If you need a tall floorstanding loudspeaker in your home entertainment system, two models have rocked up this week from different brands sporting very different price points.
Owners of big and meaty amplifiers tend to like their sound a little bigger than everyone else, and that means they usually need to consider a big pair of speakers.
There are several different types out there, and different configurations to set a room up in, but if you need lots of sound, it’s hard to look past the floorstanding loudspeaker, a product that is more or less what is advertised on the box.
Standing upright and tall, and often featuring a towering height, floorstanding loudspeakers are big and generally deliver a sound that is as loud as they are tall.
You can find them in various incarnations, and every year, we see new models arrive, but this week, two brands have graced Australia’s shores, even if they are dramatically different from each other.
This week, both Focal and SVS have launched models in this area, with each arriving for a slightly different price point depending on how much you think you need to spend.
If the answer is “less than $5K”, SVS has this week announced the “Prime Pinnacle” speakers, tall floorstanders with a 5.25 inch midrange driver completer with a composite glass-fibre cone, a 1 inch aluminium dome tweeter, and three 6.5 inch woofers dotting up the length of the speaker to account for range.
SVS’ Prime Pinnacle sets the woofers inside each of their own enclosures to improve response and sound, resulting in a pair of speakers designed to offer balanced and detailed audio for under the $5,000 mark.
In fact locally, the SVS Prime Pinnacle comes in at $3890.
If you regard that as expensive, however, you ain’t seen nothing yet, because Focal has announced a pair of Focal speakers timed for the 40th anniversary of the brand.
A reinvention of something close to classic from the 90s products in French sound company, the “Spectral 40th” offers a similar three-way loudspeaker, but with different parts to what SVS is delivering.
There’s a graphite black base with walnut sides, with a 6 inch mid-range driver, two 7 inch woofers, and an aramid fibre tweeter up top, complete with aluminium mounting which Focal says should improve the sound.
The Focal Spectral 40th does come with a rather hefty price, that said, retailing locally for $14,999, making it one of the more expensive speakers we’ve written about in the past year.
While it is price, the Focal Spectral 40th isn’t the only product reinvented for Focal’s 40th anniversary, with a Scala 40th speaker and a case made for its Utopia headphones being released for the 40th anniversary, as well.
Don’t expect either of these to be cheap, that said, because virtually nothing we’ve seen from Focal thus far has ever matched that word.
You’ll find both of these, however, in specialist sound stores shortly, appearing across the country for audio enthusiasts.
