Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

How many times have you been told by parents and teachers that everything successful must be built on a strong foundation? It's true in music, where the low frequencies are the foundation the music rests on, like the basement framing a building. If you get that part wrong, where are you? Sitting in the mud, that's where. With no chance to address beauty in the midrange, texture and air above, or other tasty things.

Youngstown, Ohio–based loudspeaker manufacturer SVS made foundations its specialty, starting at the company's very beginning in 1998, when it started by designing subwoofers and only subwoofers. The company didn't start offering regular loudspeakers, with midranges and high frequencies, until 2012. Over time, SVS's high-value speakers got more ambitious until earlier this year, at AXPONA, it introduced its most ambitious loudspeaker yet, the full-range, three-way Ultra Evolution Pinnacle ($4999.98/pair).

SVS stands for Stimpson Vodhanel Sound, after the company's founders, Ron Stimpson and Tom Vodhanel; Tom, the chief designer, left the company in 2007; Ron, the CEO, sold the company in 2011.

"The joke in our industry is the road is littered with the bodies of subwoofer companies that tried to make speakers," Gary Yacoubian, SVS's current president and CEO, told me. "Smith Freeman came on board with others who are speaker designers as opposed to focused on subwoofers. It's been a journey, and the Ultra Evolution Pinnacles are the culmination of that thus far."

Currently, SVS offers 18 models of subwoofer and 20 models of loudspeaker. If the Stereophile Recommended Components list is any guide (and that is what it is meant to be), SVS is building on a strong foundation: The most recent list includes two SVS subwoofers in Class A and a third in Class B; the Prime Wireless Pro, an active loudspeaker, is also on the list. The Ultra Evolution speaker line includes seven models; the Pinnacle is the top.

Content and form
The SVS Ultra Evolution Pinnacle is substantial, deserving of the "tower" designation. With feet attached, they measure 50.2" high, 11.81" wide, and 18.14" deep. Unboxed, each speaker weighs 96.7lb. My review pair was finished in gloss black; the Pinnacle is also available in gloss white and black oak veneer. A one-piece, magnetically attached cloth grille covers the front driver area, unless you remove it. Those feet can be either aluminum spikes or floor-friendly elastomer; both are included. Hookup is via two pairs of gold-plated five-way binding posts, allowing for biwiring and biamping.

There is an elegant, studied symmetry to the Pinnacle's front panels; think of it as a generalization of the D'Apolito MTM concept but with time-alignment built in. SVS calls it "Acoustically centered architecture." A 1" vapor-deposition diamond-coated tweeter is in the center, flanked above and below by a pair of 5.25" composite glass-fiber midrange cones. This MTM configuration of tweeter and midrange drivers is flanked above and below by a pair of 8" woofers that are similar to the midrange drivers in construction, with composite glass-fiber cones. Each front-firing woofer is paired with an identical woofer on the rear. Each cabinet, then, has seven active drivers. There's a port below each woofer on the rear.

The cabinets are constructed from ¾" MDF, designed using finite-element analysis to minimize vibration. The baffles, front and back, are 1" thick, and the edges of the front baffle are chamfered to optimize diffraction. The tweeter and midrange drivers are sealed in a single acoustic-suspension chamber. The ported woofers are implemented in what SVS terms a Force-Balanced Opposed Array, a bipolar design in which the front- and rear-firing drivers fire together, achieving the dual advantages of reducing cabinet movement and mitigating some room interactions. The Pinnacle's symmetry, then, extends top to bottom and front to rear.

The three-way design has crossover points at 140Hz and 1.8kHz, creating a wide frequency band for the midrange drivers. That's challenging for a midrange driver, but the upside is wide coverage of midrange frequencies by a single (rather, a matched pair) of drivers across all but the lowest part of the vocal range. The crossover electronics utilize air-core and iron-core inductors, film and poly capacitors, various high-power resistors, and wide-trace printed circuit boards.

Working in tandem with the crossovers is a time-aligned, fixed cabinet geometry; note the dual-slope profile of the front baffle. The voice coils and center of mass for all the drivers are aligned. The symmetrical layout of the front drivers places the tweeter somewhat lower than it is on many other floorstanders. This is also the vertical center point of the time-aligned driver array—so when listening, pay careful attention to the height of your ears relative to the tweeters.

Looking under the hood (and at the SVS product specs sheet), one notices fine attention to detail and quality materials in the construction of the drivers. The tweeter is constructed with a "cell lattice diffuser" placed on top of an "aircraft-grade aluminum dome" coated with "industrial-grade diamond carbon dust" using vapor deposition; SVS calls it a Diamond Coated Tweeter. The midrange drivers employ cast-aluminum alloy baskets and a vented Kapton voice coil former. The woofers are driven by a long-stroke motor and suspension, also with a vented voice coil former, these from aluminum. The drivers are designed by SVS. Everything is manufactured, and the loudspeakers are assembled, in China.

Basic specifications are well within norms for this type of three-way design. The frequency range is a wide 24Hz– 40kHz. The nominal impedance is given as 6 ohms. I asked for an impedance graph, and the lowest point seems to be at about 2.5 ohms at around 80–90Hz, climbing from there. John Atkinson's measurements will reveal precise figures. Sensitivity is pegged at 88dB/2.83V/m—pretty average among recent designs. Recommended amplifier power range is 20–300 watts. These figures suggest a relatively benign load for a partnering amplifier, but hearing (and measuring) is believing!

Deployment
I slid the SVS Ultra Evolution Pinnacle speakers out of their boxes; rather, I slid the boxes off the speakers. Setup decisions are simple: spikes or elastomer footers? Both are adjustable for height. Grilles or no grilles? I chose no grilles.

I don't consider 96lb light, but these speakers are not as heavy as some I have dealt with recently. I was able to slowly walk them to the default loudspeaker positions in my living room. I do not biwire or biamp, so all I had to do was connect the speaker cables and power up.

In my Downstairs System, I am currently using a hybrid (tubed pre, solid state amplifier) McIntosh MA252 integrated amplifier, which is capable of putting out 100W into 8 ohms, 160W into 4 ohms. The review pair were brand new, so I assumed that the drivers needed some loosening up. I played miscellaneous music for more than a week before I started taking notes. It's always interesting to check out the sound during the earliest stages, and I did. In early stop'n'listen moments, I heard some opaqueness over the upper-mids and highs. They opened up over time.

Positioning the Ultra Evolution Pinnacles was interesting. I have not previously had loudspeakers with rear-firing woofers in the house. When someone asked Gary Yacoubian about positioning during a Zoom session for EISA, he responded, "slight toe-in, with three or four feet from the rear and sides." That's a common, generic recommendation, but it's more important with rear-firing woofers: What you will not want to do, given the rear woofers, is jam these speakers into corners. They don't need boundary reinforcement, and in most cases won't benefit from it.

While the force-balanced opposed array approach may make it easier to address in-room low-frequency resonances, that is not a given. Like any speaker—but maybe more so for the Pinnacles—spending time experimenting, auditioning a wide range of room placements, is a good way to proceed, remembering that small increments can make a big difference: bigger than you expect, bigger than intuition suggests.

In my case, placement of the Ultra Evolution Pinnacles was not unduly challenging, given our largish Victorian double parlor, which has a high ceiling.

I Love a Piano
"I love a piano. I love to hear somebody play, Upon a piano, a grand piano, It simply carries me away."—Irving Berlin

Jim Austin visited the SVS room at this year's AXPONA in April, where the Ultra Evolution Pinnacle was having its worldwide debut. He liked what he heard. The choice of music, though, was less than optimal for a thorough audition; it was (as is usual) intended to show off the Pinnacles' most obvious virtues—wide bandwidth and abundant bass plus excellent imaging. Jim noted, though, that "The ultimate test of a pair of speakers like this will be whether they can reproduce something dry and natural, like a well-recorded piano. ... I'm confident that Sasha's upcoming review of the Ultra Evolution Pinnacle will test this." Talk about throwin' down!