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One of the most highly reviewed and awarded brands in the loudspeaker market now has a home at Gramophone - SVS. We’re excited to feature their products in our stores in Timonium, Columbia, and Gaithersburg MD. The SVS team is based in Youngstown, Ohio, and comes to market with a philosophy that moves through all their products: providing high-quality speakers, subwoofers, and audio accessories at prices that challenge the competition. Re-defining the level of performance that you can expect for the asking price, SVS’s own marketing materials state their goals clearly:

“Audiophiles, home theater enthusiasts, and reviewers alike revere SVS products for delivering exhilarating audio performances on par with the finest speakers and subwoofers in the world. Our passion for amazing sound quality is revealed in every 5-star review and award and is brought to life with every jaw-dropping, armrest-gripping sonic moment you experience.”

Let’s look at a couple of SVS’s most popular products, and dive into what makes the SVS brand so unique:

Prime Wireless Pro Powered Speaker

Would you like to enjoy great value in a streaming, powered wireless speaker? Prime Wireless Pro Powered Speaker Pair might just be your ticket. Available in either a highly polished black or white finish, you can stream high-resolution stereo audio via WiFi (DTS Play-fi), Chromecast for Android phones and tablets, and Apple Airplay 2, as well as Spotify Connect. The system is Bluetooth-enabled as well.

This is a true system, not just a pair of speakers - and it sounds really good. Powerful, 200-watt amplification (50 watts x 4, one amplifier dedicated to each speaker’s woofer and tweeter) ensures that this compact system can actually fill even larger rooms with music. The high-quality digital-to-audio converter (DAC) allows for lossless, high-resolution audio streaming up to 24-bit/192kHz resolution.

The sound is impressive. These speakers feature 5 1/4” mid-bass drivers, and everyone who has listened to them so far gives them high marks for the quality and quantity of the bass output from such a compact cabinet. Highs are detailed, clear, and crisp, courtesy of 1” aluminum dome tweeters. SVS Prime Wireless Pro Powered Speakers use a digital electronic crossover to ensure that each speaker is delivering what it is best intended for. The balance between bass and treble output is nicely done, for realistic, lifelike sound. SVS uses what they refer to as “Performance Driven Cabinet Design”, using tapered edges on the front baffle, and strong internal bracing to minimize cabinet distortion.

SVS did not forget about connectivity and ease of use. An HDMI ARC/eARC enables great sound from your TV, and you can connect a number of external devices via line level, Ethernet, optical, and 3.5mm aux inputs. You even get a subwoofer output for enhanced low-end. The DTS Play-Fi App makes control with your PC, Smartphone, or Tablet easy. You get a front panel user interface stocked with 6 custom presets for one-touch convenience, and a handy remote control for good measure. Check out the Prime Wireless Pro Speaker Pair - you’ll be glad you did!

Prime Pinnacle Tower Speaker

Prime Pinnacle offers a refreshing take on the tried-and-true tower speaker concept. You get a combination of musicality and detail, with the kind of dynamic range that makes this product truly fun to listen to. A deep, rich bass response immediately gets your attention!

SVS says that voicing this speaker required more engineering time and focus “than any speaker in SVS history”. Why? Because creating a tower speaker that works really well in both 2 channel audiophile settings, with all the detail and imaging that hard-core two-channel fans require, and in-home theater settings, where it must accommodate the huge dynamics of a movie soundtrack, is not such an easy thing to do.

Prime Pinnacle features an attractive, highly polished cabinet that takes up very little floor space. Its footprint is “lifestyle friendly” in the sense that it is narrow - which also helps the product to have a wide and even dispersion pattern in the midrange and high frequencies. SVS engineers have taken pains to ensure the cabinet is well braced, in order to minimize cabinet resonance. The cabinet actually has four “sub-cabinets” or acoustically tuned internal chambers, that help maintain clarity and musicality, even when the music is being played loudly.

SVS uses a high-quality, one-inch aluminum dome tweeter to provide the clear and detailed high frequencies that you’ll hear with this speaker product. Listening to Leo Kottke’s acoustic guitar on a track like “Bouree”, from the Mudlark album, brings a smile to your face, as his acoustic guitar seems to shimmer and dance in space. The tweeter uses what SVS refers to as an “FEA-optimized diffuser” to achieve the broad dispersion pattern that is clearly audible when you move off to the left or right of the center listening position.

The midrange driver is a 5 1/4th inch, composite glass and fiber cone, a direct descendant of the company’s reference Ultra series products. It does a great job of reproducing the all-important broad band of musical information between the tweeter and the woofers. Remember, if a speaker can’t get the critical midrange right - it’s a speaker you don’t want to own, regardless of how good the bass or high-end is!

The picture is completed with the triple-threat of three 6.5” woofer drivers. One large driver might create a lot of deep basses, but at the cost of mandating a much wider front baffle. That means not only a less domestically friendly, “boxier” cabinet but also has implications for handling the midrange and high-frequency information due to cabinet diffraction. With three smaller woofers, SVS has the driver area needed to generate deep, strong bass, yet is able to deliver that bass from a slender baffle, compact cabinet - better looking, and better midrange dispersion. Each of the woofers has a dedicated port for low-end reinforcement.

The entire sonic picture is brought together by the SVS SoundMatch 3-way crossover, engineered to bring you a wide sweet spot. This really helps with multiple listeners enjoying the system. Prime Pinnacle towers thus blend in easily with all the other products in the Prime or Ultimate Series, so that you can build a system ideally suited to you. Stop into our Gramophone locations in Timonium, Columbia, or Gaithersburg MD sometime soon, and audition these for yourself, or shop online at SKY by Gramophone, where you’ll get a secure checkout with fast and free shipping, straight to your door.

Watch the Gramophone LIVE! with SVS!