What the maker puts in writing
- “4 gloss black 2-way Energy satellite speakers”
- “1 gloss black Energy center channel”
- “200 watt Energy subwoofer with front firing port and 8” driver and patented Ribbed Elliptical Surround(TM)”
- “Perfect for a large or small space surround sound solution” and “Wall mountable”
- Description: “A CNET Editor’s Choice winner for February 2009… Made up of four Take satellite speakers, a Take center channel speaker and one 200-watt Take powered subwoofer”
The amplifier is missing, and no bullet says so
Five passive satellites and a powered subwoofer. The satellites need an AV receiver, and the listing never mentions one.
This shelf settles the cost, because the same system appears twice on it:
Energy 5.1 Take Classic — $275 — reference 1008207 — speakers only
Energy Take Classic + Denon AVR-S670H — $749 — reference 1008207 K — with a 75 W 5.2-channel 8K network receiver
So the receiver is a $474 purchase. The question is whether you already own one.
Four other products here are speakers only: the Klipsch Theater Pack at $549.99, the Klipsch 5.1.4 at $749.99, the R-620F pack at $988.89 and the R-625FA pack at $1,298. Which makes the comparison with the Yamaha YHT-4950U at $499.99 — receiver, five speakers, subwoofer and speaker wire — a comparison between a half-system and a whole one.
The subwoofer is the part worth having
Two hundred watts, an 8-inch driver, and a front-firing port.
The port direction is the detail. A rear-facing port pushed close to a wall is choked: airflow is restricted, the bass compresses, and at high level the port can audibly chuff. A front-facing port does not care where the wall is — which on a subwoofer, the one component people shove into a corner, matters a great deal.
On this shelf only the Klipsch Theater Pack at $549.99 addresses placement differently and as well, with a down-firing wireless subwoofer — down-firing couples to the floor, and wireless means it can go wherever the bass is even.
And the Ribbed Elliptical Surround is a real piece of engineering
The surround is the flexible ring joining the cone to the frame: it lets the cone move while sealing the gap and keeping it centered. A conventional one is a simple half-roll of rubber.
Making it ribbed — corrugated — and elliptical in section changes how it stretches. It stays linear over a longer excursion instead of stiffening up and dragging the cone out of proportion with the signal.
Why that matters on an 8-inch driver: bass output is the volume of air displaced, which is cone area multiplied by travel. With only 8 inches of area, travel is the variable left to work with — and the surround is what limits it.
Two-way satellites, which is better than the alternative
4 gloss black 2-way satellite speakers.
Two-way means each satellite has a woofer and a separate tweeter rather than a single full-range driver. A full-range cone in a small cabinet is asked to produce both the midrange and the treble, and it beams badly at the top — so the balance changes as you move.
The driver sizes are not published, which is the gap. The Goldwood AA5170 at $120.88 publishes its satellites as 6.7 × 4.1 × 4 in cabinets; the Yamaha YHT-4950U publishes 4 × 6 × 4 in satellites and a 10 × 4 × 4 in center.
Nineteen-nine and a stylesheet fragment
The description dates the design itself: February 2009.
On a passive speaker that matters less than almost anywhere. There is no firmware, no codec, no HDMI version — a cabinet, a driver, a tweeter, and a crossover of capacitors and coils. The subwoofer’s internal amplifier is the one part that ages.
What has moved on is the format. Dolby Atmos did not exist in domestic form in 2009, and this is a flat 5.1 system with no height channels. Four Klipsch products on this shelf have them, and the 5.1.4 at $749.99 has four.
And a small sign of how the page was assembled: the description still contains “.caption { fo” — a fragment of a stylesheet left in the text.
What is not published
No frequency response, where the Yamaha YHT-4950U publishes “28Hz/25kHz”. No sensitivity, where the Klipsch R-620F pack publishes 96 dB — the only sensitivity on this shelf, and the figure that decides how much amplifier you need.
No satellite driver sizes. No crossover detail. No impedance. No warranty, where two Klipsch listings publish five years.
18,053 g and 505 × 505 × 572 mm are published, the latter evidently a carton rather than any one component.
Prices quoted in this text were read on October 4, 2026. The live price is at the top of the page.
