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Revel Concerta2 C25 Review (Center Speaker)

Rate this speaker:

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 19 10.5%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 52 28.7%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther)

    Votes: 90 49.7%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 20 11.0%

  • Total voters
    181

pseudoid

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...centre speaker designs are constrained...
The other big-gest constraint appears to be 'location, location, location'.... even more so than setting up a pair of L/Rs.
 

sarumbear

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The other big-gest constraint appears to be 'location, location, location'.... even more so than setting up a pair of L/Rs.
The location is the simplest; under or over the centre of the screen.
 

Bear123

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My placement actually works pretty well in my room. I tried several locations, and this produces good results and somehow passes the WAF test.

This is the front left measured with both subs running, crossed at 80Hz. Right and stereo measurements are similar.

View attachment 175926



The Infinity is a better measuring speaker in some regards to be sure, but I am space limited and stuck with something near the C25's form factor.

I keep wanting to "upgrade" to the C205 to have a matching front set, but I imagine the improvement would be only cosmetic.
Sub response does look really good…..thought I saw a scary graph in an earlier post showing poor extension and response but it seems that placement indeed works quite well for you. Nice!
 

Dj7675

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Is there such a thing as a brand/manufacturer of a "center" speaker that is worth its salt; without all of the compromises that seem to be getting in the way.
Revel C426BE... but it is a lot of “salt”. Taken from the very nice F226be/C426BE review at audioholics (link). This is what we should be the goal. But it takes size and cost to do very well. But the Revel C208 and Infinity RC263 do rather well too. But many don’t either have the space or funds to dedicate to large center speaker. More often we are seeing soundbars which would be interesting to see how they do.

3969B60B-41C5-447F-9A8A-7907F8BD3AB1.jpeg
 
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amirm

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@amirm the impulse response appears to be unfortunately yet another Klippel disaster. We have a bunch of pre-impulse ringing and a bunch of post impulse ringing which clouds the actual response. How is the plot remotely useful? What is real and what isn't? Please explain.
Happy to explain. For more than two years I have been saying the impulse measurements people ask for are useless. Yet people ask for it eventually saying, "how much work is it to just give us the plot?" Answer I gave them that creating the graph is the easy part. Having to then defend it is the big effort as anything I post, I need to be able to defend. Finally getting tired of saying no, I thought I just throw them out there. What happens? I get asked to defend it. :(

These impulse and step responses are derived measurements. No impulse or step signal is used at all to produce them. Instead a log sweep is used for frequency response and using inverse FFT, we can generate impulse and step responses. The sweeps are limited in bandwidth since we are trying to measure the frequency response in audible band. And speakers themselves filter out the response. Both of these combined (with other factors I won't go into), cause ringing and other artifacts. I can easily make them pretty by not zooming in but then they tell you even less.

If there are now complaints about them, I will stop producing them.
 

Acerun

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You are not going to use a center channel without a subwoofer or at least full range fronts, don't you?

In a multichannel setup you'll likely be crossing it over in the 80Hz-120Hz range
That is correct for me. I've got mine crossed over at 110 right now, which has been the best sounding setting to my ears so far. I am going to continue to increase that crossover and see what happens, as I have very good subs that go to 18 on paper. I've also found that the sister speakers, the m16s seem to sound better at 90.crossover. and I've got my surrounds, the Revel M55CXs at 120. Being that I have all revel speakers, I am somewhat concerned about the tonality change for a coaxial center. As soon as I went to all revel, everything seemed to be on the same wavelength... Yes, very subjective but that's the only way I know how to describe it. All of my speakers had the same tonality.
 
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amirm

amirm

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You are not going to use a center channel without a subwoofer or at least full range fronts, don't you?
No. Plenty of people use soundbars that have no subs. Same here with these svelte center speakers. If I were to use a center in our living room, it would be without a sub. I put in a sub shortly and other than it cluttering our living room, I thought it added too much rumble to our everyday listening of TV programming so took it out.

Anyone building a dedicated surround system of course would have subs but hopefully also enough room for a wide dispersion center. I have such in our dedicated theater (Revel C52): https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...el-c52-speaker-review-and-measurements.10934/

index.php


This thing weighs a ton and is way too big for living room use.
 

pseudoid

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...Plenty of people use soundbars that have no subs...
It appears plenty of people still use the built-in TV tin-cans; either not-knowing any better or not caring enough.
Sad to see many consumers paying 4-digit sums for an upgraded (?) TV video-quality yet pay nevermind to the audio part of that equation.
But then, there are also those who are fully smitten by sticking pods inside their ears... Sacré bleu!
 
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HiFidFan

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No. Plenty of people use soundbars that have no subs. Same here with these svelte center speakers. If I were to use a center in our living room, it would be without a sub. I put in a sub shortly and other than it cluttering our living room, I thought it added too much rumble to our everyday listening of TV programming so took it out.

Anyone building a dedicated surround system of course would have subs but hopefully also enough room for a wide dispersion center. I have such in our dedicated theater (Revel C52): https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...el-c52-speaker-review-and-measurements.10934/

index.php


This thing weighs a ton and is way too big for living room use.

Wholeheartedly agree. In a typical casual listening/viewing living room, a soundbar can make for a very good upgrade over the on-board TV speakers while being unobtrusive. Our Sonos Playbar & Sub (sub is ticked away in a corner) are barely noticeable but add a fair amount of listening enjoyment vs. not having them.

The only way I'd do a multichannel HT would be in a dedicated HT room.
 

Alice of Old Vincennes

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No. Plenty of people use soundbars that have no subs. Same here with these svelte center speakers. If I were to use a center in our living room, it would be without a sub. I put in a sub shortly and other than it cluttering our living room, I thought it added too much rumble to our everyday listening of TV programming so took it out.

Anyone building a dedicated surround system of course would have subs but hopefully also enough room for a wide dispersion center. I have such in our dedicated theater (Revel C52): https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...el-c52-speaker-review-and-measurements.10934/

index.php


This thing weighs a ton and is way too big for living room use.
I can easily fit your center under my 65 inch OLED using my inexpensive 3 shelf stand with stalk. I solved rumble issue by turning down volume of sub until needed or allowed.
 

DavidMcRoy

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I used the Magnepan “Tri-center” array with good success. (first photo from Magnepan)
I currently use the same technique with conventional speakers and it works even better (second photo)

You have to dial-in significant delay on the top center speaker to create a rock-solid phantom image, and it becomes imperfect to side listeners, but I like it a lot better than a single MTM center speaker. Don’t like the way it looks? Too bad. You’ll get used to it.
 

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DavidMcRoy

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No. Plenty of people use soundbars that have no subs. Same here with these svelte center speakers. If I were to use a center in our living room, it would be without a sub. I put in a sub shortly and other than it cluttering our living room, I thought it added too much rumble to our everyday listening of TV programming so took it out.

Anyone building a dedicated surround system of course would have subs but hopefully also enough room for a wide dispersion center. I have such in our dedicated theater (Revel C52): https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...el-c52-speaker-review-and-measurements.10934/

index.php


This thing weighs a ton and is way too big for living room use.
This driver layout looks like it should work.
 

Vladimir Filevski

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... For more than two years I have been saying the impulse measurements people ask for are useless. Yet people ask for it ...
Having to then defend it is the big effort as anything I post, I need to be able to defend. Finally getting tired of saying no, I thought I just throw them out there. What happens? I get asked to defend it. :(
...
If there are now complaints about them, I will stop producing them.
I find the impulse and step response graphs useful. You don't have to defend them - they are what they are.

Message to those who have complaints about the impulse and step response plots: If you don't want to see them, just scroll down a little bit.
 

nstzya

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Here is the current setup in my room. (Forgive the lack of decor--that just isn't my thing.)

View attachment 175789
Is anyone else bothered by that full cup of coffee on the equipment rack? I’m having anxiety and PTSD flashbacks of a very unfortunate incident…

The purist in me also wants to slide that center to the front edge of the shelf. Ever tried it there?
 

Laserjock

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Is anyone else bothered by that full cup of coffee on the equipment rack? I’m having anxiety and PTSD flashbacks of a very unfortunate incident…

The purist in me also wants to slide that center to the front edge of the shelf. Ever tried it there?
I’m sure it’s just there to show the size correlation but I want to push all the speakers forward also.

I think I might have suggested this before but my memory is not that good.
 

sarumbear

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No. Plenty of people use soundbars that have no subs. Same here with these svelte center speakers. If I were to use a center in our living room, it would be without a sub.
index.php
I am surprised that consider using a centre speaker that has f3 at around 70-80Hz without bass-management. That is one octave short of what is expected from the centre channel speaker.
 

Steve Dallas

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Is anyone else bothered by that full cup of coffee on the equipment rack? I’m having anxiety and PTSD flashbacks of a very unfortunate incident…

The purist in me also wants to slide that center to the front edge of the shelf. Ever tried it there?

You are just lucky it wasn't a full stein of good lager!

I’m sure it’s just there to show the size correlation but I want to push all the speakers forward also.

I think I might have suggested this before but my memory is not that good.

I spent an entire day with my UMIK and REW setting up the speakers in this room. This is a tiny room by US standards (12' 3" W x 12' 4" D x 10' 6" H), and I have dogs and children in the house, so I have a small, terrible, nearly cubicle room plus some additional environmental considerations.

There is a good argument to be made about there being some table bounce / cancellation to contend with in front of the center speaker, but it has to be weighed against probability of damage in this house.

Getting to those measurements I promised a few pages back...

I thought my laptop supported 5.1 sound over HDMI, but it is actually only stereo. To get around that limitation in testing a center channel speaker, I swapped the leads between my front left and center speakers and sent the test tones over the left channel.

Audyssey was turned off via Pure Direct mode, the crossover frequency was changed from 90Hz to 40Hz, and the subs were switched off.

The MMM (moving microphone method with unfiltered pink noise) was used to create roughly a 16" box around each headspace where each listener's melon would be on the sofa, which is the only furniture in this room. Sixty averages were taken over ~30 seconds for each measurement. This methodology is somewhat flawed, as there would be squishy bodies along with various pillows and blankets absorbing reflections off the smooth leather surfaces and acting as bass traps in normal use.

The green trace is the center seat. Red and orange are the left and right seats, respectively.

There is up to -2dB suck-out between 1KHz and 3KHz. This tracks well with @Bear123 's results. Whether that is enough to be objectionable to the left and right listeners is questionable. The dip centered around 800Hz is more of a concern to me, and it appears to be room-influenced, as it corresponds with side-wall cancellation in Amir's Early Reflections data and I see it in other measurements in this room, although it also tracks with directivity error shown in @MZKM 's directivity error chart as well, so it could be a bit of both.

Revel C25 Center LCR Comparison 1-6.png


With 1/3 smoothing to make it more readable.

Revel C25 Center LCR Comparison 1-3.png


I have Audyssey limited to 1100Hz on this speaker, but looking at this now, I may change it to 3KHz (or even full spectrum) to see if it can smooth the wide bump centered at 1.5KHz a bit. A higher crossover point also looks to be a good idea, although I do not normally like the sound of male voices coming through the subs. Too bad I can't measure the results with this laptop.

Noise floor is unusually high, as it is a very windy day.

Re-posting the Audyssey measurement from a prior page for convenience. It consists of 8 weighted sweeps roughly covering the same area I measured with REW and tracks pretty well with mine until about 6KHz.


Screenshot_20201107-191650.png
 
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pseudoid

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Is anyone else bothered by that full cup of coffee on the equipment rack?
You are just lucky it wasn't a full stein of good lager!
I had a half of a shot glass of gifted-whiskey (Honest! I don't even know the diff between Whiskey and Scotch...) on top of the real-oak entertainment system (w/LiftTV). The clutz me spilled it on the top surface. Within 20 seconds that it took me to wipe it off, still left a nasty stain; probably bcuz the alcohol stripped off the clear-coat. Should I worry more about PTSD rather than WAF effects, in the future?
 
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