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What We Think
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| If you have the space and the coin, and a taste for accurate, unhyped sound, you will be richly rewarded. |
SETUP Unlike Revel’s curvaceous flagships, the Concerta F12 left/right front speaker and C12 center are big, boring, square-rigged structures, though nicely finished in vinyl you’d swear was real wood veneer. I muscled them in place, the F12s on either side of my 42-inch plasma TV and the C12 center just below the screen on my usual center stand. (Revel offers a nice metal pedestal for its center speakers as a $200 option, but I needed more height.) The S12 surround features a three-position switch on its front face to select bipole, dipole, or monopole mode — more on that later. I placed the surrounds on high shelves flanking the listening area, but simple keyhole hardware allows wall-mounting.
Given the C12’s and S12s’ above-average bass extension, I set the bass crossover in my preamp/processor at 60 Hz for a better blend. I initially balanced up the surrounds in their dipole mode, my preference for movies and a good deal of multichannel music.
The B12 subwoofer furnishes a single parametric room-EQ band to help tame your room/placement combo’s worst low-frequency peak. It comes with a CD of test signals and instructions for downloading optimization software (Windows only) from Revel’s Web site. I did so, and the result of running the optimization routine was very close to the correction I have dialed in on my everyday sub, which has a similar feature.
MUSIC PERFORMANCE In some ways, the essence of my job is faultfinding (and my significant other says I’m very good at it), so an all-around-excellent speaker system leaves me little to say. This is one of those occasions. The Revel F12s play two-channel music with such unspectacular accuracy that it adds up to something pretty spectacular. Its hallmarks are clarity, precise and detailed shadings of tonal color, dynamic precision, and an utter indifference to volume. Unlike many speakers, the F12s’ sense of transparency remains consistent whether the music is very dynamic (say, acoustic jazz) or relatively static (typical pop) and whether it’s played at chamber-music or arena-rock levels.
This applied both to stereo and multichannel playback. During the Revels’ stay in my system I happened across Norah Jones and the Handsome Band, a live set from Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium (culled from the Live in 2004 DVD), which I recorded in HD from the INHD2 high-def channel. With a gorgeous “stereo-plus-three-ambience-channels” mix, this performance showed off many of the Revels’ strengths, from microscopically detailed renditions of Ms. Jones’s many vocal inflections to highly evocative low-end detail and dynamics. I even swore I recognized the distinctive, papery thud of the bassist’s vintage Ampeg B-15 amp — familiar to me from a thousand poorly attended gigs about a million years ago.
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The Short Form
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| WWW.REVELSPEAKERS.COM / 781-280-0300 / $3,794 |
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Plus
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| •Superb all-around performance. •Useful subwoofer room-EQ and software. •Multimode surrounds optimize sound for source and location. |
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Minus
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| •Big, boxy, boring design. •Center speaker lacks boundary-compensation controls. |
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Key Features
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| •System total $3,794 •F12 front left/right speakers 1-in tweeter, 53/8-in midrange, two 8-inch woofers; 423/8 in high; 63 lbs ($1,298 a pair) •C12 center speaker 1-in dome tweeter, 4-in cone midrange, two 61/2-inch cone woofers; 207/8 in wide; 32 lbs ($499) •S12 surround speaker two 1-in dome tweeters, two 5-in cone midranges; 117/8 in high; 12 lbs ($998 a pair) •B12 subwoofer 10-in aluminum-cone driver; 650-watt amp; 1-band parametric room-EQ; 131/4 x 141/4 x 16 in; 64 lbs ($999) •Maple, black-ash, or cherry veneer finish (S12: black or white only) |
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Test Bench
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| The F12 tower had tightly controlled directivity and unusually extended and powerful bass for a nonsubwoofer. The C12 center also had unusually well-controlled directivity, probably due to the vertically aligned midrange/tweeter array. The S12 surround had operating characteristics consistent with its dual-face bi/di/monopole driver array, but sensitivity and bass limits varied with mode selection. The B12 subwoofer had excellent extension. — Tom Nousaine
Full lab results |
MOVIE PERFORMANCE I expected a lot from the Revels on movie playback, and a lot is what I got. I began with a few of my favorite torture tests for dialogue integration, sound field wholeness, and bottom-octave oomph, and came up empty — it was all there. The C12 center speaker made a tonal and vocal-presentation match with the left/right towers that approached the best I’ve heard. The timbre match between them was nearly perfect, and movie dialogue had excellent intelligibility no matter where the volume was set. The three-way C12, with its “vertical-array” stacked midrange and tweeter between dual woofers, sounded superb from either side, escaping the flabbiness, dulling, or honkiness you hear with many horizontal two-way centers. Placed as it was under my widescreen TV, it did sound just a touch heavier than the F12s — the C12 lacks the boundary-compensation (and tweeter-level) controls of more expensive Revel centers.
But in the overall scheme this is a mere quibble. The Concerta suite produced world-class home theater sound. The Aviator DVD demands a versatile system with strength and finesse in equal measure, and the Revels came through with full impact and detail: from the cloying ambience of the opening flashback to the (literally) in-your-face crash in Chapter 24, the Revels produced engaging, high-impact sound, free of subwoofer boom, muffled voices, sizzly surrounds, and other common movie-sound faults.
The S12 surrounds dealt out a superbly integrated, naturally diffuse rear sound field, and I couldn’t make the B12 subwoofer misbehave no matter what kind of deep-bass material I played or at what volume. It punched out palpable bass to well below 25 Hz, and while it doesn’t play quite as loud as my more expensive 12-inch reference sub, it was just about indistinguishable. On movies as well as music, the Concerta system’s overall balance may initially seem a shade brighter than you’re accustomed to, but I came to realize that this was simply the sound of dead-accurate response — without the “enhanced” lower midrange common to so many speakers — and smooth treble.
BOTTOM LINE The latest Revels may not be dramatic and swoopy-looking like their bill-topping Ultima siblings, but if you close your eyes and listen, the family resemblance is striking: strict tonal accuracy, impressive dynamic capability, superbly complementary and competent center and surrounds, and a subwoofer that delivers about as much bass power and honest extension as you’ll get from a 10-incher. What more can you ask?
Test Bench: Revel Concerta Home Theater Speaker System
by Tom Nousaine
Frequency response (at 2 meters)
front left/right: 37 Hz to 14 kHz ±3.9 dB
center: 79 Hz to 11 kHz ±3.0 dB
surround: 86 Hz to 19.7 kHz ±3.1 dB
subwoofer: 32 Hz to 115 Hz ±2.0 dB
Sensitivity (SPL at 1 meter with 2.8 volts of pink noise)
front left/right: 91 dB
center: 90 dB
surround: 87 dB
Impedance (minimum/nominal)
front left/right: 2.9/6 ohms
center: 3.3/7 ohms
surround: 2.9/8 ohms
Bass limits (lowest frequency and SPL with limit of 10% distortion at 2 meters in a large room)
front left/right: 25 Hz at 77 dB
center: 80 Hz at 94 dB
surround (switch in bipole position): 80 Hz at 87 dB
subwoofer: 20 Hz at 80 dB
average SPL from 25 to 62 Hz: 100 dB
maximum SPL at 62 Hz: 107 dB
bandwidth uniformity: 94%
All of the curves in the frequency-response graph are weighted to reflect how sound arrives at a listener's ears with normal speaker placement. The curve for the left/right front channels reflects response of the floorstanding F12 averaged over a ±30° window, with double weight at 30° (the most typical listening angle). The center-channel curve reflects response of the C12 averaged over ±45°, with double weight directly on-axis of the primary listener. The surround-channel curve shows the response of the S12 averaged over ±60°.
The F12 had highly uniform directivity and deeper, stronger bass capability than many larger speakers, with slight peakiness above 1 kHz and a shallow trough between 200 and 700 Hz. Although the top octave had softly falling response, I also observed a tweeter resonance at 24 kHz (not shown in graph), but this won't be audible.
The C12 center speaker shared this last characteristic and also the tightly controlled directivity. That's unusual for a low-rider center speaker and is apparently due to the vertically arrayed midrange/tweeter complement, which completely frees the C12 from the off-axis lobing so common with such speakers.
The S12 surround had characteristics common to dual-face speakers. Both sensitivity and bass limits were reduced in the dipole and monopole settings. Further, there was a moderate amount of lobing when I measured the speaker from far off-axis with its bipole or dipole setting engaged. These results are typical for these types of speakers and generally not problematic for a surround. In the monopole setting, frequency response was marginally smoother but fell significantly below 400 Hz.
The B12 subwoofer's bass limits were measured with it set to maximum bandwidth and placed in the optimal corner of a 7,500-cubic-foot room. In a smaller room users can expect 2 to 3 Hz deeper extension and up to 3 dB higher sound-pressure level (SPL). The B12 had good low-end extension but moderate overall SPL capability. Although the crossover control is marked from 50 to 175 Hz, the actual acoustical turnover frequencies ranged from 52 to 115 Hz. The B12 had useful response up to 152 Hz when the crossover was bypassed.
The subwoofer provides three room-correction EQ controls for taming the most common low-frequency mode in typical listening rooms: a Center Frequency knob to select the center of the equalization band, a Bandwith dial to select the range of frequencies affected on either side of that center, and an EQ control to dial in the amount of attenuation. The Center Frequency and Bandwidth controls were reasonably accurate (within 10% of their marked settings), but the actual acoustical attenuation varied significantly from the markings of the EQ control. When the EQ knob was set to its -15-dB mark, the measured attenuation varied between -4 and -12 dB depending on how the Center Frequency and Bandwidth controls were set. Although there was only 4 dB of level/crossover interaction over the full range of the crossover control, the Bandwidth, Center Frequency, and EQ controls exhibited twice that much level interaction when adjusted to different settings.