SVS announced their flagship Ultra Series full-range loudspeakers, claiming a deep, detailed soundstage with incredible resolution, absolute transparency, and amazingly rich and articulated bass, outperforming speakers two and three times their price. The line-up includes a 45-inch tall upswept trapezoidal tower, a bookshelf speaker, center channel, and a unique and flexible surround speaker.
The Ultra Series loudspeakers are built with top-grade components and high-end design features configured to deliver uncompromised, dynamic, distortion-free audio, with open, airy highs and the deep, tight, linear and powerful bass. Its unique SoundMatch 3.5-way crossover is designed so that only the top of the two 6.5-inch composite glass-fiber midrange drivers crosses over to the tweeter, while the bottom midrange driver works to ensure that off-axis performance is smooth and even, with a wider sweet spot and a more consistent sound across the entire room.
The Ultra series were tested at the world-renowned National Research Council (NRC) facilities in Ottawa, Canada, where each speaker underwent hours of anechoic chamber measurements and subsequent revisions to perfect the design. Final voicing was performed in the NRC’s famous IEC 268-13 standardized listening room, where lead designer Mark Mason Mason and SVS President Gary Yacoubian refined their performance in a real-world environment. Every angle, every surface, every dimension was tweaked to achieve acoustic perfection. Even the speaker grille design was subjected to this rigorous FEA to ensure the utmost in sonic transparency.
The Ultra Tower also employs SVS’s proprietary ForceFactor woofer array, with two 8-inch drivers horizontally opposed to eliminate cabinet vibrations, for reduced distortion and cleaner, tighter bass response. Since the Ultra Tower’s trapezoidal shape results in non-parallel surfaces-which serves to reduce standing waves within the cabinets themselves-each of the four UltraSonic woofers also fires in different directions into the room, reducing frequency response deviations throughout the listening space, and ensuring more consistent, powerful and accurate bass performance no matter where you sit.
Every other speaker in the Ultra series has been designed to complement the performance of the Ultra Tower, with flush-mounted drivers to reduce diffraction and improve on-axis high frequency response, along with rear-mounted bass reflex ports (on the Tower, Bookshelf, and Center) for phenomenal bass output and extension and minimal frequency response degradation.
The Ultra Center features vertically aligned midrange driver and tweeter for improved uniformity in horizontal dispersion and a consistent frequency response at all listening positions within a typical home theater environment, along with dual woofers for increased bass output and power handling. The Ultra Surround also promises to deliver an incredibly immersive and flexible multichannel sound experience. Designed with dual isolated crossovers for each tweeter and woofer, the Ultra Surround can operate in either bipole, dipole, or in SVS’s unique Duet configuration, which creates two separate speakers within one cabinet. In Duet mode, each speaker’s two discrete channels means that listeners can implement a true 7.1-channel surround sound experience using only two Ultra Surround speakers instead of the typical four.
“The Ultra series speakers also embody value because our team was meticulous in choosing build materials, design elements, and testing to achieve uncompromised performance, yet with pricing for a mainstream audio fan,” said Gary Yacoubian, SVS president and managing partner.
Price and Availability
SVS Ultra Tower $1999 pair
SVS Ultra Bookshelf $999 pair
SVS Ultra Center $699 each
SVS Ultra Surround $1199 pair
