Revel Concerta2 M16 Black

Product Information

Deja vu over and over again and again ad infinitum. Speaker break in has been thoroughly covered multiple times in this forum and uncountable times in other forums. Speaker marketers appear to be the primary source of the audible speaker break in theory whereas speaker engineers say slight changes from break in can be measured but are not audibly noticeable. Harman marketing folks wanted to promote audible speaker break in until Toole and Olive set up a blind test that showed no audibly noticeable change from speaker break in. This was documented in an earlier ASR post quoting Toole: That proved to be the case in our listening sessions, because although the M105’s bass was outstandingly neutral, free of unwanted distortion and stayed very clean even at higher listening levels, the very lowest musical octave was a tad lower in level than you’d hear from, say, a pair of Revel F206s or F208s… or an M106. The CDS50 did very well and put on a brave show. However, we were keen to hear how it performed through the SA20 as, after having the disc spinner already plugged into one of our other amplifiers, we knew that it had more to give.

When approaching your local dealer for a listen it is essential that you discuss a home demo. Take your time; the M16s will grow on you and could prove to be indispensable. I can imagine many people spending years of sonic bliss with these speakers and being ever so grateful that they had the patience to run them in. Find the correct isolation and stands and begin to build a system around them. I did find that I could appreciate the M105's treble, just very clean and detailed without a hint of that "crispness" that defines a fake hifi speaker. Truly smooth highs. At first blush it seems that the response is not flat but if you ignore the hump at 100 Hz and roll off above 10 kHz, the rest is actually pretty close to flat. So tonality should be neutral but with some boosted bass. The high frequency roll off was puzzling as it doesn't match Harman's measurement: Thanks to those connectivity options, the CDS50’s 32-bit/192kHz ESS DAC can also be as used as a standalone DAC/outboard converter for other sources.I am a huge fan of using MTM center speakers upright for stereo applications because I prefer the visual aesthetics of the taller, slimmer cabinets and symmetrical driver arrangements. Value For Money – The Revel Concerta2 M16 is good value for money and the sonic wealth of the speaker befits its price point. It’s a real world speaker at a real world price We must admit to being unsure what the ‘M’ stands for in the M105s’ model number, but only a few seconds after we’d started playing music through them, we would certainly have placed serious money on it standing for ‘Monitor’, because these small standmounters would have to be one of the most accurate, most revealing loudspeaker designs we have ever heard. If we were monitoring music in a recording studio and wanted to hear exactly the sound that had been captured, these Revel Performa3 M105s would be our tools of choice. I found the sound of the Revel Performa3 M106 difficult to describe. No matter what music I played, I could hear no shortcomings—no deviation from neutrality throughout the speaker's extended frequency range, and every recording revealed the review samples to be detailed, dynamic performers with superb soundstaging. So I thought I'd focus on a few aspects of the M106 that particularly impressed me.

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that the SA20 is equipped with rather chunkier speaker output terminals too. Revel is now part of the considerable grouping of product that forms the impressively named Harman Luxury Audio Group. This also includes Mark Levinson, Lexicon, JBL, Harman Kardon, AKG and Arcam and this large (by the standards of Hi-Fi anyway) group is in turn owned by Samsung. Revel seems to have been issued the challenge of making speakers that can complement this considerable selection of electronics brands, leaving JBL to get on with the business of being JBL. Does this mean that the M16 is a flexible friend to many an amp or a speaker struggling to exert its own identity? We have our vertical dip at extreme angles so floor and ceiling should be covered if the room is not too dead already: The reality is wholly positive though. The M16 impressed out of the box and with some more hours on them, they’ve really only improved. In one very important way, this is immediately identifiable as an American speaker. The M16 is big and confident in the way it approaches everything it plays but this is done in a commendably subtle way. When you listen to something like Biosphere’s Substrata, which is at once large scale and also impressively intimate, oscillating between these two extremes, often very swiftly. The Revel is utterly at home at both ends of the scale. It doesn’t impart scale where it shouldn’t be present and delivers it when it should. It is fairly unusual to have a product turn up and me to have no real idea how it will sound. My exposure to other Revel speakers has not been extensive and has occurred mainly with rather more expensive members of the range in turn being powered by some very serious pieces of kit indeed. The M16, costs a tenth as much as the last Revel I listened to and much as I don’t think the equipment I have to hand is shabby, it also costs a great deal less than the Levinson gear it was running off.measurements is touched on in Objective Loudspeaker Measurements to Predict Subjective Preferences. The direct Additionally, thanks to the tweeter’s dispersion, taking the Revel Concerta2 M16 out of the corner of the room pays off and allows them to show what an impressively wide and open sound stage they can produce. The upshot of this is that toeing in appears more to do with personal taste than necessity here. SA10, CDS50, Revel Concerta2 M16 Review Then there’s the authority of the presentation, helped by the Revel’s ability to dig deeply in the bass. These speakers may just be 37cm tall, but close your eyes and you’d swear you were listening to decently sized floorstanders. The M16's grille attaches magnetically, so there's no ugly hardware on the front baffle of the speaker if you decide to leave the grille off. Tested by instrument and by ear