Since speaker manufacturers typically replace a particular model in their line after 3 years, you could say that 1 human year equals about 25 speaker years. That means Revel's original Salon lasted to the ripe old age of 200 — or 8 years to you and me. The engineers behind the Salon didn't want to create a new model just for the sake of creating a new model. Instead, they waited until they'd amassed enough advances to make a substantially better Salon. The result: the Salon2, in the company's Ultima2 Series. (Obviously, the engineers' efforts during this time went straight into R&D, not into thinking up creative new names.)
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The Short Form
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| An imposing, near-perfect super-speaker that's priced and sized for devoted audiophiles only. |
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• Extraordinarily natural, accurate midrange and treble • Potent, powerful bass • Practical and easy-to-use bass and tweeter controls |
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Minus
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• Room-dominating size • Budget-dominating price • Price $22,000 a pair |
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Key Features
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•1-in beryllium dome tweeter; 4-in mid- range; 6 1⁄2-in midrange; (3) 8-in woofers; 53 1⁄4 in high (w/base); 178 lb • Bass-contour and boundary-compensation settings • Tweeter level control with +/-1-dB range in 0.5-dB increments • Hinged door covers speaker-cable connections • Finishes: mahogany, gloss black revelspeakers.com :: 781-280-0300 |
The Salon2 is nothing short of a superspeaker. It weighs as much as a typical adult male, stands as tall as the average fourth-grader, and (for a pair) costs as much as what you'd pay for a nice midsize sedan. It's a serious commitment not just financially but also from a real-estate perspective: To sound its best, it needs to sit about 3 feet out from the wall behind it. Although Revel touts the speaker's ability to blend with a wide variety of architectural styles, the big Salon2 will dominate any room it inhabits — unless it's sharing the space with that Jeff Koons sculpture of Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles.
While Revel itself is a rather small enterprise, it's owned by a huge company, Harman International, which is also the parent of JBL, Infinity, Lexicon, Harman Kardon, and many other audio brands. The audio research facilities in Harman's California headquarters are probably the world's finest, replete with three anechoic chambers for measuring speakers, not to mention a listening lab with motorized platforms that exchange a set of speakers in a matter of seconds for seamless comparisons. Thanks in large part to these unequaled resources, Revel director Kevin Voecks and his team take a more scientific and methodical approach to speaker engineering than probably any other high-end speaker designers can.
At this price, you'd hope the Salon2 isn't just slapped together out of medium-density fiberboard, as most speakers are. Well, it is made from MDF, but it's a sort of mega-version: Nine thin MDF panels are glued together and bent at high pressure to form the curvaceous cabinet. Revel creates the front baffle from a slab of 2-inch-thick MDF. All this mass makes for an exceptionally rigid cabinet that contributes no significant vibration of its own to the sound.
The Salon2 is a four-way design. The three 8-inch woofers have air-moving power equivalent to that of one 14-inch woofer but, according to Voecks, run far cooler and with lower distortion than a single large woofer. Next up is a 6 1/2-inch midrange/woofer, with a 4-inch midrange above that, both boasting snazzy titanium cones. The real star of the front baffle, however, is the 1-inch beryllium dome tweeter. Beryllium is one of the stiffest yet lightest materials used in speaker diaphragms — but it's also exceptionally brittle, highly toxic when vaporized, and therefore extremely expensive to use in manufacturing.
Thanks to the Salon2's bass-adjustment switch, you get placement options other than 3 feet out into the room. The switch has three settings: Normal, Contour (to tame the bass subtly in rooms with poor acoustics), and Boundary (to attenuate the bass substantially so the speaker doesn't boom if placed close to a wall). There's also a tweeter level switch that boosts or cuts the treble by 1 dB in 0.5-dB steps. You can use it to compensate for the slight treble reduction caused by the speaker grille, or just to tailor the treble to your taste.
SETUP
Nothing that weighs 178 pounds could be considered easy to set up, especially if you use the Salon2's frighteningly sharp carpet-piercing spikes. Fortunately, Revel designs its speakers for exceptionally broad dispersion; the sound that projects forward differs little from the sound emitted at an angle of 15° or 30°, so the aim isn't critical.
Two sets of beefy binding posts hide behind a hinged panel on the back of each speaker. They accept spade connectors or banana plugs, but you can't shut the panel if you use the latter.
The Salon2 is more handsome and better-sounding without its grille. But the grille is beautifully executed, made from thin fabric and spindly wire and held in place with magnets hidden in the speaker's front baffle. Turning the treble up half a dB using the switch in back eliminates most of the grille's negative sonic effect.
I listened mainly with the speakers placed 3 feet away from the back wall. Later I moved them 2 feet closer to the wall and set the bass switch to the Boundary mode. With this setup, the bass was slightly less defined and the stereo imaging a bit less dramatic, but the Salon2 retained about 95% of its quality.
TEST BENCH
Sensitivity (SPL at 1 meter with 2.8 volts of pink-noise input)L/R •• 28 Hz to 20 kHz±1.3 dB
The Salon2 has exceptionally even frequency response when measured on-axis or a few degrees off-axis; this is textbook performance few speakers can match. It also exhibits extraordinarily uniform directivity, with only subtle changes in the midrange and a mild reduction in treble (-3 dB at 14.3 kHz at 30°) as you move off-axis. This makes the speaker less sensitive to placement or to room acoustics. Low-frequency extension (-3 dB at 25 Hz) and output (106 dB average SPL from 35 to 65 Hz) are impressive, meaning that you can use the Salon2 without a subwoofer. Given its relatively low impedance and slightly below average sensitivity, the speaker must be used with a high-quality, high-current amplifier for maximum performance.
— B.B.
MUSIC PERFORMANCE
Like the sound of a door closing on a Mercedes coupe, the Salon2's precision is immediately apparent. The speaker sounds extraordinarily clean and deliberate. Woofers stop moving when they're supposed to, instead of ringing and smearing the sound. The tweeter produces no audible trace of distortion. The stereo imaging is incredible — I could easily pick out each instrument in space, even all four members of the World Saxophone Quartet wailing at once. But the Salon2's somewhat elevated tweeter mounting places the image higher than I'm used to hearing.
That beryllium tweeter is like a standout contestant on American Idol: The other drivers sing beautifully, but the tweeter really belts it out. Cymbals, snare drum, and hand percussion simply sparkled, without a single note ever sounding overly bright. Acoustic guitars sounded like I was hearing them in person at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica — I could almost feel the soundboards breathing. Saxophones came across with more detail than I can ever remember hearing.
It was a blast to hear the Salon2's woofers pressurize my room. The drywall strained to contain the sound. I felt every note from the pipe organ in my favorite deep-bass recording, a Telarc CD of organist Michael Murray and the San Francisco Symphony playing Joseph Jongen's Symphonie Concertante. Most speakers can't reproduce its subterranean notes at all.
MOVIE PERFORMANCE
Even though I didn't have Revel's accompanying center and surround speakers — the $8,000 Voice2 and the $10,000-a-pair Gem2 — I ran a few DVDs in stereo to get an impression of how the Salon2s would perform in a home theater setting. When I played James Taylor's Live at the Beacon Theatre, the tweeter revealed a fascinating sonic interplay between cymbals and Taylor's guitar that I never noticed in hundreds of previous hearings.
It's the brutal stuff, though, that really lets the Salon2 show off. The Shoot 'Em Up DVD's combination of nearly nonstop gunfire with an intense rock soundtrack works most woofers nearly to death, but the Salon2's titanium cones never complained. In fact, my 200-watts-per-channel amplifier ran out of juice before the speakers could distort. And the tweeter's detail brought a fresh, terrifying realism to the brontosaurus stampede scene in Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong.
BOTTOM LINE
The Revel Ultima Salon2 is a serious effort by one of the most serious and scientific speaker-design teams in the world. And it demands a serious commitment from its owner, because it costs a lot and takes up a lot of space. But if you want to hear exactly what your favorite music and movies are supposed to sound like, few speakers can equal or exceed this one.