KILLER SOUNDS ON A BUDGET:

We were excited enough to be among the first to receive Pioneer’s new Atmos-enabled Elite speaker system for review, but when the company sent along legendary audio engineer Andrew Jones to install them, that was something else entirely. The man behind the speaker’s design and engineering — whose name is stamped right on the tell-tale white Pioneer speaker boxes — personally visited our testing studio, set up and calibrated our next-gen surround system. And well … we geeked out a little bit.In 2010, Best Buy approached Pioneer with an idea: a speaker that delivered incredible performance at a shockingly low price — a value proposition so enticing, it would be impossible to turn down. Pioneer accepted the challenge, and tapped Andrew Jones to head up the project. At the time, Jones was busy designing a $40,000 pair of reference speakers for Pioneer’s high-end TAD division. This project would require a radically different approach, transitioning from “cost is no object” to wringing the most performance from every penny. The result was the first generation of Andrew Jones signature speakers, which debuted to rave reviews. Subsequent revisions resulted in the more recently-introduced Pioneer SP-PK2FS, which we reviewed last year. Now, Jones is back with an Elite series of speakers designed to deliver the new Dolby Atmos cinema surround sound experience in the home. They’re admittedly more expensive than the last line, but are still designed to deliver performance that rivals speaker systems several times its cost.