arendalsound.com
Today, Arendal announced a new line of their speakers that was eagerly awaited, at least by some. Pricing is high, so not for the faint of heart. No measurements yet so we can just expect validation in the future. This is a crowded space, with KEF Meta, Perlisten and Revel being some of the key players, but there is one thing that to me as HT person makes potentially huge difference:
Arendal has just released the most serious horizontal center channel available at any price (let's not discuss McIntosh $50k center). For my EU location is shows EUR 4.7K and delivery 10 days before Christmas. I am very likely to order, even without the full reviews and measurement as really impressed with the oversized design effort and the sheer size.
While there are complaints on other forums that this is excessive design, there is a whole lot of market for excessive horizontal center and it is very poorly populated. Arendal has trashed all the high end centers in spec (Revel C426 which is IMO best center offered right now, some people might also claim Perlisten S7c as best but similar in specs to Revel) by a MASSIVE margin - something I did not expect. 4x 6.5 inch drivers for Revel 4x8" driver for Arendal. Revel 263mm x 979.7mm x 358mm, vs Arendal 29.0 x 135.0 x 54.8 cm - this thing is TWICE the size essentially. 27.7kg for Revel vs 82kg for Arendal - common this is epic. Max power handling of 1kW also seems handy - this thing will go louder than anything before.
I understand that few care about the center channel, but I feel that this launch is truly EPIC because we for the first time have a true horizontal center that could be able to match the reference towers to a very, very large extent. Based on specs alone, this is way ahead of Revel and Perlisten that have been the most able companies to provide "matching" solutions for LCR. So my kudos to Arendal. I can understand that people ultimately might not care about this, but by the book, you should not have a retarded centre and huge towers - they should be of the same size and timbre to match. If you ignore that, results are honestly, at least for me, disappointing more than 80 vs. 110dB SINAD.
People looking for reference in this budget and needing to deploy horizontal center should really seriously consider this line, and I hope we get full reviews and measurements soon that will validate the performance of these new speakers.
