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Perlisten ? new speakers on the block

littleaudioco said:
I believe one of the guys designed some speakers for Arendal at some point, a previous range I think, not the current stuff. But then, Andrew Jones has designed speakers for TAD, Elac, KEF, Pioneer, and a few others, but it doesn’t mean they all sound similar. Some individuals on one forum were trying to say that Arendal was basically as good as Perlisten based on that, but cheaper. Designers have to work with what they’ve got, hence different projects turn out differently. Perlisten has pretty much been a no-holds-barred project, and that shows in the design, execution, and sound quality of the products.

on a general note, the D215s sub and the S Series (as an AV package) have just won EISA awards.
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Thanks.
What are your thoughts on the R7? Can you comment on how they compare to Kef Ref3, MA PL300?
How much does the R7 give up to the S7?

Thanks
 
indus said:
Thanks.
What are your thoughts on the R7? Can you comment on how they compare to Kef Ref3, MA PL300?
How much does the R7 give up to the S7?

Thanks
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I’m unboxing the R7t today, although it’ll take a bit of time to run them in. Just running in the R4b and R5t now. They’re quite smooth initially, and need time to loosen up.

KEF are excellent speakers, most will know that I like them. They measure well, and that’s thanks to the tech behind them. From that point of view, I think Perlisten are the first brand to come along to challenge the technicalities of the KEF design, and I really think they’ll give them a run for their money.

The way the whole range has been designed, you just get more as you go up the range. This isn’t always the case with many speaker manufacturers, like Dynaudio, which seem quite patchy from a sound point of view between models. Never really got on with their floorstanders. The whole Perlisten design centres around the DPC array, which is just as important to Perlisten as the UniQ array is to KEF. Main difference is quite a restricted dispersion vertically, removing issues caused by floors and ceilings. This DPC array, with one HF dome and two mid domes, covers from just above 1kHz and upwards, so the majority of the sound you hear will be identical between all models. What you get as you go up are extra bass drivers, adding extension and output - you get ‘more’.

This goes for the two ranges as well. The designs are essentially the same, but the S Series has carbon ply bass drivers, carbon ply mid domes, and a beryllium HF unit - the R Series uses soft dome HF and mids, and the bass drivers are a pulp composite - the main areas to keep costs down. I guess if you look at the S Series as the no-holds-barred pinnacle design, the R Series is like KEF’s R Series - basically the same thing, just not as good, limited by its price constraints. I guess you’re looking at about 80% of what the S Series is, although this is always hard to quantify.

In comparison to KEF, I guess they’re similar in a lot of ways. The Perlistens are a little more room friendly with a downward firing port, so you can place them closer to a back wall - the KEFs need some space. They’re just as demanding as the KEFs, maybe a little more so on some models as they dip into the 2ohm region, so the same care needs to be taken with amplification. I don’t think the PL range will be a worry to the Perlisten R Series. As for the actual sound, obviously, that’s a personal thing!

It’d be interesting to put the S7t up against the Blades - if the S7t was made in the U.K. or U.S., they’d likely be around £25k, which puts them in Blade territory. They might look a bit more conventional, but it’s two models aiming to more or less achieve the same thing, but in a slightly different way. From personal experience, I do know that Blades need some space to breathe properly…
 
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littleaudioco said:
I’m unboxing the R7t today, although it’ll take a bit of time to run them in. Just running in the R4b and R5t now. They’re quite smooth initially, and need time to loosen up.

KEF are excellent speakers, most will know that I like them. They measure well, and that’s thanks to the tech behind them. From that point of view, I think Perlisten are the first brand to come along to challenge the technicalities of the KEF design, and I really think they’ll give them a run for their money.

The way the whole range has been designed, you just get more as you go up the range. This isn’t always the case with many speaker manufacturers, like Dynaudio, which seem quite patchy from a sound point of view between models. Never really got on with their floorstanders. The whole Perlisten design centres around the DPC array, which is just as important to Perlisten as the UniQ array is to KEF. Main difference is quite a restricted dispersion vertically, removing issues caused by floors and ceilings. This DPC array, with one HF dome and two mid domes, covers from just above 1kHz and upwards, so the majority of the sound you hear will be identical between all models. What you get as you go up are extra bass drivers, adding extension and output - you get ‘more’.

This goes for the two ranges as well. The designs are essentially the same, but the S Series has carbon ply bass drivers, carbon ply mid domes, and a beryllium HF unit - the R Series uses soft dome HF and mids, and the bass drivers are a pulp composite - the main areas to keep costs down. I guess if you look at the S Series as the no-holds-barred pinnacle design, the R Series is like KEF’s R Series - basically the same thing, just not as good, limited by its price constraints. I guess you’re looking at about 80% of what the S Series is, although this is always hard to quantify.

In comparison to KEF, I guess they’re similar in a lot of ways. The Perlistens are a little more room friendly with a downward firing port, so you can place them closer to a back wall - the KEFs need some space. They’re just as demanding as the KEFs, maybe a little more so on some models as they dip into the 2ohm region, so the same care needs to be taken with amplification. I don’t think the PL range will be a worry to the Perlisten R Series. As for the actual sound, obviously, that’s a personal thing!

It’d be interesting to put the S7t up against the Blades - if the S7t was made in the U.K. or U.S., they’d likely be around £25k, which puts them in Blade territory. They might look a bit more conventional, but it’s two models aiming to more or less achieve the same thing, but in a slightly different way. From personal experience, I do know that Blades need some space to breathe properly…
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Thank you for your response, lots of great insight.
I've had MA PL300 mark 1 for many years now and have been very happy with them. They are in a large open plan room (8m by 8m) but still need to be close to a side wall and rear wall. They would sound absolutely awful in this position if it weren't for the fact that I use a Trinnov room correction device.
This sorts out a lot of issues and makes them sound very good indeed.
The Trinnov is used by many mixers/sound engineers that work with some of the biggest recording artists in the world.

I'm looking to upgrade and this would be my final speaker. The Perlisten design appeals due to its claimed room friendly design, this would potentially give the Trinnov less work to do in the digital domain, which is a good thing.

The Kef Meta Ref5 and the S7 at circa £16k+ are probably too much money for me, I can't really justify it given what's happening in the economy.
So that leaves Kef Meta Ref3 vs R7 at circa £10k, and £10k is hardly loose change!
At this price point the Meta 3 worries me a bit as it only has two 6.5 inch bass drivers vs the two 8 inch ones I have currently in the PL300.
I listen to a lot of bass heavy edm and the room is large so bass output is important to me. So here the R7 takes the advantage as it has four 6.5 inch drivers.

Anyway, excuse my ramblings I'm just thinking out aloud!
 
indus said:
Thank you for your response, lots of great insight.
I've had MA PL300 mark 1 for many years now and have been very happy with them. They are in a large open plan room (8m by 8m) but still need to be close to a side wall and rear wall. They would sound absolutely awful in this position if it weren't for the fact that I use a Trinnov room correction device.
This sorts out a lot of issues and makes them sound very good indeed.
The Trinnov is used by many mixers/sound engineers that work with some of the biggest recording artists in the world.

I'm looking to upgrade and this would be my final speaker. The Perlisten design appeals due to its claimed room friendly design, this would potentially give the Trinnov less work to do in the digital domain, which is a good thing.

The Kef Meta Ref5 and the S7 at circa £16k+ are probably too much money for me, I can't really justify it given what's happening in the economy.
So that leaves Kef Meta Ref3 vs R7 at circa £10k, and £10k is hardly loose change!
At this price point the Meta 3 worries me a bit as it only has two 6.5 inch bass drivers vs the two 8 inch ones I have currently in the PL300.
I listen to a lot of bass heavy edm and the room is large so bass output is important to me. So here the R7 takes the advantage as it has four 6.5 inch drivers.

Anyway, excuse my ramblings I'm just thinking out aloud!
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I’ve always been a believer in getting the right speakers for the room forst and foremost, and setting them up to sound as good as possible before initiating any room correction. While plonking a speaker where you want it and letting digital room correction sort it all out for you can work, the natural output of the speaker can be altered quite a bit, and you have to wonder whether that’s a good thing or not.

The Perlisten’s, like most speakers, can still give you issues near side walls, but will certainly help near to the back wall. There’s also the option of using the supplied foam bung and sealing the speaker if using them with a sub or two, which can further stretch their room friendliness. Obviously you’ll lose a bit of extension (about 32Hz in-room as opposed to about 21Hz).

Smaller bass drivers can give you a tighter bass and better response. I doubt you’ll ever see Perlisten use any drivers any bigger than they currently use. I think 6.5 is about the right size for most larger speakers, any bigger and you may as well just move into the realm of big 10s and 12s.

The R Series floorstanders are THX Dominus rated, so will fill a 184m cubed room continuously with 120dB output (for at least 2 hours) with a listening distance of up to 6m - if it can handle that, it can handle the average U.K. living room!

Many tend to disregard home theatre speakers, or those that are THX certified becaise they think “they’re designed for films”, but it is the many requirements of THX that make them room friendly. The whole point of THX in the first place was to guarantee a certain level of quality in cinemas, and to be able to reproduce a more consistent and predictable sound in different rooms. I think it would be a huge mistake to overlook Perlisten because of that, especially when some hi-fi speakers are mostly tuned in anechoic chambers, and therefore need to be used in free space to sound their best.
 
hifinutt said:
thanks

he notes

"The midrange clarity is unrivaled by any speaker I have heard to date. For example: In Matchbox Twenty’s “Real World”, the snare had a distinct wall bounce in the recording that I had not noticed before. I actually used a few other speakers on hand to see if I could hear this same event but none managed to provide that same distinct sound. I cannot state with certainty what might be the factor for this.....

Overall, one of the best performing speakers I have seen. There is a magic in the midrange that is uncanny and was a characteristic that made me tilt my head and go “hold on… let’s hear that again” as I went through my library of music."
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wow
the best midrange he ever heard
YAWN
 
Two quick points in regard to the following.

littleaudioco said:
Smaller bass drivers can give you a tighter bass and better response. I doubt you’ll ever see Perlisten use any drivers any bigger than they currently use.
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Actually, larger drivers played at the same level and frequency will have a proportional decrease in acceleration. In this sense they are "faster" however speed isn't a factor for either size as long as both are operating in their usable band. There is no speed difference because faster speed translates as higher frequency and not faster sound.

This said, the overall class that deploys large woofers many times benefits from better tactile sound, while at the same time, the smaller driver may indeed be used to a higher frequency, where speed could be gauged by that higher frequency motion albeit at lower relative excursion, that being the other property as frequency increases.

At any rate, there is no strict speed advantage for the smaller driver, where a larger driver - in a suitably optimized design - generally sounds faster.

littleaudioco said:
...some hi-fi speakers are mostly tuned in anechoic chambers, and therefore need to be used in free space to sound their best.
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I understand your general point, however any speaker tuned in true anechoic space will suffer an enormous increase in level below approximately 100-150Hz when used in real space, which is why no speaker is actually tuned there. On the other hand you may refer to much rarer speakers designed specifically for boundary loading that must then be used in proximity to those same boundaries in real space.
 
Filian said:
Two quick points in regard to the following.

Actually, larger drivers played at the same level and frequency will have a proportional decrease in acceleration. In this sense they are "faster" however speed isn't a factor for either size as long as both are operating in their usable band. There is no speed difference because faster speed translates as higher frequency and not faster sound.

This said, the overall class that deploys large woofers many times benefits from better tactile sound, while at the same time, the smaller driver may indeed be used to a higher frequency, where speed could be gauged by that higher frequency motion albeit at lower relative excursion, that being the other property as frequency increases.

At any rate, there is no strict speed advantage for the smaller driver, where a larger driver - in a suitably optimized design - generally sounds faster.
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I’ll stick to my experience rather than the theory. When I refer to “faster”, I mean transient response, leading edges of notes.

I understand your general point, however any speaker tuned in true anechoic space will suffer an enormous increase in level below approximately 100-150Hz when used in real space, which is why no speaker is actually tuned there. On the other hand you may refer to much rarer speakers designed specifically for boundary loading that must then be used in proximity to those same boundaries in real space.
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Hence why I said “mostly”. Even though a lot of speakers will have a number hours of tweaking outside an anechoic chamber, the designers still seem to design them with free space in mind. Fine for some countries, but not really for countries that generally have smaller, and more sturdily built rooms.
 
littleaudioco said:
I’ll stick to my experience rather than the theory. When I refer to “faster”, I mean transient response, leading edges of notes.
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Experience is certainly essential, and in a sense, it's all that counts. Sound is; everything else is abstract or data.

However the central points remain: There is no strict speed aspect to mass-related functions that translates into or manifests as such - as audible speed or quickness - at the ear because at no frequency within a driver's band is it asked to accelerate beyond that frequency's wave function. Speed is defined by that bandwidth's upper cutoff. Therefore any transient response won't be related to driver size nearly as much as overall system behavior, if at all.

At the same time, any multi-driver speaker will exhibit subjective quickness as the combined behavior of many complexities. It's this sum that manifests transient behavior. (A large speaker optimized for it can actually sound quicker; it is, after all, accelerating less, but again that's not the related phenomena at play here. There is no fundamental speed aspect related to driver diameter or mass.)

littleaudioco said:
Hence why I said “mostly”. Even though a lot of speakers will have a number hours of tweaking outside an anechoic chamber, the designers still seem to design them with free space in mind. Fine for some countries, but not really for countries that generally have smaller, and more sturdily built rooms.
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Free space is the proximate physical condition embodied in a speaker's fundamental design foundation. It's not an anechoic condition per se but a fairly standard term - thankfully, too - that is only generally modified as we slide toward and into baffle-assisted speakers.
 
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