There’s something odd about the way that SVS presents its loudspeakers to potential purchasers. The price is given per speaker, even for larger floorstanders that are intended for use by music lovers as a stereo pair. I guess this makes sense for a company that sells a lot of speakers to home-theater enthusiasts—you could conceivably need three or five or seven of the same model for an ambitious AV setup. Still, it’s a little peculiar for a company that also targets the audiophile market to do this with its top products. You wouldn’t find an elite dealer advertising, say, MBL 101 X-Treme MkIIs for $199,000 per speaker or Magico M9s for $375,000 per speaker. Yet the Ohio-based manufacturer sells its top model, the Ultra Evolution Pinnacle, for $2499.99 each. I’ll tell you upfront that if you’ve got $5k to spend on loudspeakers, the SVS flagship should be on a very short list of products to investigate. Though there is a caveat to that recommendation that I promise to get to in due time.

In its early days, SVS stood for Stimpson Vodhanel Sound, but since Gary Yacoubian and a partner bought the company from Ron Stimpson in 2011, the initials don’t stand for anything. Originally, SVS made subwoofers and only subwoofers, but Yacoubian has expanded the range of the company’s offerings considerably. SVS still sells 18 different subs but also more than 20 full-range loudspeakers and other audio products. Talk about expansion: There are now over 1000 places to buy SVS products in the U.S. and another 500 internationally. Obviously, they don’t all sell everything SVS makes, but you can get small powered SVS loudspeakers at Best Buy, SVS balanced interconnects at Microcenter, and the online retailer Crutchfield offers many of SVS’s products, including the recently introduced Ultra Evolution series. Full-range speakers and subwoofers alike are manufactured in a single Chinese facility staffed with over a dozen full-time SVS employees; members of the design team visit the factory frequently.

The Ultra Evolution Pinnacle is a substantial 3-way, 7-driver design that stands 50.25″ tall on spikes and weighs in at close to 100 pounds. SVS should be lauded for coming up with a way for a single person to unpack its largest model without risk of damage to either product or consumer. When the cardboard carton is opened with the speaker standing upright, one encounters a strap wrapped around the Pinnacle that the eager owner pulls on gently to slide the speaker out of the box—lifting is never required. The cabinet is fabricated from 0.75″ MDF, though the front baffle and rear panel are 1″ thick. To minimize diffraction, the anterior aspect of the speaker has chamfered side edges and the five forward-firing drivers—from top to bottom, woofer/midrange/tweeter/midrange/woofer—are flush-mounted. The front baffle features a geometry intended to assure time-alignment of the waveform launched by those five drivers: The woofers are closest to the listener, the tweeter most distant.

All the drivers used in the Ultra Evolution series have been custom designed by SVS, and optimized, Gary Yacoubian says, “to match the operating frequency range and loading of that driver.” The tweeter, in particular, is the fruit of a lengthy development process. “In our extensive search for a hyper-rigid, lightweight tweeter dome, it was finally a layer of vapor-deposited diamond carbon on a formed aluminum dome which yielded the most significant sonic improvements,” Yacoubian explained. “This pushed the break-up mode far higher in frequency, flattened frequency response, and lowered the tweeter’s resonant frequency. Together with a precision-etched phase ring suspended in a semi-random organic lattice structure, we achieved the best tweeter that SVS has ever made.”

The two 5.25″ glass-fiber-composite midrange drivers have aluminum-alloy baskets designed to maximize heat dissipation, and an exceptionally low-mass Kapton voice-coil former that, like the diamond-coating process for the tweeter, is said to result in superior transient response and dynamics. The midrange transducers share a sealed internal compartment with the tweeter that attenuates the back wave produced by the drivers. There are four 8″ woofers, also with glass-fiber membranes, two firing forward and two mounted on the speaker’s rear panel, with a 3.5″ port located just beneath each of the two rearward-facing drivers. This woofer quartet is loaded into a single, extensively braced acoustic volume with damping material “strategically positioned” in that compartment, most of it in the middle of the chamber where the air velocities generated by cone movement are highest. The configuration of the woofers results in prodigious, evenly distributed bass output into the room, while minimizing issues of excessive mechanical energy within the speaker. This Forced Balanced Array, as SVS calls it, allows for the Pinnacles to be placed quite close to the wall behind them, atypical for a ported design.

The crossover frequencies are 1800Hz for the midrange-to-tweeter handoff and 140Hz for midrange-to-woofer. The latter value is exceptionally low and, according to Yacoubian, “a credit to the wide operating range of our custom midrange drivers.” He continued: “This low crossover point optimizes omnidirectionality throughout the midrange frequencies and allows the woofers to be further specialized for their low-frequency role in the system. The spatially distributed woofer array, beneficial in so many ways for room-mode control, boundary-reflection smoothing, and vibration cancellation, would have started to become directional if we had used a higher crossover point.”

Finish options include high-gloss black or white and a black oak veneer. Suitably colored one-piece grilles that attach magnetically to the front baffle are provided. Each Pinnacle is shipped with four elastomer screw-in feet in place; these can be replaced with height-adjustable spikes, also supplied, which is what I did for the great bulk of my time with the speakers.

In my room, a 15′ x 15′ space with a 10′ to 12′ ceiling height and a hall leading off to one side near the front that reduces standing waves, the Pinnacles wound up with their rear surface 22″ from the CD/diffuser-lined wall behind them, about 8′ apart, and 9½’  from the sweet spot. Only digital source material was employed for this review—a Sony X1100ES spun silver discs and a Baetis Reference Mingo+ handled streaming and playback of locally stored DSF and FLAC files. Amplification was provided by Tidal Ferios monoblocks and, briefly, a vintage Pass Aleph 0s stereo amp. The linestage/DAC was a Tidal Contros. Analog wires included Siltech 880i balanced interconnects and 880L speaker cables from Siltech, as well as Hex cables from T+A. Digital interconnects were Wireworld (AES/EBU) and Apogee WydeEye coaxial.

My opinion regarding two issues that an owner of these speakers will have to deal with: Bi-wire, yes; grilles, no. Removing the flimsy jumpers connecting the two sets of binding posts and substituting two pairs of T+A Hex speaker cables for the pricy Siltech wires improved transparency, detail, and bass articulation. Deploying the Pinnacles with their grilles on may elicit a positive response from the non-audiophile member of your domestic dyad, but the cost is a small but noticeable reduction in clarity and crispness. Actually, sonic matters apart, I missed the way the black drivers “popped” against the brilliant white gloss finish of the review pair.

In action, the SVS Ultra Evolution Pinnacle is a versatile loudspeaker that touches all the musically relevant audiophile bases. It’s a very neutral speaker, reliably presenting a listener with the true tonal balance of a recording or a component preceding it in the audio chain. The Pinnacles accomplish this when played at softer levels, making them quite suitable for late-night listening.

In terms of representing dynamic nuance, they are competitive with far more heroic—read expensive—designs. With his string quartets, Beethoven left nothing to chance, providing extensive instructions in the printed score for players who, nearly 200 years after his death, are still collaborating intensely to fully realize the communicative power of his miraculous chamber music. A good example is the slow second movement of his Quartet No. 3 in D major, where Beethoven’s directives are particularly comprehensive, often with crescendo/decrescendo indications within a single bar. In its well-recorded performance on the Myrios label, the Hagen Quartet observes the printed instructions exactly, down to the final smorzando, or “dying away”—and the Pinnacles let you know that the four musicians are adhering to the letter of the law.

I did try driving the Pinnacles with my beloved Pass Labs Aleph 0s stereo amplifier. Why? What’s the point of comparing a speaker’s performance with costly modern 400W monoblocks to how they fare with a three-decades-old 40Wpc stereo amp? Well, two points. First, the SVS speakers sounded pretty good with the Pass amplifier—less dynamic nuance, less detail, less deep bass—but still pretty good. Second, and perhaps more important, the SVS is a good enough speaker to let you easily hear that the Tidal is (by a considerable margin) the better amplifier. You’d be surprised at how many $5000/pair loudspeakers really can’t discern the difference between good electronics and the very best.

The Pinnacles are fast. Any musical sound produced by plucking will let you know how well a loudspeaker fares with that sonic parameter. So, guitar (John Williams playing Bach), pedal harp (Naoko Yoshino playing a Rosetti sonata) or harpsichord (Jory Vinikour playing Spiders, a wild piece by the late Ned Rorem)—were well-served by the SVS floorstander, the initial attack of each note convincingly attached to the main body of that sound, no matter how rapidly the music unfolded.

Not at all surprising, given the company’s history of developing dedicated low-frequency products, the Pinnacle’s bass performance is a notable strength—not just in extension and “slam” but also in reproducing the musical character of the bottom octaves. “When the Mud Men Come,” from the Canadian band Monkey House’s 2019 album Friday, gets my vote for the best Steely Dan song not actually written or performed by Steely Dan. The breezy representation of psychosis, the asymmetric phrases, the harmonic fluidity that’s at once unexpected and utterly inevitable all channel Becker and Fagen’s genius, aided by meticulous production values that also serve to remind one of the selection’s inspiration. The bass player, Pat Kirkbride, is a stylistic chameleon, fashioning his lines so as to evoke the A-list hired guns that SD brought into the studio (Chuck Rainey, Anthony Jackson, Tom Barney) as well as Walter Becker’s own inimitable, loping style of playing. The SVS speakers make this homage very evident to a receptive listener.

At least in part a consequence of the forward-facing driver’s time alignment, the Ultra Evolution Pinnacle’s spatial rendering is very accomplished. The disposition of orchestral sections, and individual players within those sections, is apparent; so is the arrangement of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses in a medium-sized chorus, even one recorded at a respectful distance. Scaling of instrumental voices is good—violin vs. piano on the late Dave Wilson’s superb recording of the Brahms “Rain” Sonata, as played by David Abel and Julie Steinberg, or the seven variously sized instruments performing Stravinsky’s tart L’histoire du soldat on a PentaTone SACD, a reading by Paavo Järvi and members of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen.

More generally, perhaps what’s most impressive regarding these loudspeakers is how close they get to five- and six-figure products in reproducing the structure of what we hear, the factors often considered individually—frequency, color, texture, harmonics, attack, decay, and so on—that combine to represent a unique musical sound in life. Structure lets us distinguish a trumpet from a cornet, a Stradivarius violin from a Guarneri del Gesù, a Stratocaster from a Telecaster, or the evolution of a great singer’s vocal instrument. It may not seem like much of stretch to differentiate Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert’s Wintereisse for Decca in 1965 from the same artist performing the same work for DG in 1985, or Joni Mitchell’s voice on Blue (1971) from how she sounds on Night Ride Home (1991)—and it isn’t. But good audio can let you know that, as much as things have changed due to the passage of time, vocal overuse, or too many Marlboros, we’re still hearing the same person. The SVS Ultra Evolution Pinnacle meets that standard.

These speakers do everything that’s described above for a price that’s a fraction of “entry-level” floorstanders from…well, you know the usual suspects. SVS brings this off thanks to good engineering, economy of scale, and the advantages of manufacturing overseas. The caveat to the advice offered in paragraph one? That the SVS Ultra Evolution Pinnacles should be on your short list of products to audition when your budget for a pair of high-performance loudspeakers is $5k? Here it is: Make your budget $10,000, buy the Pinnacles, and keep the change. Now I think I understand the “per speaker” pricing. Essentially, it’s classic BOGO—buy one, get one free. You’re getting a $10,000 per pair set of loudspeakers for $5000. At least that’s my take on it. 

Specs & Pricing

Type: 3-way reflex loudspeaker
Driver complement: One 1″ diamond-coated dome tweeter, two 5.25″ composite glass-fiber midranges, four 8″ composite glass-fiber woofers
Frequency response: 24Hz to 40kHz (+/-3dB)
Nominal impedance: 6 ohms
Sensitivity: 88dB
Recommended amplifier power: 20–300 watts.
Dimensions: 11.81″ x 50.2″ x 18.14″
Weight: 96.7 pounds
Price: $5000 per pair

SVS SOUND REVOLUTION
340 Victoria Road
Youngstown, PA 44515
(877) 626-5623
svsound.com