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Carlo currently lives in Granville, Ohio with his wife, two young sons and a pair of hyperactive dachshunds. As a new company with interesting products claiming impressive performance, Perlisten is more than just a pleasant surprise. They have come to market with a fully formed product line and production pipeline and the speaker and subwoofer models they provided me for review are simply superlative. While aesthetics is the most subjective of things, I found the design and finish of all the products to be extremely appealing.
It is, by some measure, the best sounding home theater system that I have had in my home up to this date and I will not be happy to see it go. No, this system is not a value play for those looking ultimate bang for the buck. But when compared to similarly priced alternatives, I think its value shines from the intelligent and unconventional engineering used to achieve its effective performance.
Pioneer VSX-534 5.2 Channel Home Audio Smart AV Receiver *VSX534
Moving from the sextet performing this song to the trio playing “Willow Weep for Me”, the performance gets more intimate but no less enjoyable. Acoustic bass, drums, and piano were so harmoniously imaged that I felt like I was in the recording space. Again, for the age of this recording, Kelly’s piano playing had great body to the sound and that classic ring to the notes as they decayed. Chambers was intensely plucking away on the right with the depth and weight of his notes hitting just right. Jimmy Cobb on drums was in the center but pushed farther back in space, the sound of his drum skins and cymbals were more distant but no less clear and crisp.
That this is an advance on current speaker designs can be seen specifically in the vertical response, but its effect may be better appreciated with our results in the listening window and in-room response. I do caution that the intellectual property that enables this speaker does not, on its own, set the sound of the speaker. Changes in the slope of the in-room response and the value of the directivity indexes will change the perceived frequency balance and spaciousness of the speaker playing in mono. Perlisten is setting these to achieve what they think is the optimal subjective result.
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Different speakers will produce stronger early reflections back to the ears than others. Even if the DI is monotonic and close to linear like the ones shown above, the level of these curves will differ between speakers. Before we move to our measurements let’s looks at the anechoic CEA-2034 response curves supplied by Perlisten. These were made outdoors with the speaker on very high stands to attenuate floor reflections.
The R5m doesn’t get phased at all by this sudden change and expands the soundstage to suit while still allowing me to easily place every instrument section precisely in space. Again, these Perlisten speakers may not image quite as wide as the Revels I have here, but they image wide and naturally enough to make an orchestra sound suitably grand. All of the Perlisten R-Series speakers at minimum meet the THX Ultra specification (up to 12-foot viewing distance/3,000 cubic foot room) when using them in the way I was planning in this review.
ANTHEM MRX 740 Home Theater Receiver, A Video Review
The low-frequency response is likely a ground plane measurement spliced in. In this plot, we added the Predicted In-Room Response to the traditional curves. This curve attempts to predict the response of a speaker at the listener’s seat.
If you want to get really specific, the R5m will meet the THX Dominus spec if used as a surround speaker in a larger installation. And where a single R212s sub is THX Ultra rated, duals will put you in THX Dominus territory as well. And finally, the R4s meet the Dominus spec for both surround and height channel use. Since the floor and ceiling bounce is shorter from the speakers to your ears than the wall bounce in most rooms, the bounce is shorter in distance and thus it is higher in amplitude than the wall bounces.
Loudspeakers: EMPTek R55Ti Towers, R56Ci Center, R55Wi Surrounds
Such was the case when I was introduced to an upstart company called Perlisten Audio. I also discovered that, because of said history and experience, these guys own/control most of their production chain so they aren’t designing this stuff and farming it out to a contract factory. They are building it themselves at their own facilities and are exercising stringent QC throughout the process.
This track is not so much about just playing bass notes but more using a collage of sounds, obtained from a single instrument, to build a melody. The Perlisten S7t successfully renders the detail, intensity, and variety of tones that Brain Bromberg is using to play that song in spades. The only caveat I have is that the price of a single R5m and its matching stand is only $705 bucks shy of a single R7t tower speaker.
There was a very good deal of specificity to the sounds moving around and behind me. Beginning my listening with just the S7t speakers in stereo, once I had dialed in the positioning, there were a few things that immediately became apparent. Not just in the treble where you would expect it with a Beryllium tweeter, but in all aspects of the way they reproduced music. At first, I thought that the midrange was a little recessed and pushed back compared to what I was used to, but the more I listened to the S7t the more I realized that the midrange was, in fact, balanced and quite neutral. Some speakers I’ve had here have sounded detailed to the point of being ruthless or occasionally harsh and that can be from various reasons, not least of which is the room.
The R5c maintained that performance and clarity when listening decently off-axis too. The R212s subwoofers pounded away at all the explosions, proton packs firing, ghost traps opening, earth tremors, you name it. One subwoofer would have probably been enough in my room as the two subwoofers weren’t even breathing hard but the bass sounded tight, solid, and evenly distributed through the seats which is why you do multiple subs if you can. The on-wall surrounds continued to impress me, effectively creating the whole rear half of the surround audio bubble.
The “floor reflection” is defined as the spatial average of three measurements at 30 degrees below the main axis ± 10°. Note the huge attenuation the speaker produces at 30 and 40-degrees. 20-degrees is a little compromised but as we said earlier, at 5-degrees the DPC has a whole other job, to stay as close to the on-axis as possible.
I appreciated its more compact size and room correction found the R5c capable enough to assign it an 80 Hz crossover to the subwoofers, consistently. Well, the folks at Perlisten decided to send along an R-series system for us to try out, based around the much more modestly sized R5m monitor speakers, the R5c center channel speaker, and the R4s on-wall surround speakers. Bottom octave bass duties were carried out by brand new twin R212s subwoofers. Visually this is the kind of speaker system that would be more at home in more typical medium-sized home theaters.
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