Synchrony Redux

PSB SPEAKERS was founded by Paul Barton in 1972. While the brand has long been part of the Canada-based Lenbrook Group, which also includes NAD and Bluesound, Barton began as and remains PSB’s chief designer, cook, bottle washer, and one of the most respected speaker authorities in the industry. His work, including the new Synchrony T600 under review here, has long made use of the Canadian National Research Council’s (NRC) audio testing facilities, including its anechoic chamber.

- Thomas J. Norton

DESCRIPTION

The new Synchrony T600 looks more closely related to the discontinued PSB Imagine T3 than to the original Synchrony One flagship (also discontinued), a model first released in 2007. It shares the Imagine T3’s cabinet configuration and driver layout but otherwise appears to be a major redesign.

PSB calls the Synchrony T600 a “transitional” three-way speaker. Starting at the bottom, its three 6.5-inch, carbon fiber cone woofers are each separately enclosed and rear-ported. Two plugs are included with each tower to block any two of its ports, though I didn’t use them. The transitional aspect of the designation comes from each woofer having a different high-pass filter frequency: all three operate at the lowest frequencies, but only the top one is still functioning at the point where the midrange takes over.

The woofers (and the midrange driver) employ rigid, cast (not stamped) baskets. Their magnets are a combination of ceramic and neodymium. The latter is the most powerful known magnetic metal, but due to its cost and relative rarity (neodymium is mined mostly in China), it’s little used in loudspeakers apart from tweeters where the magnets can be small.

The 5.5-inch midrange driver also employs a carbon-fiber cone and crosses over to a 1-inch, titanium dome tweeter, the latter a refinement of similar tweeters used in other PSB designs. The midrange-to-tweeter crossover is at 2.2kHz (4th order, Linkwitz- Riley) and the bass-to-midrange crossover is at 450Hz (third-order, Butterworth). The T600’s specified sensitivity is 91dB, its minimum impedance is 4 ohms, and its frequency response rated at 24Hz to 23kHz +/-3dB.