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"Highly Recommended" - Stereophile
Sound & Vision Magazine "2007 Editors' Choice Audio Product of the Year"
"Among the Best Loudspeakers"
The PSB Synchrony One is a full-range reproducer capable of delivering the most technically refined and demanding recordings available with unexcelled realism. It also provides unparalleled tonal, spatial, and dynamic accuracy.
Sound & Vision magazine bestowed its "2007 Editors' Choice Audio Product of the Year" on the PSB Synchrony series. According to Daniel Kumin, "Here are my speakers for the next decade or two."
"According to my value system for loudspeakers -- honest octave-to-octave balance, precise imaging, expansive spatial accuracy, freedom from dynamic compression, and absence of coloration -- PSB's Synchronys are among the best loudspeakers I've auditioned in my studio in several years," reports Al Griffin in the November 2007 issue of Sound & Vision magazine. "You could easily spend substantially more and do no better, or not as well. Synchrony was definitely worth the wait."
"Highly Recommended" -- Stereophile
In the April 2008 issue of Stereophile, John Atkinson reports, "The last two speakers I reviewed, the Sonus Faber Cremona Elipsa and the KEF Reference 207/2, each cost around $20,000 / pair. As much as I was impressed by those highfliers, PSB’s Synchrony One reached almost as high for just $4500 / pair." John Atkinson concludes, " It is also superbly finished and looks beautiful. Highly recommended. And when you consider the price, very highly recommended."
"Low Frequency Extension"
"Driver coherence was excellent," notes Neil Gader in his preliminary encounter with the Synchrony series in the October 2007 issue of The Absolute Sound magazine. "Naturally, the S1 tower held the advantage in dynamic headroom and low frequency extension, but the midrange 'voice' of these speakers was nearly indistinguishable… Port and cabinet colorations were vanishingly low… "
Five-way Transitional Driver Array
The Synchrony One is a five-driver 'five-way transitional' array, in which three identical 6.5-inch woofers sum their outputs across the lowest octaves but roll off, each at a different frequency throughout the midrange, which inherently smoothes response both on-axis and off. Each driver operates in a slightly different, fully isolated enclosure volume, each of which is vented by way of slightly different port dimensions and calculations.
The resulting construct is incredibly complex in both amplitude and time domains The Synchrony One would be utterly impossible to undertake without advanced computer modeling and simulations, but delivers remarkable extension and accuracy from the very lowest octaves, and response that remains, almost incredibly, within a 1-dB window from 70 Hz to 10 kHz.
Equally important, thanks in large part to the new Synchrony woofers' unique performance, the Models One boasts extraordinary freedom from low-frequency non-linearities: well below a half percent. According to PSB designer Paul Barton, these are among the first wide-dynamic-range speakers in history from which inherent distortion is not a meaningful audible factor.
From-the-Ground-Up Technology
The Synchrony drivers, enclosures, and crossover circuits are all ground-up components, but in every case are important evolutions of longstanding PSB technologies. The Synchrony structures reflect continued development of PSB's unique, proprietary cabinet-construction system, employing extruded-aluminum corners and tapered rear panels, in combination with elegantly veneered, 7-laminate wood-composite curved side panels, to form what is possibly the strongest, "deadest," most non-resonant and coloration-free enclosures in the industry.
Synchrony continues PSB's tradition of extended-response titanium-dome tweeters, in a new generation that extracts even greater high-output linearity thanks to multiple technical enhancements in its neodymium magnet structure, lighter, stiffer voice-coil components, and enhanced mechanical systems.
Equivalent developments in the 6.5-inch and 5.25-inch cone woofers employed throughout the line (and the Synchrony One's 4-inch midrange as well) have concentrated on improving linearity and virtually eliminating dynamic compression.
In addition to their distortion-arresting electro-magnetic elements (aluminum bullet, copper "shorted-turn," and aluminum magnetic focusing ring), the Synchrony cone drivers all employ a newly developed sandwich-laminate diaphragm material composited from woven fiberglass and compressed felted-complex natural materials, as well as ultra-rigid, cast-aluminum baskets. The sum of these parts is fast-reacting, pure reproduction that contributes impressively lifelike transients and an unprecedented degree of clean, high-output bass.
Uncanny Crossover Performance
PSB's care in crossover design and driver-circuit electro-acoustic integration, already widely admired, has been even further developed for the Synchrony line. All models employ fourth-order acoustic Linkwitz-Reilly sections, for the best possible unification of drivers into a single acoustic entity, with minimal errors in both the amplitude (frequency-response) and time (phase-response) domains, and insignificant static and dynamic distortions. Consequently, the Synchronys' ability to conjure up depth, imaging precision, and spatiality from both two-channel and multichannel productions, is nothing short of uncanny.
Superb performers on their own merits, PSB's latest flagship designs are equally unique in the degree to which work to answer the real-world problems of integrating the loudspeaker with the reproduction system and the listening room. All of the Synchrony models are engineered to produce stable, overwhelmingly resistive (and thus easy-to-drive) loads over their full high-power operating ranges: in short, they make amplifiers work better and sound better.
Each Synchrony is designed so that its "in-phase lobe" is balanced and even throughout the seated-to-standing vertical window of the prime listening area (hence their "tweeter-under" layouts), ensuring their superb sound under real-life listening conditions.
Advanced Tower Design
The towers are extensively engineered so that their primary "floor-bounce" reflections, the Achilles-heel of any floorstanding speaker, actually help smooth and extend mid-bass and midrange response, rather than peak-and-dip roughening it as does virtually every other floor design.
They are further supplied with simple but potentially very valuable port-tuning plugs, enabling owner or system-designer/installer to effect small, subtle, but very meaningful corrections in room-specific low-frequency smoothness on site.
Timbre-Matched System
The entire Synchrony line is extraordinarily superbly matched in timbre–a claim often made but rarely supported–so that any selection of floor, stand, and multichannel models may combine to form a tonally cohesive surround system. |