court had depth as well as length and
width. Voices sounded lifelike in the movie’s
extensive dialogue.
Reproduced by modestly priced home
theater speaker systems, transient sounds
often seem brittle because the high frequencies
are overemphasized or dull and
muffled because the highs are rolled off.
Another problem that’s more difficult to
quantify but easily discernible is the dimensionality
of the sound — whether it all
seems to stop at the plane of the speakers
or blossoms into a three-dimensional image.
Although the Athena system did exhibit
a slight rise in the high frequencies, it
didn’t unpleasantly exaggerate transients,
and it certainly placed sounds in three-dimensional
space.
Since The Contender lacked the ka-pow
factor, I spun the DVD of Wrongfully Accused
(Warner), one of Pat Proft’s goofy,
inane farces featuring Leslie Nielsen of
Naked Gun fame. This movie takes on and
puts down a whole library of films, from
The Fugitive to North by Northwest, with
TV’s ER thrown in for good measure. So
the soundtrack includes a roaring, rumbling
diesel locomotive, a propeller airplane,
gunshots, explosions, and even a hydroelectric
dam. It almost seemed that the
Point 5 speakers relished reproducing this
bombastic buffet.
They did equally well with straight music,
from the subtle to the grandiose. However,
even with the sub switched to its Audio
mode, I had to turn down the bass level
another notch or so. I chose CDs by three
artists I’ve heard live. First I spun This
Road Tonight (Roheen), the recent release
by Kitty Donohoe, a Celtic-flavored singer-songwriter
from Michigan. In addition
to guitar, fiddle bass, percussion, and vocals,
the mix includes pennywhistle, mandolin,
and bodhran (a simple Irish drum).
The Point 5 system separated each instrument
clearly, without overemphasizing any
one of them, while Donohoe’s clean, natural-timbre
voice soared over the complex
production.
Pop-folk duo Dave Carter and Tracy
Grammer, who recently toured with Joan

test report
HIGH POINTS
Impressive depth of sound.
Good tonal balance.
Wide dynamic range.
Excellent transients.
LOW POINTS
Subwoofer is placement sensitive
(can be boomy).
Larger than most sub/sat systems.
Baez, released Drum Hat Buddha (Signature
Sounds) last year. It percolates with
production. Although I’ve listened to it a
hundred times, on the Athena system I
heard threads of instruments that I’d missed
previously, especially in Grammer’s mandolin
and tambourine parts.
Finally, I listened to Dmitry Paperno’s
interpretation of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata
No. 7, in D Major (Cedille). Paperno played
a Steinway that I’ve heard in person hun-
Frequency response (at 2 meters)
front left/right.............99 Hz to 16.9 kHz ±4.6 dB
center..........................94 Hz to 18.6 kHz ±4.3dB
surround....................99 Hz to 16.7 kHz ±4.3 dB
subwoofer....................35 Hz to 100 Hz ±2.7 dB
Sensitivity (SPL at 1 meter with 2.8 volts of
pink-noise input)
front left/right/surround ..............................91 dB
center...........................................................91 dB
Impedance (minimum/nominal)
front left/right/surround....................3.7/10 ohms
center..............................................6.5/10 ohms
Bass limits (lowest frequency and maximum
SPL with limit of 10% distortion at 2 meters in a
large room)
front left/right/surround........62 Hz at 69 dB SPL
center...................................50 Hz at 72 dB SPL
subwoofer.............................25 Hz at 82 dB SPL
96 dB average SPL from 25 to 62 Hz
102.4 dB maximum SPL at 62 Hz
All of the response curves in the graph are
weighted to reflect how sound arrives at a
listener’s ears with normal speaker placement.
The front left/right curve reflects response of the
S.5 satellite averaged over a ±30° window, with
double weight at 30°, the most typical listening
angle. The surround-channel curve shows the
response of the same speaker averaged over a
±60° window, with double weight at 60°
because most of the sound reaching the
listener will have been reflected from room
surfaces. The center-channel curve averages
the response of the C.5 speaker over ±45°, with
double weight directly on-axis. Both the S.5 and
C.5 had extremely flat response below 1 kHz,
in the lab
dreds of times. The Point 5 speakers truly
made it seem as if that very instrument was
playing in my room, particularly in how
they reproduced the transients from the
hammers striking the strings. I especially
enjoyed the sound in the Denon receiver’s
5-Ch Stereo mode (front L/R signals duped
for the surrounds and mixed for the center).
It should be easy to find fault with a
$800 home theater speaker system, but the
Athena Technologies Point 5 made it hard.
Perhaps if it had remained in my home a
few months, I could find more flaws than
that the subwoofer is exceptionally placement-sensitive,
tending toward boominess,
and that the instruction manual needs a
clearer layout.
In my grade-school play, I was Zeus,
and my big line was, “And the gods rejoice.”
The line seems appropriate for a
speaker system from a company named after
Zeus’s most illustrious offspring. The
Athena Point 5 delivers Olympian sound at
a very mortal price. S&V
with output rising significantly above that
frequency. The off-axis notching of the horizontally
arrayed C.5 can be seen in the graph at
1.8 kHz, but our averaging technique tends to
understate the effect for off-axis listeners.
Bass limits for the P.5 subwoofer were
measured with it set to maximum bandwidth
and placed in the optimal corner of a 7,500cubic-foot
room. In a smaller room users can
expect 2 to 3 Hz deeper extension and up to 3
dB higher sound-pressure level (SPL). The
graph reflects its performance when the frontpanel
switches were set to the S.5 and Audio
positions. In this mode, the low-pass filter’s
turnover frequency was 100 Hz. With the SUB
setting of the mode switch, the crossover
control became active, and I measured a 115-
Hz turnover frequency at a marked 150 Hz, 80
Hz at the midpoint of the control’s rotation, and
55 Hz at a marked 50 Hz. Flipping the
Audio/Video switch to Video increased output at
50 Hz by about 5 dB while sharply attenuating
response below 45 Hz by about 10 dB.
— Tom Nousaine
decibels
15
10
5
0
–5
–10
hertz
front left/right
center
surround
subwoofer
–15
20 100 1k 10k 20k
“Athena Point 5 Home Theater Speaker System” by Rich Warren, Sound & Vision, July/August 2002.
© 2002 Hachette Filipacchi Media US, Inc. Originally published in the July/August 2002 issue of Sound & Vision Magazine.
Reprinted with permission. PAR008E