Kudos: Great value proposition; unique speaker/light combo; spacious sound
Concerns: Can crackle/distort at higher volumes/bass; not suited for high SPL applications; longevity of exposed speaker drivers
As I write this, summer is just over a month away… Also as I’m writing this, it is currently pouring in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where I live.
This is the conundrum of a good outdoor audio entertainment system; it needs to be able to provide us with quality sounds when we want to be outside and enjoy them, yet be robust enough to live outside year-round, season after season, holding up to whatever Mother Nature decides to throw at it. And here in Myrtle Beach, that means sub-freezing lows in the winter, scorching highs in the summer, frequent rains throughout the year, and occasional hurricanes.
I’ve had a variety of outdoor audio systems at my home, but the default is usually a pair of surface-mounted outdoor speakers placed under the eave of my house. Connected to my Control4 system, this pair of speakers provides decent audio out by my pool area and lives in a spot that keeps them mostly out of harm’s way.
Note, that I said “decent audio.” The fact is these speakers are spread about 35 feet apart and tasked with providing all the audio for my backyard and swimming pool area. Sitting next to one speaker, you barely hear anything from the other, and getting it loud enough to enjoy across the pool makes it too loud for anyone sitting near the house. The bass performance is spotty at best.
The great outdoors is just that: great. Without walls, ceilings, or defined/contained listening spaces, getting quality sound in a backyard is often easier said than done. This doesn’t even address the issue of far higher levels of background noise outside. And if you don’t have enough drivers and power behind your sound system, it’s going to get swallowed up, sounding thin and unimpressive.
A far better solution is a landscape audio system. Not only are these typically more discreet, designed to nestle into landscaping, planters, or hardscaped areas, but they employ multiple small satellites and frequently a subwoofer to provide more even coverage and consistent performance across much larger listening areas. Basically, employing the commercial audio strategy of lots of speakers playing at lower volumes.
While there are certainly a variety of options out there for landscape audio systems, the LSKIT8BAMP kit from SixFive Audio, reviewed here, has a couple of interesting tricks that make it worth considering. First, the MSRP for the system — which includes eight satellites, an in-ground 10-inch subwoofer, and a 250-watt stereo amplifier — is about $600 less than similar systems, meaning you can spec it into more projects. Second, not only is it a full landscape audio system, but each of the speakers includes LED downlighting to act as pathway lighting to create an immersive outdoor environment.
According to SixFive, “This patented technology offers a seamless integration of dual all-weather speakers within stylish pathway lights, ensuring your outdoor spaces are both beautifully illuminated and filled with crystal-clear music.” Who wouldn’t want that?!
Who Is SixFive Audio?
Admittedly, SixFive Audio wasn’t on my radar, so a big “thank you” to my PR friend, Sue Toscano, for suggesting I might be interested in checking out their new Fusion system.
Sue mentioned that SixFive was a division of Memphis Audio, which also didn’t resonate with me. (After some research, I learned that Memphis Audio was founded in 1965 — the name SixFive is a nod to their roots — and has been specializing in the 12-volt space, and for the past 60 years has been a leader in high-performance car and marine audio.)
To get a little background on the company and understand who they are and what they hope to accomplish in the home audio and CI space, I reached out to Nick LoMonaco, SixFive’s president/CEO.
“We’ve always been known for being easy to work with and actually caring about our dealers, and that hasn’t changed. SixFive is just an extension of what we’ve always done — make solid products that help our dealers grow their business,” LoMonaco said.
“We’ve built strong relationships with distributors and dealers across the country over the past 60 years, particularly in the 12-volt space, and many of those same partners also operate in the home audio market. So, when we had the idea to take our proven marine speaker technology and apply it to a premium landscape solution, the response was overwhelmingly positive.”
“The landscape system is where the brand really took off,” LoMonaco continued. “These are built with marine-grade components, so they can take a beating — rain, sun, heat, cold — and still sound great. But more than that, they’re tuned to create a really immersive outdoor soundstage.”
While the landscape speaker system was the company’s starting point in coming to residential, SixFive has since grown into a broader home audio brand. “We’ve invested in new technologies and product categories,” LoMonaco said, “including architectural speakers enhanced with our proprietary Turbo Mount system, a self-deploying mount that locks into place with just a single flip of a switch. No tools, no hassle, and saves a ton of install time.”
The company also makes a line of subwoofers that offer high output with a small footprint.
“We knew from the beginning we didn’t want to just be another ‘me-too’ speaker brand,” LoMonaco stressed. “That’s why we led with the landscape system — it was unique, sounded incredible, and gave people a reason to care about the brand. From there, we built out the rest of the line — architectural speakers, subs, and more — that check the boxes dealers need checked.”
SixFive products are available nationally from distributors like 21st Century, and they welcome dealers who are interested in going direct to send an email to [email protected].
First Impressions
SixFive offers a variety of packages to get started. You can order items a la carte, including four satellite speaker lights in either bronze or black finish, the 10-inch LSSUB in-ground 200-watt sub, or the 250-watt stereo LSAMP, or you can buy an LSKIT, which includes either four or eight satellites and an LSSUB, with or without the LSAMP. Since I have a pretty large backyard area I wanted to cover with sound — and operate under the guise that more is almost always better when it comes to outdoor audio — I requested the LSKIT8BAMP, which is the full megillah, including eight black speakers, subwoofer, and amplifier.
To make the lighting portion of the speakers work, you also need a 12-volt landscape lighting transformer. SixFive offers the LSTFMR for this purpose.
The full system arrives in four boxes, with the eight satellites and ground stakes in one, the sub in another, and then the amplifier and transformer in their own. Having only seen the images of the speakers, I was anxious to give them a look and feel, so I unboxed them first.
While the speakers aren’t heavy, the black-finished bronze metal has a nice feel and finish. The bottom of the speaker has 1/2-inch NPC brass threaded rods for screwing in the included ground stakes or using something else. With the ground stake attached, the speakers stand 25 inches tall, reduced to about 20 inches after burying the stake, with a 9-inch diameter at the widest point at the top. If you are installing these in an area where flooding is a concern, the height of the installed speaker should keep it out of danger. Extending from the bottom of the speaker is a roughly 3-foot wiring lead that has four color-coded wires, two each for the lights and speakers.
The top of the speaker has perforations in the brass — what SixFive calls a “sound resonating brass enclosure” — and peering through the tiny holes you can see the two omnidirectional, 2.5-inch, all-weather speakers underneath oriented 180 degrees to each other. I do have a bit of concern as to how these speakers — which are exposed to the elements, specifically rain — will hold up in the long run, with them positioned upward for water to drip directly down onto them. I went out and looked at them after a rain and could see water on the drivers. Fortunately, SixFive does offer a full five-year warranty on all the speakers if you have an issue.
Visually, I thought the speakers looked like they would definitely fit into the kinds of homes we are working in, and would certainly make a great addition to our backyard. In fact, I was on a job recently that had brass lighting fixtures that looked nearly identical to the SixFive system, just without the audio.
To get a third-party opinion, I asked my wife what she thought, and straight out of the gate, she loved the way they looked. In fact, her first words were, “Wow! We get to keep those?!” So that’s a great first WAF impression. (For perspective, telling her that we were getting a Trinnov Altitude 16 barely merited a, “Hmm. That’s nice.”)
The subwoofer is the typical oil barrel with a periscope port and “mushroom cap” design used by many. Since it will be mostly out of sight when buried underground, it isn’t trying to win any beauty contests.
The 1U, half-width LSAMP includes analog, optical, and coaxial digital inputs and outputs, letting you easily daisychain multiple systems together for larger projects if needed. The analog outputs aren’t buffered, so depending on your source and how many loop-outs you’ll be making, you might want to go with one of the digital connections.
While the amplifier could handle two subwoofers, it would require reducing the number of satellites to maintain the 4-ohm load the amplifier is optimized for. SixFive also mentioned that they are working on a lighting-only module for landscape fill-in without audio, which will help create a more immersive backyard experience.
Setup
It seems like I’m always chasing down cuts or breaks in the wires in my yard, so I decided to trench the direct-burial-rated wiring into the ground to at least give this system a fighting chance. All that meant nearly a full day of laying out, then trenching and burying, the wiring, making wiring connections, running conduit alongside my house, installing an LB, and cutting in a wall-box for the speaker wire to meet up with the amplifier. Oh, yeah — and digging a 24-inch diameter and 14-inch-deep hole to bury the subwoofer.
After discussing locations with my wife, she decided that the speakers would look best arrayed in the grass just past the pavers around my pool deck. This also happened to be the best location for sound coverage and would provide the most straightforward — i.e., least amount of trenching — for the wiring. I started by placing the first and last speakers where I wanted them, then split the distances between the other six evenly, creating a space of about 9 feet between each speaker, within the 8-to-10 feet spacing that SixFive recommends. I positioned the subwoofer in the middle of them in a spot where I knew the ground was soft and root-free enough to dig. SixFive recommends using 14-gauge wiring for lighting or speaker runs over 150 feet.
I went with an alternating left/right/left/right speaker layout; you could also go all lefts on one side and all rights on the other. The amplifier has individual volume trims for channels 1-2 (left/right), so if you needed one area to be a bit quieter/louder than the other, that would be an option. However, running your source in mono is probably the best bet sonically over such a broad area.
As mentioned, the dual speakers are arranged 180 degrees from each other at the top of the enclosure, but to be honest, I forgot to pay attention to this when installing them; I just plunged the stake into the ground with the wire lead pointing in the direction I wanted. While I’m not sure it would make any real-world sonic difference, you could “aim” the sound a bit toward the area — either side-to-side or front-to-back — you are trying to cover.
For my install, it was easiest to place the transformer at one end of the speaker chain and the amplifier at the other. So, I pulled a run of 14/2 from the transformer that looped to each speaker, and a run of 16/4 from the amplifier that looped to each speaker and the dual voice coil subwoofer, which requires connecting all four wires. There are color-coded leads on each speaker to identify the +/– of both the speaker and lighting portion, and the manual includes several wiring diagrams showing what to do. (They also suggest using a 6-conductor wire that can handle speakers and lights on a single cable.)
Two minor nits. One is that SixFive doesn’t use the standardized wiring color code for the subwoofer connections, instead using Red/Black for left channel and Green/White for right, with Green being the + instead of the industry standard –.
Two is that the system doesn’t include any wiring connectors. SixFive says it figured that installers would likely want to use their preferred weatherproof connection, however, I feel like a system should be complete in the box and include everything you need in order to install it. (Granted, I’m not expecting them to include the actual speaker wiring…) This actually delayed my install as I had to wait until I could bring some connectors home from work. Just know that you’ll need to show up to the job with the appropriate connectors, four per speaker.
One issue I had was finding a nice way to manage all these wire connections and extra wires at each speaker. I ended up zip-tying them in a bundle at the base of the speaker, or you could bury them if the terrain permitted. I did use a Bogen IE1 direct burial junction enclosure to make the connections at the sub, which I buried along with the sub.
The LSAMP has eight EQ presets, from flat, to adding bass boost, to adding a boost to various frequencies in the upper mids (from 6–9 kHz). It is also rack-mountable with included rack ears. The amp has an auto on/off audio sensing feature and has a USB-C connector for service/DSP software updates and a USB-A connection with 5v/1A output that could be used for powering a streaming/Bluetooth device. The Amp’s Phoenix connectors accept wire up to 12 gauge and it has a detachable IEC power cord.
Performance
Before I get to the audio, let me start with the lights. When we moved into our house back in 2000, there was some basic landscape lighting in our backyard, but over the years, the wires got cut, the lights broke, and the transformer failed, so we had no backyard lighting. Flipping the switch on the SixFive transformer when the sun went down and having those eight lights come on for the first time really made our backyard come to life. It adds such a nice detail and makes for a wonderful ring of lights surrounding our swimming pool at night. I actually went and brought out all my family to come and see it.
If a house had a long pathway, these would be a fantastic addition that not only provided some nice lighting but also some wonderful ambience with the music.
The speakers include a 3W 2700k bulb, and they use a standard G4 Bi-pin LED that can be replaced if you need more output or a different color temp.
The SixFive LSTFMR that powers the lights is a nice piece of kit, in a solid and great-looking stainless steel weatherproof package, but it really isn’t anything “special,” and doesn’t include any form of automation. While you could easily add a timer, smart plug, or dusk-to-dawn sensor, SixFive isn’t in the transformer business, and you can get similarly rated transformers on Amazon that include photocells and timers for almost one-tenth the price of the LSTFMR.
The system’s sound quality is spacious and expansive, with a very even volume level all around. Unless I moved closer to one of the satellites, audio always felt like it was playing in this broad arc coming from out ahead of me and then extending out into the sides, and, even when near one of the speakers, there was still a lot of width to the presentation — exactly what you want for filling a backyard with music.
Audio quality lacks a bit of the high-end frequencies of some other outdoor speaker systems and is a bit more diffuse-sounding. SixFive engineer Brad Diedrich, who created the patented speaker design, admitted that the low position of the speakers relative to the listener’s ear level makes high-frequency performance a challenge.
Also, don’t expect the sub to produce impact tremors in your pool. The bass from the subwoofer does a nice job of low-end fill and helping augment the 100 Hz low-frequency limits of the satellites, but it isn’t bass-heavy by any means. For example, the sub couldn’t deliver the full depth of the big bass drop in The Crystal Method’s “High Roller,” or produce the opening timpani and bass drum notes from Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” or the low-end on Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack. But even without the lowest octaves, the sub gave the music enough bottom end to be enjoyable. The sub did deliver that nice, textural bass synth from Bela Fleck’s “Flight of the Cosmic Hippo.” If positioning the subwoofer in a corner is possible, it would likely benefit from that reinforcement.
Overall, I found that the system sounded especially good with pop music, which was generally big in the midrange, without any super low-end. Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” with the opening a capella voices of Ladysmith Black Mambazo singing, had a wonderfully full and spacious sound that just engulfed the entire pool/listening area, and Taylor Swift’s vocoder-enhanced vocals at the beginning of “Delicate” just floated in the backyard space, seemingly coming from everywhere, as did Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” John Mayer’s Born and Raised and Battle Studies albums also sounded really good.
I preferred the sound with the Amp’s EQ to preset #1, which adds a +3 dB bass boost, but you need to be careful as this extra low end can start to produce crackling distortion from the satellites if listening at higher volumes or with bass-heavy content, revealing their low-frequency limitations.
For better or worse, the speakers have a mostly even 360-degree dispersion, so you get loads of coverage in all directions, as opposed to traditional landscape audio systems, which focuses the audio only toward the listening position. For me, with an open backyard, this was great as I got more sound throughout, but if you are concerned about bothering your neighbors with music, this greater dispersion might not be great. Otherwise it helps to provide even more fill.
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If high SPL across a large area is what you need, this system probably won’t do it. Even when dialing the bass down, you’ll likely run into distortion before you get the high volumes you want, unless you are listening to something with virtually no low end, like, say, Vivaldi. I was able to get 80+ dB SPL at all areas around my pool with very consistent levels at all seating areas the same distance away, which was plenty loud, but not loud. More like, the music provides great ambience for the party, but the music isn’t the party.
The Fusion Landscape’s goal is delivering immersive, balanced sound throughout an outdoor space, rather than produce high SPL levels, helping to create a great backyard vibe through light and sound. One killer app for this system would be lining a long pathway leading to a space where the lights and speakers deliver the ultimate ambience along the way.
I can’t overstate the value proposition the SixFive Fusion Landscape system offers, with the whole kit having an MSRP of $3800 (plus a 12V transformer to power the lighting). For this, you get eight stylish speakers to fill an area with sound, plus a whole lighting element that just adds icing on the cake!
800-489-2300 – SIXFIVEAUDIO.COM
Product Specs:
- LSKIT8AMP includes eight LSSPKR4 satellite landscape speaker lights with ground stakes, LSSUB 200-watt direct burial subwoofer, LSAMP 250-watt 2-channel amplifier; available black or brass finish
- Speakers feature dual all-weather 2.5-inch omnidirectional speakers with 100 Hz–20 kHz frequency response; 50 watts RMS, 89 dB sensitivity
- Includes 3-watt, 2700k LED lighting
- Subwoofer has a 10-inch dual voice coil Polypropylene and Santoprene driver designed for outdoor applications
- Amplifier rated 125 watts RMS per channel (4 ohm) with eight selectable DSP EQ presets, analog, Toslink, and coaxial input and outputs, and includes rackmount ears
- Warranty: 3 years on amplifier, 5 years on speakers/subwoofer
