Every so often, a great new company explodes onto the market – that company of the moment is French speaker manufacturer Revival Audio.
Yes – the last thing this industry needed was another speaker brand – but when a brand makes an impact on us like this one has, after only 18 months since inception and with only two models, we may make an exception.
While Revival Audio was launched in 2021, the people behind the company have a solid background in the industry. Co-founder Daniel Emonts has spent time with Altec Lansing, Focal -JM Lab, and his most recent role was as a senior R&D engineer at Dynaudio. His partner, Jacky Lee, worked for Dynaudio China as Chief Commercial Officer for five years.
Revival Audio has gone back to the roots of speaker manufacturing – deciding to design and build all essential components used in their speakers. The usual pathway for most speaker manufacturers – particularly start-ups – is to select what they consider to be the most appropriate drivers available from the plethora of specialist manufacturers and then work out how to best put them together in a box that will give the desired results. This approach sometimes reaps excellent results; Serhan Swift took two off-the-shelf speakers from Scan-Speak and painstakingly turned them into the mu2 bookshelf speakers, with spectacular results.
But this was not to be the road travelled for Revival. They designed their speakers from the ground up – starting with building their own drivers and even heavily researching the materials used to develop these drivers. For example, their bass drivers are a unique sandwich configuration – a concept made popular at Daniel’s old stamping ground Focal – comprising a basalt fibre fabric topcoat, a polymer glue and felt middle layer and a foam-based cone as the bottom layer.
They also took the approach that sound comes first, and form must follow. This has resulted in a speaker that looks much like the great designs of 50 years ago (luckily, there is an increasing interest in retro designs at the moment). The cabinets themselves are beautifully constructed – again reminiscent of a craftmanship long discarded.
Irrespective of their approach, the results speak for themselves. There may only be two models in the range (currently), but they are both
exceptionally enjoyable speakers for the money. It is refreshing to sit in front of a speaker and realise that you are listening to the music – not the speaker itself.
There is an excellent in-depth review from Jez Ford for Sound & Image/What Hi-Fi on the smaller of the two models – I would encourage you to read this at https://www.whathifi.com/reviews/revival-audio-atalante-3. Jez concludes the review with, ‘So is there room in the market for a new loudspeaker brand? When it arrives with a derrière-kicking debut performance like this, we can only say, ‘Mais bien sûr!’
Is there a downside? Yes, one! Initial shipments into Australia were modest, and demand has been better than anticipated. You may need to be patient and wait a short time for your new speakers to arrive. Hopefully, this situation will be resolved in the near future.
There is no speaker that has universal appeal. Everyone has their own take on what they want from a speaker – but if you are in the market for a pair of speakers costing less than $12,000, these should at least be on your audition list.
The two models pricing is as follows:
The matching speakers stands for both models sell for $750/pair.
We have the speakers’ set-up in the showroom for demonstrations and we encourage you to visit Len Wallis Audio for a personal listening session.
Hello,
If you have or will have the JBL Synthesis SDP-58 or SDR-38 available before the end of january 2023, would you be able to provide a demo ?
I am located in Maroubra. Thank you.
Antoine
Hi Antoine – unfortunately our renovations are way behind schedule. I doubt we will have either model set-up before May. Regards, Len