Two years ago, SVS changed ownership, and you could say it’s simultaneously a remarkably unchanged yet very different firm. It’s unchanged in that many old hands are still with the company, and the concentration on high-performance home theater products remains. But it’s different in two major ways: It’s now making products in China, and it has expanded beyond subwoofers with a full line of speakers. All of the speakers were connected to their respective amplifiers, which in this case were Parasound Halo A21 (stereo) and A31 (three-channel) amplifiers, via 12-gauge speaker cable from Binary, a SnapAV company. The sub was connected to my Behringer via a 10-foot balanced cable from Monoprice, with an additional one-meter balanced interconnect from the Behringer to my Integra DHC 80.2, also from Monoprice. Source components included my Oppo BDP-103 and the Dune-HD Max, both connected to my Integra via one meter HDMI cables from Monoprice. With everything set up and the levels matched inside my Integra, it was time to get down to business.

The Ultra Tower speakers area perfectly tuned acoustic ecosystem. From the drivers to the crossover and cabinet, each component is painstakingly engineered and critically tested to perform in harmony and convey breathtaking sound quality. Ultra Driver & Tweeter DesignThe premium drivers need an equally capable crossover so no expense was spared with the smart SVS SoundMatch 3.5-way crossover. Its tapered array is designed so the top mid driver crosses over to the tweeter while the bottom midrange is crossed over to the woofers to prevent beaming. This results in an expansive yet precise soundstage with frequency response and imaging at all listening positions. Performance Driven With 80% of the sound coming in mids, the drivers unveils the core of the speaker’s timbre. Augmenting high-frequency performance, the Ultra Tower speaker’s aluminum dome tweeter is incredibly transparent and precise. Light, efficient, robust and resistant to distortion, the tweeter’s airy’ reproduction of vocals and tranparent highs reveal as much as the finest loudspeakers worldwide. The FEA-optimised diffuser grants broad dispersion for an exceptionally wide and convincing soundstage with perfect on/off-axis response. Design Process The center channel should be placed directly on-axis, relative to the primary seating position. As with the main front speakers, placing the tweeter at/near head level when seated is optimal. But depending on the placement of the video display or projection screen, this is not always possible. Beyond that, you also get a set of metal feet that screw into the bottom of each speaker. We have hardwood floors, and we were more than happy to keep the default rubber feet attached. We didn’t feel we had a problem with isolation, so swapping out the feet isn’t something you necessarily need to do. It’s good to have the option, though.

The result is a speaker that measures well with near flawless real-world frequency response, but also optimized to sound amazing on a human level through listening tests with real music and cinematic content, in a real world listening environment like your home. Acoustically transparent and FEA optimized grilles, wedge-shaped front baffle and flush-mounted drivers all contribute to reduced edge diffraction and improved on-axis high frequency response

Dayton Audio T652-Air Dual Tower Speaker

A center channel speaker is often considered the most underrated speaker in a home theater surround sound system because it handles the majority of dialogue, vocals, music and sound that’s coming from right in front of you in a movie, but rarely does a home theater center speaker get the same love as tower or bookshelf speakers. Many speaker manufacturers compromise with a two-way design or thin center channel speaker with flimsy drivers as an afterthought, not SVS. The SVS Ultra Center channel speaker flexes serious sonic muscle and is optimized for horizontal placement and elevating the most challenging movie and music content to reference quality. Ultra Driver & Tweeter Design The center channel is less revolutionary in its design, but plenty smart. Dual 6.5-inch woofers flank a 4.5-inch midrange driver sitting below a 1-inch tweeter. This kind of driver arrangement works to eliminate “lobing” which can create dead spots in different parts of the room. This way, everyone listening to should be able to hear the center channel clearly – an important benefit for dialog clarity and intelligibility when watching movies. Performance The Ultra Surround is intended for wall-mounting, which I simulated by placing each speaker atop a 5-foot-high stand directly against the wall. I used them mostly in bipole mode (which I prefer to dipole) in a 5.1 setup but also tried hooking them up in 7.1, with each half driven separately. Separate sealed midrange enclosures minimize top-to-bottom wall dimensions and shift standing waves beyond the driver pass band, minimizing negative driver interaction and associated frequency response degradation

is there something wrong with your BP10s? Why do you feel the need to replace them? That would be my first question, next, if you already have a sub in the SB-13 Ultra (bitchin' by the way), why invest more into towers? Why not the Ultra Bookshelf speakers or the like? With a sub as good as the SB-13 Ultra mated to towers, you're either going to have to lose the tower's low end (money wasted) or some of the sub's performance (also money wasted). Just my opinion of course.Every feature on the Ultra Tower speaker’s cabinet was designed with a sonic purpose in mind. Tapered edges on the cabinet’s front baffle, known as chamfers, minimize edge diffraction for clear and precise soundstaging. The sweeping side panels of the floorstanding loudspeaker are non-parallel so each of the 8-inch woofers fire in different directions to fill a room with deep, effortless and accurate bass. What we did like about the SVS Ultra Towers, and what we thought the speakers also did really well, with the sense of space and imaging they delivered. This is due to, we are convinced, the toe-out design to angle the woofers, but even if that hadn’t been the case, we’ve no doubt that they’d do a very good job convincing us of the place of the individual elements of the mix. And if you can forgive the slight misstep with the highs, which will probably end up getting fixed the next time SVS release a new iteration of these, you have to applaud their overall sound quality. In terms of floorstanding speakers, they deliver audio that in our opinion is beaten by perhaps only one or two other models in the same price range. It’s a very good look. By the way, SVS has an excellent speaker positioning guide - far more intuitive than anything we could put together here. You should make full use of that if you buy. Clearly, SVS believes it has designed a speaker that shatters previous attempts at redefining the price-to-performance barrier. We just had to find out for ourselves whether or not that was true. Here’s what we found. Out of the box Starting from the bottom up, the Ultra Tower speakers feature a proprietary SVS ForceFactor woofer array with two 8-inch drivers horizontally opposed at the base of the speaker for room-filling low-frequency output. Because of the unique shape of the cabinet, each of the woofers fires in a different direction resulting in deep, effortless and accurate bass throughout the listening area. SVS Sound Revolution Specs: Frequency Response / Acoustic Data:

Fair review. I think I'm going to take SVS up on the 45 day audition. Also read your glowing review of the NAD T 757 and am wondering how you think the Ultras would pair with the NAD. Currently have a Denon 2310ci and see you say, "While Onkyo and Denon may make more AV receivers than the before-mentioned Non-parallel cabinet panels reduces axial standing waves within the cabinet, reducing frequency response coloration I have already tried the bookshelf option with the SB-13Ultra, it just doesn't work. What works best is the BP10's flying solo with no sub, more often than not the SB-13Ultra just sits there looking heavy. Which is why the Triton Seven and SVS Ultra Tower caught my attention, full-range speakers without powered built-in subs. Below, you'll find a list of equipment we used in conjunction with the Prime Pinnacles while doing our listening tests for this review. It's all gear we are familiar with, which helped us evaluate the speakers’ audio quality. We mixed and matched depending on whether we were listening to music, or movie audio. Volume: A speaker's decibels tell you how loud your speaker can get. The higher the decibels, the louder your speaker's volume output.It’s always difficult when you name a speaker something like Pinnacle. Not only do you have to deliver something that really does sound like it’s reached the heights of what is possible, but you also leave yourself open to the question: where the hell do we go from here? We can’t answer the latter, but we can confirm that SVS have definitely reached the former. The SVS Prime Pinnacle floorstanding speakers are arguably the best they’ve ever built.