Pass Laboratories Inc. introduced two new finishes for its SR1 Loudspeaker, a high-performance listening system using the highest quality drivers available.
The new finishes are Madrone Burl and natural Black Ash.
Madrone is from the sturdy madrone tree, native to the Pacific Northwest and a natural inhabitant of rocky arid areas where other trees fail to survive. It yields a highly figured wood in a very light color.
Natural black ash, on the other hand, is typically dark reddish-brown with distinctive black streaks.
Pass Labs is offering the new options as exclusive alternatives to the SR1’s original finish of Cherry.
The SR1 is Pass Labs’ second loudspeaker, replacing the Rushmore, its introductory model.
A four-way floorstanding system, The SR1 is equally uncompromising. Its refined sound stage, deep awareness of micro-detail, and effortless dynamics deliver quality musical reproduction.
Each SR1 consists of four speaker drivers plus a four-way passive crossover.
Like the Rushmore, the SR1 leverages the ability of dedicated electronics to enhance and complement the performance of its passive components.
More than the Rushmore, the SR1 emphasizes absolute audio performance over driver sensitivity and offers more flexibility in select complementary power amplifiers and crossovers, which can range from totally passive to active quad-amplification.
The SR1 has been designed to harness the classic “mass controlled piston” model, in which the speaker’s radiating surface behaves as a rigid surface.
This yields a well-defined characteristic in the spectral region where the sound is proportional to the electrical current through the voice coil.
At the boundaries of this frequency band, the response falls off in a predictable manner.
The trick is to find a perfect piston driver. The cone surface must maintain its shape over the frequency band without breaking up into resonant vibrational modes.
The suspension and motor system must remain linear with high excursion. But most speakers allow the cone to flex in a way that gives some extension at higher frequencies at the cost of an irregular response in the frequency response and phase performance.
The SR1’s drivers, Nextel-coated cones, and a Crescendo tweeter from Seas of Norway, present a combination of low distortion, high dynamics, and predictable performance.
It takes a minimum of four sizes of these drivers to span the SR1’s 10-octave audio range without significantly leaving the “piston” region.
The SR1 uses dual enclosures. A large bass enclosure with ten-inch and eight-inch drivers handles the bottom four octaves, and an adjustable smaller enclosure carries the midrange and the tweeter.
The Seas drivers are complemented by a set of crossover and equalization electronics created to elicit the drivers’ best performance.
The SR1 is compatible with a wide range of power amplifiers. The impedance does not dip below 4 ohms, and the sensitivity is approximately 90 dB for a 2.8V input.
The SR1 Loudspeaker is available now from authorized Pass Labs dealers at a suggested price of $18,000/pair in its original Cherry finish, and $21,000 in Madrone Burl or Black Ash.
Pass Labs’ SR1 Speaker in its original Cherry finish (left), new natural Black Ash (center)and Madrone Burl.
