Dynamic Duo

CERTAIN GEOGRAPHIES have long-held associations with loudspeaker design.

- Daniel Kumin

Maidstone, Kent or Steyning, Sussex in Britain (KEF and Bowers & Wilkins, respectively) for example. Or Cambridge, Massachussetts (Acoustic Research/KLH/ Advent) and Los Angeles, California (JBL) here in the United States.

And Youngstown, Ohio?

Youngstown is the home of SVS, an all-American speaker-maker whose origins lie a few miles up the road in the even-more-smalltown midwest. SVS got its start by devising surprisingly effective but highly affordable tubular subwoofers (I’ve long wondered if the originals were built within “construction tubes” sourced from the local home center), descendants of which the firm still manufactures today, alongside numerous more conventionally rectilinear, highly regarded subs. But SVS has long since branched further up the audio-frequency tree with fullerrange models, including the Prime Pinnacle, a new flagship tower for its Prime series.

The Prime Pinnacle is a relatively slim, deep tower that follows a fairly familiar pattern of current-day, full-sized loudspeaker design, with a single dome tweeter and cone midrange supported by multiple woofers. Variations of this layout have been adopted by numerous loudspeaker-makers worldwide, almost as if by mutual consent— presumably both because the tall, slim form is attractive to customers, and because its narrow baffle reduces edge diffraction and cabinet resonances (at least in one dimension) while still yielding substantial bass-extension potential via multiple smaller woofers.