At CEDIA Expo 2006, The Perfect Vision was treated to a private showing of Revel’s new flagship Ultima 2 family of loudspeakers. In talks with Revel’s Kevin Voecks, Director, Revel Products (see a video clip), it became apparent that the three-year design effort that led to the creation of the Ultima 2s leveraged all of the resources of Revel’s parent company Harman International, which is saying a mouthful. Revel, as many of you may know, uses a distinctive “blind testing� regimen to evaluate the performance of its own and of competitors’ loudspeakers. For many years, Voecks said, the original Ultimas reigned supreme in Revel’s in-house tests, but the new Ultima 2s have now decisively claimed the top spot.

The Ultima 2 line consists of the four-way, six-driver Salon 2s ($22k/pair); the three-way, four-driver Studio 2s ($16k/pair); the three-way, three-driver, wall/stand-mount Gem 2s ($5k/each), and the three-way, four-driver Voice 2 center channel speaker ($8k/each). The Ultima 2s feature beryllium tweeters mounted in a newly developed wide-dispersion waveguide, plus titanium midrange drivers and woofers. Among the design goals for the speakers were broad dispersion, ultra-low diffraction, extremely even power response within the room, and very low distortion.

In a brief listening session, the new Salon 2s were very impressive, exhibiting almost shocking levels of “see-through� transparency, lively and lifelike dynamics, full-range bass, and the ability to resolve exceedingly fine musical details that would simply get lost in most other loudspeaker systems. Having heard the already excellent original Salons many times, I can vouch for the fact that the Salon 2 takes a big—to my ears, very big—step forward in performance. Whether you can afford them or not, you really should make an effort to hear the Salon 2s, if only to use their sound as a benchmark.

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