Revel M55XC Outdoor Speaker Review

[vkvedam]

Certainly @amirm has developed a soft corner spot in his heart for Revel. Might work as surround for sure but JBL Control 1s are doing a fine job of that in my home cinema

 

[Robbo99999]

Based on the frequency response it looks ear-piercing to me. Looking at the directivity, I'm impressed.
Splendid work on that, Revel, splendid.

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Now, this may be perceived as a little bit of an outlier in the tuning of all Harman/Revel products. I wonder how much a back-wall fills in the lower frequencies to align it more with other Harman speakers. Note to other speaker manufacturers; here's the Harman secret formula for excellent Amir-reviews;

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Yeah, you can tell the M55XC is the major outlier here, somewhere in the region of 3dB average elevation above the other curves all the way from 1kHz to 20kHz, and also combined with no bass. Surprised about this review given such a large disagreement, even if you take into consideration wall mounting because I'd be surprised if wall mounting can raise up the whole sub 1kHz area (it wouldn't) to match the elevated treble and would also be surprised if it extends the bass by a large enough degree too.

 

[TimVG]

Response is easily corrected

 

[Robbo99999]

Response is easily corrected

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Yeah, you can tell from your Filter #1 that is applying a very broad gain to the bass/mids combined with likewise Filter #2 that is applying a very broad cut to the treble (and both substantial 3dB gain and attenuation each way), that the speaker is very unbalanced to the tune of a total 6dB skew between bass/mids & treble - those two very broad filters at +3dB and -3dB. I'd be quite amazed if this speaker could sound good without EQ, so I'm surprised.

 

[tomtoo]

Unless outdoor speakers are usually garbage, I don't see why this is as well rated as it is. It would be interesting to see klippel with a "wall".

They are usually garbage. The speakers used have to be sun and rain resistend. What makes the materials used somehow limited.

 

[TimVG]

Yeah, you can tell from your Filter #1 that is applying a very broad gain to the bass/mids combined with likewise Filter #2 that is applying a very broad cut to the treble (and both substantial 3dB gain and attenuation each way), that the speaker is very unbalanced to the tune of a total 6dB skew between bass/mids & treble - those two very broad filters at +3dB and -3dB. I'd be quite amazed if this speaker could sound good without EQ, so I'm surprised.

We'd have to see how placing it directly against a wall affects response in the bass and even that will be room and location dependent. In any case this speaker can be EQ'd to be +/-1,5dB anechoically speaking for in-room use with a small amount of filters, which is good news.

 

[ttimer]

Can someone enlighten me what the intended outdoor use case for this speaker is? It is small, distorts early and has limited bass. My experience with (non-mounted) speakers on the terrace/in the garden is that they need a lot more volume, power and bass than comparable speakers indoors. Even with gain from the back wall, a large part the sound energy is dissipated instead of reflected back at the listeners. If they are mounted on the wall they are likely to be quite far away from the listeners. Therefore they need even more volume and power to provide adequate spl, something this speaker can't really do. Are they intended to be used inside a shed or garage? Price is quite steep for that, though....

 

[Robbo99999]

We'd have to see how placing it directly against a wall affects response in the bass and even that will be room and location dependent. In any case this speaker can be EQ'd to be +/-1,5dB anechoically speaking for in-room use with a small amount of filters, which is good news.

Yeah, I think it would sound pretty good EQ'd (good directivity) and crossed over with a sub provided you didn't play too loud, because these speakers distorted easily as higher volumes.

EDIT: it might be a similar story for my JBL 308's once Amir reviews that model....ie almost definitely requires some broad filter EQ to pull down the tweeter (but I imagine bass ok), but hopefully those will show good directivity too.

 

[restorer-john]

This is inside my "photo booth" so probably has a bit more enforcement than it would on one wall.

Ah, the "photo booth". Is that like an Instagram filter for the response?

 

[JohnYang1997]

Can someone enlighten me what the intended outdoor use case for this speaker is? It is small, distorts early and has limited bass. My experience with (non-mounted) speakers on the terrace/in the garden is that they need a lot more volume, power and bass than comparable speakers indoors. Even with gain from the back wall, a large part the sound energy is dissipated instead of reflected back at the listeners. If they are mounted on the wall they are likely to be quite far away from the listeners. Therefore they need even more volume and power to provide adequate spl, something this speaker can't really do. Are they intended to be used inside a shed or garage? Price is quite steep for that, though....

Takes eq nicely. Good direction performance. No big peaks big dips. Pretty cheap for a revel.

 

[MZKM]

Can you recalculate for what it would look like with no toe in? Might help explain the subjective/objective discrepancy, here.

It would not be wholly correct as the vertical response would not be true, but I can simulate it.

 

[uwotm8]

Looks like a generic satellite speaker due to measurements. Lack of lower midrange must be hearable as a thin hollow sound. Hard to believe that someone will buy it for any purpose except the direct one: surviving bad weather and producing some sound outdoor (who cares about the quality).

 

[tktran303]

Don't have a gated one but in the process of measuring distortion with Audio Precision, I did measure its frequency response as well:

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This is inside my "photo booth" so probably has a bit more enforcement than it would on one wall. Still, you can see how even the response is.

This is a good explanation of your perceived impression of this speaker- balanced / neutral, and translates well with lots of music, nothing sticking out like a sore thumb, albeit just lacking the bottom 2 octaves...

 

[echopraxia]

The speaker has almost no bass out in the open. In that regard, it would lose big to any speaker with bass and its score would be as reported. So my subjective listening test in the same condition as measured, match.

As noted repeatedly, this is an on-wall speaker. I am not yet setup to measure them that way. So we have to imagine the bass improving to fill in the gap there. I was able to listen (almost) that way and that is how I rated the speaker.

I thought this would be obvious.

The bass differences from speaker placement is obvious, but here’s the contradiction of hypotheses this new data point creates: If your large subjective preference of the Revel M16 over the Infiniti in the experiment earlier is due to the increased harmonic distortion from the Infiniti, then this Revel M55 should have received an even more unfavorable review than the Infiniti because it has even more harmonic distortion. But despite this distortion, it appears the Revel M55 sounded much better subjectively (based on review conclusions) than the Infiniti.

So there must be something else going on. It is interesting that IMD is very low for this speaker; perhaps IMD is actually far more audible than harmonic distortion?

This topic of speaker placement (and in-room curve) brings up a thought I’ve had on my mind for a while: I wonder what would be revealed if we computer an “optimally EQ’ed speaker preference score” for each speaker (e.g. an algorithm which solves an objective to maximize the traditional preference score for a given speaker by “virtually EQ’ing” it optimally).

Not only would this be interesting to those who are fine with EQ’ing their speakers, but it would also remove a lot of confounding variables from the score that always come up — speaker placement, misc. frequency response imperfections, etc.

 

[Absolute]

Question; the review says these speakers can play loud based on the compression tests, but based on the distortion test they won't go loud before they invent their very own version of all sounds.

Did they sound very different at those distortion-heavy spls?

 

[bobbooo]

This is a good explanation of your perceived impression of this speaker- balanced / neutral, and translates well with lots of music, nothing sticking out like a sore thumb, albeit just lacking the bottom 2 octaves...

That's in-room response, which should slope down in order to sound 'neutral'. It's the anechoic on-axis response that should have zero slope for neutrality. As it is this in-room response represents an overall bright tonal balance (which is further compounded by the lack of bass extension).

 

[echopraxia]

Question; the review says these speakers can play loud based on the compression tests, but based on the distortion test they won't go loud before they invent their very own version of all sounds.

Did they sound very different at those distortion-heavy spls?

Yeah this is very interesting, because I had previously thought of dynamic compression as being closely related to distortion vs SPL tests. But on second thought, this is clearly not true.

In fact, if distortion vs SPL measurements are just measuring the amount of unwanted frequencies outside the fundamental tone, then this is almost completely unrelated to compression!

For example, you could design a speaker that experiences horrible dynamic range compression (e.g. just add it to a built in DSP in an imaginary active speaker), yet despite this terrible sound, the speaker could simultaneously maintain extremely low distortion throughout, as measured by such a THD metric not taking distortion into account.

 

[bobbooo]

That’s pretty damn exceptional for any speaker at that price point

It's really not...

All the speakers in the black circle are better performing at a similar or lower price point, with only two speakers measured so far that are worse performing and more expensive, shown in the red circle. Whether it's good for an outdoor speaker is another matter, as it's the only one measured so far. But if you're after a compact, passive, indoor bookshelf speaker, you can get the Q Acoustics 3020i for half the price of this, or the even smaller 3020 model for just $229 a pair, which is likely to acoustically measure similarly to the 'i' model (of course it would need to be measured to be certain of this), and has a comparable size to the M55XC.

 

[tomstoll]

i ordered a pair of the larger M80XC with a hefty discount to replace a pair of polk atrium 4s. im ok with less than ideal bass but looking for whatever upgrade i can get.

 

[ROOSKIE]

If anyone is actually looking for an outdoor speaker Wirecutter tested a line-up and included some blind testing in the process.
The Revel was not in this test however 11 speakers were. Not sure of a way to currently draw any conclusions about how this Revel stacks unfortunately.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-outdoor-speakers/