Revel Ultima Salon2 Loudspeaker

A Tour-de-Force in Contemporary Loudspeaker Design

Most reports of a great-sounding demonstration at CES or CEDIA are followed by the qualifier “… for a show,” as in: “The XYZ sounded fabulous… for a show.” That’s because it’s rare to hear truly first-rate sound in a hotel room from a system that was set up the day before.

But the demonstration of Revel’s new Ultima Salon2 at last year’s CEDIA show was a different matter. Designer Kevin Voecks played the work-in-progress speaker at an off-site hotel for select members of the press, and made a deep impression upon all who heard it. The sound had a remarkable coherence and articulation, and a clarity that was breathtaking. I was so captivated that I wanted to just sit and listen to music for the rest of the afternoon. Clearly, something special was going on.

Revel’s flagship is a complete rethinking of the original Salon launched with great fanfare ten years ago. The company was formed in 1995 by the consumer-electronics giant Harman International to compete in the upper-end loudspeaker market. With Harman’s significant financial resources, sister-company JBL’s engineering chops in driver design and manufacturing, Voeck’s high-end design expertise, stateof- the-art acoustic-testing facilities, and a listening-test regimen developed by Dr. Floyd Toole (formerly of Canada’s famed National Research Council), Revel was a serious endeavor. But forget what you know about the sound of the original Salon and Studio; the Salon2 isn’t an incremental improvement over its predecessor, it’s a quantum leap in every performance parameter.

The Salon2 is a four-way, six-driver design in a tall, narrow enclosure. The cabinet is striking in its beauty, from the highgloss mahogany finish, to the elaborately contoured baffle, to the rounded rear. The enclosure rests on a pedestal slightly larger than the box itself. The open-air pedestal gives the Salon2 a wider and more stable footprint, and also allows the speaker to be ported at the bottom.

The rounded rear panel—there is no “back” to the speaker— presents a design challenge: How to affix binding posts? Revel has solved this dilemma with a recessed area covered by a smoked Plexiglas door. Push open the rounded door to expose two sets of gold-plated input terminals. Loudspeaker cables can be routed through a channel in the area below the door for a very neat and tidy look. The input-terminal plate contains two adjustments: one for tweaking the tweeter level, and another to adjust the bass balance to compensate for placement near boundaries. Even the grille attachment method is clever; slip the grilles over the baffle and invisible magnets hold it in place. This entire loudspeaker is beautifully engineered and executed at the highest level. (See sidebar for technical details.)

Listening

The term “clarity” seems to have fallen out of favor in audio reviewing, perhaps because it is too simple and plain. But if I had to describe the Salon2 with a single word, it would be “clarity.” This loudspeaker has a quality that can be compared to a perfectly transparent and pure crystal—such is the low level of colorations and distortions.

The Salon2’s most salient characteristic (if you can call it a characteristic of the loudspeaker) is the quality that struck me at the CEDIA demo—a startling coherence and transparency that took a big step forward in seemingly removing the loudspeaker from the signal path. This impression was fostered not by what the loudspeaker was doing, but more precisely, by what the loudspeaker wasn’t doing—adding timbral colorations, introducing distortion, and otherwise making its presence known. Instruments had a palpability and vividness, both spatially and in tone color, without the slightest hint of forwardness. Timbres were remarkably lifelike and natural, and the overall presentation sounded like music rather than a disparate group of drivers in a box.

The Salon2’s treble reproduction was quite simply the best I’ve heard from a dynamic loudspeaker. The top end was highly detailed, but not in a brash or analytical way. Cymbals, for example, were portrayed with a delicacy and inner detail that must be heard to be believed. It was as though the metallic sheen overlaying the treble we’re so accustomed to hearing in reproduced music was stripped away to reveal the nuance and subtlety of the cymbal’s texture. The instrument went from sounding like a coarse burst of white noise to a highly complex and subtle rendering in which I could hear the overtones shimmering off the cymbal’s surface along with the finely filigreed decay. In addition to this extraordinary treble resolution, the top end was free from grain and glare. In the treble, the Salon2 had the fine resolution of transient detail of the best ribbons, the transparency of an electrostatic, and the dynamics and the impact of a dynamic driver.