58 | svconline.com DECEMBER 2005
R E V I E W
Small speaker duo combines high
quality and big sound.
TOA Electronics continues to deliver quality
products of all stripes. Even if the company
isn’t on your short list of speaker manufactur-
ers in terms of name recognition, you’ll want to
be aware of its new HX-5/FB-120 combination.
This high-quality package consists of a sub-
woofer, the FB-120 ($692), and a full-bandwidth
modular speaker package, the HX-5 ($494), in
which four trapezoidal enclosures are combined
into a single unit. Together, these two present
a truly handsome package from an aesthetic
standpoint, but they deliver the goods from an
aural perspective as well. I got to take the rig
for a spin, and I was more than pleased. Let’s
dig into what I found.
Let’s look at the HX-5 first, since it repre-
sents the truly innovative half of the package.
I pulled the thing out of the box, and the first
thing that came to mind was “line array.” In
the strictest sense of the word, it is indeed a
simple line array, to the extent that it employs
four identical enclosures arrayed in a vertical
pattern with the goal of controlled directivity.
It’s not as sophisticated as a large-scale touring
system, yet it nicely accomplishes the goal. TOA
refers to it as a variable dispersion speaker, and
that is the perfect description. And, frankly, if a
full-tilt line array is what you need, TOA makes
them as well.
Since the four enclosures are intended for
use only as an integrated unit (and due to wiring,
can literally be used only that way), there’s really
no point in describing the individual cabinets,
other than to say that they are trapezoidal and
made of polypropylene. Each enclosure features
a center-positioned 5in. cone-type LF driver, and
three vertically arrayed, balanced-dome-type HF
drivers. In the four-enclosure arrangement, the
LF drivers stack one above another, and simi-
larly, you wind up with 12 HF drivers in a vertical
John McJunkin
TOA
HX-5B/FB-120B
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