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Carlo currently lives in Granville, Ohio with his wife, two young sons and a pair of hyperactive dachshunds. As a new company with interesting products claiming impressive performance, Perlisten is more than just a pleasant surprise. They have come to market with a fully formed product line and production pipeline and the speaker and subwoofer models they provided me for review are simply superlative. While aesthetics is the most subjective of things, I found the design and finish of all the products to be extremely appealing.
Through that formative experience, Carlo developed and appreciation for good music, and for good sound reproduction. The question of what makes one piece of equipment sound better than another is something that he’s always found fascinating. Also, as a budding graphic artist, the aesthetic aspects of a given piece of gear became increasingly of interest to his eyes. It was at about that time as well that Carlo began purchasing “Audio Magazine” on a regular basis and came to appreciate, in particular, the writing and reviewing of the late Leonard Feldman.
Pioneer VSX-534 5.2 Channel Home Audio Smart AV Receiver *VSX534
If they stayed on, the response at 5-degrees would start dropping which we do not want to happen. At 2 kHz – 3 kHz the outer tweeters have turned off and only the central tweeter is on. Unfortunately, that center tweeter is radiating over a wide-angle.
Even when listening casually to this CD while well away from the speakers, at my computer desk, what I was hearing often sounded so good that I had to stop what I was doing to turn around and just enjoy the music. Now, having acquired a decent understanding of the speaker’s sound character, I brought the twin R212s subwoofers into the studio to create a 2.2 channel system to see how that would fare. Using the Anthem STR preamp’s bass management and room correction capabilities, I was able to blend both the monitors and subwoofers together with stereo bass. The dual-driver, push-pull design of the R212s subwoofers provided an unyielding supply of tight and authoritative bass whenever the situation called for it. And by just “juicing” the overall bass level by 2 dB, it brought almost stupid levels of fun to certain bass-heavy electronica and rock tracks! The latest version of REW also allows for calculating PEQ data for the Perlisten sub as an added bonus.
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Different speakers will produce stronger early reflections back to the ears than others. Even if the DI is monotonic and close to linear like the ones shown above, the level of these curves will differ between speakers. Before we move to our measurements let’s looks at the anechoic CEA-2034 response curves supplied by Perlisten. These were made outdoors with the speaker on very high stands to attenuate floor reflections.
These woofers come in about 600 Hz and slam the vertical radiation response back down. Not until 300 Hz, where the room, not the reflections, dominates the response at the listening position does the vertical radiation pattern of the R7t move to converge to the on-axis amplitude. The fundamental design criteria for good-looking CTA-2034 curves are that the listening window should be flat.
ANTHEM MRX 740 Home Theater Receiver, A Video Review
The custom subwoofer app is extremely well designed and offers a ton of control. I could have easily ended up with this setup when I setup my new (first “real”) HT last year, but ended up going with Ascend speakers instead of EMP. I also bought the previous generation subwoofer from SVS and I already had sources so that didn't factor in.
The front baffle is made from a solid HDF block that has been carved to the desired shapely result to house the drivers just so. The whole shebang sits on a curvy but heavy steel plinth with 4 substantial feet with polished rose gold spikes. Per tower the S7t cabinets are properly inert and, once you place them, they aren’t going anywhere. These were some of the heaviest loudspeakers that my son and I had to navigate down the stairs and into our basement HT. The speakers also have two internal 3.5-inch down-firing ports with the air emptying through the rectangular mesh openings, all around the base. Perlisten includes foam plugs to stuff the ports and change the S7t to a sealed tuning but installing them requires turning the speakers on their side and removing both the plinth and another metal plate to access the ports.
Such was the case when I was introduced to an upstart company called Perlisten Audio. I also discovered that, because of said history and experience, these guys own/control most of their production chain so they aren’t designing this stuff and farming it out to a contract factory. They are building it themselves at their own facilities and are exercising stringent QC throughout the process.
On rare occasions, I’ll get a speaker or sub in here that will significantly aggravate that frequency. I don’t know what it is about the specific speaker/room interaction combination that causes a peak that large, but it was happening here and now, and it was audible. Given my limited positioning options in this room, it left me with one option to remedy the situation, room correction. So, after a few more measurements and engaging Anthem ARC Genesis room correction with a maximum limit of 600 Hz, the room resonance peak was thoroughly banished.
Perlisten claims that having two drivers sharing the same common air volume results in a 10 dB reduction in even-order harmonics. The drivers themselves were completely designed by Perlisten to have a high sensitivity, low mass, low inductance, and low distortion with a very long linear motion. The drivers are powered by a sizeable Class-D amplifier capable of outputting up to 1.3 K Watts of power for short-term bursts.
The Directivity Indexes go up when the power response or early reflections goes down relative to the listening window , so we see the Directivity Indexes going up around the crossover with speakers with spaced drivers. A few years back THX decided to revamp and broaden their certification levels that categorized home theater equipment according to room size and viewing distance. People have debated the benefits of THX certifications for a while now but there is no argument that the requirements for equipment to reach those certifications is rigorous, particularly for loudspeakers. The Dominus level alone is pretty much a doubling of the limits for Ultra.
First, having five Perlisten DPC-Arrays around me resulted in some of the most consistent sound quality in each of our four theater chairs that I have experienced to date. Second, sitting closer than 9 feet away from the main/center speakers, in a much smaller room than my studio, didn’t result in the S7t or S7c overpowering the space. Far from it, everything sounded just as detailed as in the studio but now within a cohesive bubble of immersion that made effects like pans and flyovers sound even more convincing. Third, despite their 4-ohm impedance rating, the speakers were sensitive enough to be driven off my Anthem MRX1120 AVR’s amplifier resources effectively at our regular listening volumes. The speaker was a tonal match to the mains and surrounds making music and effects a seamless blend across the main channels.
Recall this is where the floor reflections are the most energetic in reflection since they have the smallest path to the ear. Note that the highest quality professional speakers designed for mid-field to far-field usage have deep waveguides to control the room acoustics and create the most accurate mix. To conclude the measurement section, this speaker is a significant advance on what has been about 25 years of evolution of the 3-way speaker with a vertical array of a dome tweeter, cone midrange, and woofer. The use of computer-aided design tools was essential in these speaker’s development. The advances across the past 25 years have been documented in both AES papers and an examination of the finished product.
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