Revel Concerta F12 loudspeaker blackash

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Description & Setup
That impression of value was not dispelled when the Concerta F12s arrived at my house. First, the F12 is a big speaker, and in many ways seems a low-cost parallel to Revel's venerable Ultima Studio. It sports a small dome tweeter, an inverted-dome midrange of exotic material, an Organic Ceramic Composite, or OCC, and two 8" woofers in a ported enclosure, all integrated with high-slope crossovers. Okay, the Ultima Studio has two tweeters, but that's not why it costs more than 10 times as much as the Concerta F12. Was it the switch from the Ultimas' mica/carbon-filled copolymer and titanium diaphragms to the Concertas' OCC?

Maybe, but the biggest, most obvious difference is the design and construction of the enclosure. The Concerta F12's cabinet is a simple rectangular prism that weighs about 100 lbs less than the Ultima Studio's. There's no room in the F12's bill of materials for exotic molded synthetics, sharply styled side panels, or the labor needed to assemble and finish it all, but it's still a nicely finished box with a synthetic veneer. As in the Studio, the F12's drivers are vertically aligned on the front panel, the biwirable terminals are in a recessed area near the bottom of the rear panel, and just above that is a large flared port. But the F12 has no level controls.

Like earlier Revels, though, the F12s slid neatly from their cartons, and were among the easiest floorstanding speakers to unpack and set up that I've dealt with. I removed the Styrofoam endcaps, snapped on the front grilles, and walked them into position. I first auditioned them in my Connecticut system, where the stiffness of my Kubala-Sosna cables conspired with the very limited clearance around the inset terminals to make for some uncomfortable and repeated twisting and turning. That done, I put on a series of familiar two-channel recordings to hear how the F12s needed to be positioned.

From the get-go, the F12s were so strikingly clean in the midrange that they gave me a lot of positioning leeway. Center-image fill was always dead-on when the speakers were anywhere from 7' to 11' apart. The speakers' distance from the front wall was equally uncritical, as long as it was at least 6" so that the rear port could breathe. Of course, the amount of bass and the interactions with room boundaries changed along with the distance from the front wall; I settled on a wall-to-front-panel distance of about 32", or only about 4" more than I use with my Paradigm Studio/60s. At that position, bass was not so much noticeably strong as it was easily available when the recording demanded it, and well extended. Because the midrange was apparently generous with gross position changes, it was the treble that dictated the toe-in angle. Regardless of how far the F12s were from me and each other, they always sounded best when toed-in so that my ears were directly on their tweeter axes. Off axis, there was the predictable reduction in overall treble; the F12s seemed better balanced on axis.