I received an email from a longtime press representative I’ve known for years, telling me about a new loudspeaker company he’s representing. The company is bursting from the gates with a line of products that includes floorstanders, standmounts, wallmounts, surrounds, center channels, and a range of subwoofers.
Looking at the pictures, the products do look much more elegant, well made and ambitious than those from the usual hi-fi startup, but still, I’m thinking, I’ve heard a lot of clever and ambitious fluff like this before: a full-blown catalog of home theater–friendly speakers and, as is common these days, manufactured in China.
I beg off saying that I’d really like to find out who is behind this and, if at all possible, some rather granular technical detail about, say, the big floorstander. Put up or shut up.
Shortly thereafter, I got what I asked for but didn’t expect: specific and detailed answers to my questions.
“Perlisten” is short for Perceptual Listening. The company was conceived and organized during the period 2016–2019. They designed and produced their first six products in 2020 and made their worldwide debut in 2021. The principal managers are Daniel Roemer and Lars Johansen, both of whom have long résumés that include technical and management positions with major speaker companies.
Second, and more significant to me, Perlisten provided detailed technical and test-and-measurement data that is well beyond what is common in this industry.
Hi-fi companies, like other companies, always offer poetic blandishments and dwell on certain physical enhancements perceived as being marketable. Perlisten, of course, also makes marketing claims—but the company also presents data: graphs of frequency response (on- and off-axis), impedance, phase, and distortion, and spectrograms showing off-axis response along vertical and horizontal axes. Floyd Toole’s work made a strong case for such measurements (footnote 1), which these days are most often obtained with a Klippel Near-field Scanner or a similar proprietary system, but few companies publish such detailed information about their products. I hope Perlisten’s transparency will encourage other companies to provide this information (footnote 2).
While such transparency doesn’t assure a slam-dunk, it grabbed me by the collar and shouted “We are serious!” So I asked for the big floorstander, the S7t.
The Perlisten S7t
When the S7t’s arrived, I was glad to have help setting them up—definitely not a one-person job. Three masked men—Steve Jain of Fidelity Imports, his son Ethan, and a friend—made quick work of assembling and positioning the S7t’s, which came in a spectacular Gloss Ebony finish. The substantial-looking rectangular cabinet bears what at first glance appears to be five drivers mounted to a thick, meticulously sculpted front panel. On the rear is a glamorous polished brass panel with two massive pairs of multiway binding posts fitted with jumper plates. Below that is a perforated rectangular metal grille that is echoed on the side panels; they function as the vent when the S7t is used in its standard, bass-reflex mode. A 27.5lb steel plate attached to the base supports four adjustable outrigger feet. Spikes are optional.
When you look closer, you see that the S7t has seven drivers, not five. Four of those—two on bottom, two up top—are 7″ (180mm) woofers. Between them is a carefully contoured waveguide—an acoustic lens—that is roughly the same size as the woofers. Its central element is the 28mm (1.1″) beryllium-dome tweeter. Closer examination reveals two additional 28mm domes embedded at the top and bottom edges of the lens so that their perforated covers preserve the lens’s contour; these domes are made from “thin-ply” carbon. Perlisten calls this central assembly the Directivity Pattern Control (DPC) waveguide. This feature is central—literally and figuratively—to Perlisten’s Signature and Reference speakers.
These flanking carbon-dome drivers together function as a midrange driver; the central beryllium dome is, as you might expect, a tweeter—although Perlisten calls it a “fullrange tweeter.” The DPC controls horizontal and vertical dispersion—the latter effect minimizing early reflections from floor and ceiling. The dome midrange drivers have much less moving mass than a traditional midrange cone, which should result in better transient response, lower distortion, and higher efficiency. (Perlisten specifies the S7t’s sensitivity at 92dB/2.83V/m.)
While the Perlisten spec sheet calls the S7t a four-way system, it is by no means a typical four-way. The top and bottom woofers are slowly rolled off around 500Hz; the other two (sandwiching the DPC) roll off about an octave higher. All three drivers in the DPC come into operation around 1.1kHz. The peripheral carbon domes roll off at about 4.4kHz. The central beryllium-dome tweeter extends up to and beyond the top of the audible band; the specified upper end of the S7t’s range is 37kHz, –10dB.
It was apparent to me that the transitions between the large cones and the domes and the central dome and the flanking ones would require something other than classic textbook crossovers. Roemer confirmed that it is “atypical” and that there is “greater overlap” than one often finds among the drivers. He also said that he didn’t much like specifying crossover frequencies “because this implies [a] traditional approach.” Perlisten’s approach, he told me, was to “not think in terms of manipulating driver+Xover to match a set of electrical filter ideals,” ie, fourth-order Butterworth, and then to force each driver to handle a specific bandwidth. Instead, they wanted it “all to work together to meet the design goals” and to “create a single coherent wavefront.” This, he said, is “where speaker imaging comes in” and “how the speakers can virtually disappear.” He suggested that I “walk toward the speaker while playing some music with vocals, keeping your head approx. on the main axis.” He indicated that I would find that “it is difficult if not impossible to point to a single transducer creating the sound.”
“This makes for a rather complex X-over, but well worth it given the outcome,” he said.
Unusually, Perlisten speakers are designed to be used either sealed or bass-reflex (ported)—the latter achieved by plugging the down-firing port. Throughout this audition, I listened in bass-reflex mode, which, according to specifications, extends the response down to 22Hz (–10dB), with in-room response down to an impressive 16Hz.
Listening
Initially, the S7t’s were placed where my Revel Ultima Studio2s had been. My first impression was of a full and clean sound, which I found quite pleasing. After a short time, I realized that the soundstage seemed crammed between the speakers and that imaging was a bit vague. I was enjoying the clarity of the mid and low bass and very good dynamics but, overall, it was not what I expected. I removed the speaker grilles, but that yielded no improvement.
My eyes were drawn to the DPC array, the treble source, which was situated significantly lower than tweeters on most floorstanding loudspeakers. The central tweeter dome is 32″ from the floor, lower than typical ear height and lower than my ears at my sofa (38″). I adjusted the front feet to tilt the speakers up a bit so that the speakers’ axes were aimed at my head, but that made no audible difference. I asked Dan about it (while not admitting what was going on). He then told me, in detail and with illustrations, that the “S7t has a 2° tilt back” and that the “design reference axis is at the 2° angle (meaning, it is much higher at a distance).” Consequently, at my initial listening distance of about 12′, the reference axis of the tweeter is at 37¼”. My ears, at 38″, were quite close to that axis. In fact, at 12′, the ±2° window encompasses ear heights from 32–42″; at 10′, the ±2° window ranges from 32″ to 40 3/8″.
Footnote 1: Toole’s book, Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms, is in its third edition. Kal’s Stereophile review of the first edition can be found here.
Footnote 2: I’m sure that one reason Perlisten is so forthcoming with measurements is that the S7t’s measurements are so outstanding.—Jim Austin
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COMPANY INFO
Perlisten Audio
807 Liberty Dr.
Verona, WI 53593
(414) 895-6009
perlistenaudio.com
ARTICLE CONTENTS
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Specifications
Associated Equipment
Measurements
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