HFT
Nearly invisible acoustic treatment.
About the size of a shirt button, yet powerful enough to transform your listening room's acoustics, HFT's may be the single most important accessory you can choose where overall sound quality is concerned. HFTs oscillate at high frequencies in response to acoustic pressure in your listening room to compensate for acoustic distortion and correct for phase anomalies by re-cueing your rooms acoustic response to sound pressure. You will hear an increase in sound stage depth and width, an improvement in clarity and frequency extension, even bass energy can be tamed when HFT's are correctly placed in your room. All this is possible when you follow our easy placement guidelines. HFT's will transform the way your system and room sounds for the better guaranteed, or your money back!
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The sound of your listening room is made up of hundreds if not thousands of resonators – all reacting to the energy your stereo system creates. Each piece of furniture, your walls, your ceiling, equipment racks, glass windows, light fixtures, knick knacks and even your speaker cabinets and the enclosures of your components all resonate out of tune with the music. Think of it this way: your room and its furniture are like one big instrument with 500 strings. Every time your speakers create a note these strings are being excited – and that’s the problem, not one of those 500 strings are in tune. The fact is, they are all resonating out of tune – distorting your music. The resonance of your listening room is literally pushing back on your soundstage, compressing the air and decay of notes and distorting fundamental harmonics in your favorite music. This is why most systems have soundstages that primarily exist in and around the speakers. This is also why many systems are set up like a gigantic pair of headphones with extreme speaker toe-in creating one narrow sweet spot that prevents you from sharing the joy of music with others.
So what to do? In the past, the answer was to dampen a room with acoustic absorption until it measured flat while redirecting reflections with diffusers. Unfortunately, neither of these solutions address the real concern which is how to make your listening room sound like music. Overdamped rooms sound dead with little or no decay and even moderate dampening can stifle the sense of air and decay found in live music. Diffusers render a sound with a little sense of the live hall even when recordings are capable of recreating breathtaking soundscapes. Obviously, venues designed for unamplified acoustic performances would never rely on dampening and diffusion alone. Over-dampen a theater and you won’t hear the subtleties of a solo guitar or the subtle intonation of a piano unless you are sitting near the front row. This is why the best venues are somewhat live with reverberations that complement the performers and their instruments. Where amphitheaters voiced like the average audiophile’s listening room it would have thousands of surfaces resonating out of tune with the music, interspersed with absorption that makes live music sound flat. In fact, the acoustic noise floor in rooms with random resonating items actually increases with volume. It is this variable increasing noise floor that prevents you from ever experiencing the magic of live music in your home.
A new answer. HFTs are tiny high-frequency transducers that clean up high-frequency harmonics in your listening room. You see, harmonics are interconnected, so when you affect harmonics -even those beyond the limits of human hearing – you also affect lower frequency harmonics you can hear. HFTs literally cancel harmonic noise on any surface they are placed. Simply follow our easy placement guidelines, 5 HFTs at a time, to systematically overcome your room’s tendency to fight with the music your system is trying to recreate. HFTs replace random out-of-tune resonance with a sympathetic resonance that complements the music. Just 5 HFTs can affect a meaningful improvement to the average listening room, while additional HFT 5 and 10-pacs improve your listening enjoyment further still until you ultimately bring your entire listening room in sync with the music.
*updated 6/17/24. Now use a 2.0 below the tweeter instead of an X.
Available packs:
HFT wide angle 3 pack - $399
HFT wide angle combo pack (2x Standard 1x X) - $499
HFT X wide angle Each - $199
Review
“ the overall results were quite startling. When my wife walked into the listening room after the process was finally completed, she made one of those quick jaw dropping expressions and sat down without a word. Nothing more was said. She just wanted to listen to the music without interruption. I understood.
Images truly stabilized and were much more clearly defined—even on the most mediocre of recordings. There was considerably more air and immediacy around individual instruments and vocalists. The soundstage extended well beyond the outer edges of both speakers and seemed to reach beyond the front wall and all the way back into the listening position.“
-Robert Youman - August 2019
Review
"These HFTs surprised me the most – their effect on the room was immediately audible. With just a few in our system and we were beginning to hear the holistic changes in the room. We started with the speaker only sets of HFTs, one module per side at a time. Over the course of testing and tuning, we hear subtle shift and changes that end up accumulating to a significant change. The soundstage would grow bigger and provide more depth."
Siao Jer - June 2018
Review
“The HFT/FEQ combination serves to make your listening room canvas more pristine so that when your audio system paints the music on it, the end result is a lot more true to life. Needless to say, the Synergistic Research HFT/FEQ combination I used in this review is not going anywhere. They are now an integral part of my reference audio system.“
-Malcolm Gomes - June 2018 - Issue 97
Review
"Suddenly, the Synergistic name didn’t sound so far-fetched; there was a synergy across the frequency range that rarely happens in audio"
Review
"The FEQ and HFTs has brought me closer to the music more than any product I have ever reviewed. Compared to my previous reference at nearly half the price and considering its size and how it’s applied within our family room (happy wife … happy life), the combination of FEQ and HFTsis my new reference. "
Review
"Even though parts of the Atmosphere/ATM/UEF/HFT system may sound voodooish, these things work, making smaller rooms sound like larger ones and making big multiway speakers disappear in them like two-way mini-monitors. " - JV
Review
"The effect on our system was immediately obvious: A thin layer of hash that had been below my notice (Ain't it always the way?) was removed, clarifying a system that I already thought was exceptional."
HFT
Room Treatment Placement Guide
Easy as 1, 2, 3