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Comes Close to Flagship Tower Performance
Although it is more compact (and more affordable) than the tower Synchrony models, the PSB Synchrony One B bookshelf speaker comes astonishingly close in sound to its larger floorstanding siblings.
The Synchrony One B boasts a two-way design. It uses the Synchrony high-linearity titanium-dome tweeter and dual-laminate-weave 6.5" woofer, plus the same construction and crossover details as the towers. The One B delivers useful output to a remarkable 40 Hz.
"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."
"The Synchrony models are clearly Barton's best ever design," reports Steve Guttenberg in the August 8, 2007 edition of his Audiophiliac CNET blog. "The sound, especially the top of the line Synchrony One tower speaker, was spectacularly vivid."
"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… "
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.
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. | 
