Why so underwhelmed by Revel F208 audition???

I auditioned a pair of f 32's along  with f 208's and they were being driven by a relatively cheap Anthem 225I and I spent the afternoon enjoying good music. The salesman told me the Revels were power hungry speakers and I was really surprised how well a $1995. integrated  drove them. now comparing the two F-32 were good speakers that could easily pull me into the music but the sound was still coming from different drivers that weren't perfectly integrated, things like "wow powerful bass" or doesn't her voice sound incredible". The f 208's make music, they need gobs of power but I just sat there trying to hear anything they did exceptional, like, 'excellent midrange, or feel the bass, but all I got was music with an open soundstage. I love them. My reference are Kef 105/3, 107/2, beethoven mk2, revel f 52.
 component matching is the holy grail and getting it right is trial and error if you don't have your own shop to mix and match.

I'm afraid that I too was not bowled over by the F208s, though the salesperson tried to tell me they had the most natural sounding horns ever, I felt they sounded like the sax player used Tupperware for reeds. An exaggerated plastic like sound which is just not natural.

I think one of the big selling points for the F208's is a very wide listening area, but meh.

On the other hand, honestly, I didn't find them objectionable to listen to either. I was just not moved to take money in my pocket and exchange it for the speakers. :)

Best,


Erik

Well I'm an extremely picky audiophile and find the Revel 206 to be outstanding. Also my Salon 2's will compete with anything at their price point IMO..Some very weird opinions here bc one thing the Revels aren't is poorly designed and sound anything less than beautifully musical. Good grief. Kevin V. is a legendary designer with incredible resources for R&D. 

You may be like me. I prefer intrinsically damped speaker drivers. Paper pulp and doped fabric - no metal or ceramics for me.

the problem with a rigid driver is that it MUST necessarily have internal vibrations (hit a wine glass with a spoon or think of a bell). This is unavoidable physics. I find rigid drivers often sound hashy and lack the natural sparkle that you get from a damped driver - it is all about timbre and the decay that some people are more sensitive to than others.

Your PMC 22 are paper pulp with a soft dome tweeter and in my mind there is no surprise they sound sublime

That said, some rigid driver designs are better than others. Focal sound pretty good for example - light rigid drivers can be driven by smaller cheaper drive motors and they have a flatter frequency response but they all vibrate internally which can affect timbre - some have added rubber damper dots to ceramic drivers to try to band aid the problem (like putting your hand on the cymbal after hitting it to "choke it") others have used stitching on the rubber surround to dampen the cone (common for a while with polypropylene cones)

Not all pulp paper and soft drivers are superior - being less rigid the designers must worry about breakup of the cone. So it is not completely black or white but what advantages/shortcomings that you as the listener are prepared to accept.

I just bought a pair of F208’s and was hoping to find them a big upgrade to my Focal Chorus 826v towers. Immediately, I noticed that they did have a much more authoritative bottom end. However, to my surprise the Focal Chorus 826v clearly outclassed them in every other way. Although I’m not a huge country music fan, I find the Brooks and Dunn track "My Maria" to be a great track to audition speakers to, because it has really well recorded drums, that challenge the mid-bass reproduction abilities of most speakers.
Amplifier was a Parasound Halo A21, Marantz Av8801 processor, Sony ES 400 Disc Bluray changer.
When I played the track back to back between the Focals and the Revels, the Focals brought out all of the detail on the cowbell, and the snare drum and reproduced them with a very 3 dimensional quality. Additionally the cymbals had more sizzle with the Focal tweeters. The Revels by comparison, couldn’t come close to the imaging, or detail of the cowbells or the punchiness of the snares in the drum recording. The vocals weren’t quite as well projected either.

I was there with my best friend that helped me with the set-up, and we unanimously agreed that we were hearing the same things. He was actually going to buy the Focals, but he even admitted that I’d be crazy to replace the Focals with the Revels. This should really speak volumes to the quality of the Focal Chorus 826v, since its a generation older, and two price points down from the Revel F208. Just makes we wonder how badly the Focal Aria 948, must kick the crap out of the Revel F208, since they are the same generation and price point. Pretty bad that Revel got beat so badly by a competitors "previous generation, and 2 price points down."

The only thing I can think of is that maybe the Revel’s weren’t broken in fully, but I bought former demo models that had done several days worth of demo duty at an A/V convention... so they certainly weren’t straight out of the box.