Infinity Compositions Overture 3 (1997)
A seven-driver tower with four 6½-inch woofers and its own bass amplifier — and a 300 Hz resonance that no amount of clever cabinet thinking could fully hide.
Overview
Seven drivers and a built-in amplifier in the bottom front of the cabinet — that's the shape of the thing. The Overture 3 is a moderate-sized tower in Infinity's Compositions line, and it does not do anything by half measures. A 1-inch soft-dome tweeter sits between two 5½-inch cone midranges in a D'Appolito arrangement at the top of the cabinet, and below that a quartet of 6½-inch woofers — two of them firing forward, two firing to the rear — handles everything under the crossover. The rear-firing pair is the party trick: mounted so their motional forces oppose each other, they were meant to cancel cabinet vibration rather than radiate a dipole pattern. Audio (February 1998, p.44) confirmed the drivers are magnetically shielded, which matters if this tower is going to sit beside a CRT television in the home-theater role Infinity clearly intended.
The bass section is self-powered, which puts the Overture 3 in a small club of late-nineties towers that shipped with an onboard amplifier for the low end. That design choice has real consequences for how the speaker behaves at the input terminals. In plain terms, the speaker presents an easy load for any amplifier above the bass region, but the low minimum impedance and wide swing mean cable resistance matters. The reviewer's own arithmetic put the ceiling at about 0.05 ohm of series resistance to keep cable-induced peaks and dips under 0.1 dB, which for a ten-foot run translates to 14-gauge or heavier low-inductance cable. Nobody needs to spend a fortune on wire here, but lamp cord is not the answer either.
Infinity rated the speaker at 94 dB sensitivity. The two cabinets in the review pair matched within ±1 dB from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, which is genuinely good sample-to-sample consistency for a seven-driver tower. On-axis frequency response, measured with the grille off and the bass level control in its middle position, fit a tight 3-dB window from 320 Hz to 20 kHz, and a 6.5-dB window across the whole 30 Hz to 20 kHz range. That's a wide, flat result by any standard of the period — with one significant caveat.
Between 200 and 350 Hz, the response goes lumpy. Cabinet side-wall vibration contributed to the same region, with high-Q peaks and dips between 200 and 300 Hz under high-level sine drive. When the speaker is set up normally with the vent facing the floor, the resonance is significantly diminished — so placement is not a nicety here, it's part of the design. The bass level control itself offers up to 8 dB of boost or 3.1 dB of cut between about 50 and 90 Hz, letting owners tune the bottom end to the room.
Off-axis behavior is where the narrow cabinet earns its keep. Horizontal response stays extremely uniform out to about 13 kHz, narrowing somewhat above that but remaining consistent to ±15°. Vertically, the D'Appolito midrange/tweeter array keeps response uniform within ±10° of axis, with excellent above/below symmetry; beyond ±10° some dips appear in the 2–6 kHz upper crossover region. The narrow baffle broadens coverage and reduces diffraction, and it makes a seven-driver tower look smaller than it is — no small thing in a living room.
Distortion figures are mixed but honest. At 41.2 Hz, harmonic distortion stayed moderate with a 7-volt rms input, at which point the speaker began to sound strained; below 6 or 7 volts the output was clean and robust. At 110 Hz, third harmonic peaked at 2.6% with a 50-watt input, and at 440 Hz harmonic distortion stayed under 0.5% at the same drive. Intermodulation distortion from 440 Hz and 41.2 Hz tones stayed very low below 5 watts but climbed to 3.5% at 10 watts. The limiting factor between 24 and 35 Hz was the built-in bass amplifier — Infinity chose not to include a compressor or limiter, so the amp simply clips rather than protecting itself. Woofer excursion peaked at 0.5 inch peak-to-peak at 16 Hz and 0.4 inch at 38 Hz, with a sharp minimum at 48 Hz, the vented box's tuning frequency. The woofers overloaded gracefully and showed no dynamic offset.
Peak output tells the home-theater story. With room gain, the Overture 3 hit 100 dB SPL at 20 Hz, rose through 110 dB at 62 Hz, plateaued around 111 dB between 80 and 200 Hz, and reached 120 dB by 350 Hz — above 400 Hz it climbs to roughly 125 dB. Maximum bass output is about average for the speakers of its day, which is fair rather than damning: the tower goes deep and loud, but the self-powered bass section is the governor on how hard it can be pushed down low. Input power handling tracks the bass control position closely, from about 20 watts at 20 Hz with the control centered down to roughly 10 watts at 32 Hz where the internal amp takes over, then rising past 100 watts at 100 Hz and 1 kilowatt at 370 Hz.
In listening, Audio (February 1998, p.50) found the Overture 3 clearly benefited from more engineering and design effort than most speakers of the era, noting the extensive use of injection-molded plastic parts across the Compositions line. The reviewer compared them against B&W speakers and found most recordings profited from the Overture's additional brightness, gaining airiness and clarity — with grilles on, that brightness was somewhat reduced. Infinity's own Compositions family filled out the system: Audio (February 1998, p.49) reported the Overture 1 bookshelf at $1,349 per pair for surround duty and the CC-3 center channel at $449, both sent along for a home-theater evaluation with the Overture 3 anchoring the front.
Collectors chasing a pair today should know what they're taking on. The self-powered bass section is the defining feature and the defining risk — an amplifier board buried in the bottom front of the cabinet is not a user-serviceable part in the way a passive crossover is, and it is the component most likely to need attention decades on. The vented duct resonance means placement against the floor matters; a pair hoisted onto stands or set up on a hard reflective surface will not sound like the speaker Audio measured. And the impedance behavior means amplification choice is more forgiving above the bass than below it. Get those three things right — amp, cable, placement — and the Overture 3 delivers a wide, flat, genuinely dynamic tower that was engineered with more care than most of its contemporaries. Get them wrong and the 300 Hz region will tell you about it.
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