Got some Revel's up front for your LCRs and want to do the same for the sides and rears, without compromising preformance or space in your theater? Now's your chance.
Revel, known for their excellent sounding, if somewhat whacky looking loudspeakers, is ready for a new foray into the world of architectural loudspeakers with their appropriately monikered, Architectural Series of in-wall and in-ceiling loudspeakers. If you’re looking to fill in your surround channels with something as inconspicuous as your Revel LCRs are not, they’ve now got a speaker you can really sink your teeth into.
Revel, part of Harman’s high performance group, and with good reason, has introduced these speakers to be an acoustic match for their free-standing Ultima2, Performa and Concerta models. There are 10 in-ceiling and 11 in-wall models in the new series, with woofers from 6-1/2 to 9 inches.
Tired of standing on the top of a 12 foot ladder balancing your Makita in one hand holding and the speaker in the other as you try to get everything cinched down? Well, you’ll love these new speakers. Your worries are over on that score. They use Revel’s RollerLock mounting mechanism that enables tool-less clamping to the sheet-rock.
To ensure a sleek appearance and easy installation, they also incorporate the company’s magnetic adhesion, bezel-less grill system. Designers will love the fact that the speakers come with either round or square grills to minimize the speaker’s aesthetic impact.
The driver compliment includes Micro Ceramic Composite (MCC) cone woofers and aluminum dome tweeters, mounted in a special waveguide that helps deliver a seamless transition between the drivers. The waveguide, coupled with the unique driver construction allow the speakers to show off the fine details in any soundtrack musical recording, while also rocking the room with thunderous dynamics and all the while maintaining tremendous accuracy.
Why is a rigid, yet highly damped speaker cone material such as MCC important? Well, if the speaker cone flexes, or breaks up, it introduces phase and frequency response anomalies that detract from the sound. In multi-element loudspeaker designs, speaker designers try to minimize woofer flexing because of the distortion it introduces.
The challenge comes when trying to increase strength without also increasing weight. All manner of different construction materials and techniques have been used to achieve this goal, with some being more effective than others. Modern materials science and computer modeling techniques have allowed loudspeaker designers to achieve performance targets heretofore unattainable.
Computer modeling lets different cone constructions be built in the computer, rather than being physically built. That means dozens or even hundreds of different cone designs can be examined for the best possible characteristics, rather than the 4, 5, or 6 that were possible before the advent of such technologies.
