#ayre is so pretty this was a delight to paint | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

taww · 5 years

Text

Review: Silverline SR17 Supreme loudspeaker

Silverline SR17 Supreme loudspeaker

The Audiophile Weekend Warrior (TAWW)

TAWW Rating: 5 / 5

Combining the body and scale of a larger speaker with traditional mini-monitor virtues, the SR17 Supreme is an exceptional conveyor of musical color and expression.

PROS: Organic midrange tone; top-to-bottom coherence; ample scale and dynamics; superb imaging; unfussy setup.

CONS: Smidge of lower midrange coloration; favors acoustic over electronic music; awkward recessed terminals.

This review has been a long time coming. Back in 2010, @mgd-taww gave the Silverline SR17 Supreme (USD $7,500) a rave review in Bound for Sound magazine, and heartily recommended them to me as an upgrade to my Merlin TSM speakers. It took me 8 years and a move to the West Coast to finally reach out to Silverline for a review pair; then another 15 months of listening to get around to this review. In the meantime, lots of speakers have come and gone in the market, particularly in the 2-way monitor category saturated with offerings at every conceivable price point. And yet, to my ears, the SR17 Supreme endures as one of the most satisfying speakers of its kind. Read on for my take on how it’s withstood the test of time.

History & Design

Silverline is a small speaker manufacturer based out of Walnut Creek, California, a short drive northeast of San Francisco. The SR17 is one of their first models dating back to a couple years after their incorporation in 1996:

1998: The SR17 debuted at the 1998 Stereophile Show in LA, sporting a Dynaudio D28/2 tweeter and Esotec 17WLQ midwoofer.

1999: Updated with an Esotec D260 tweeter and revised crossover.

2004: The SR17.5 was introduced, with increased internal volume via a deeper cabinet for better bass response.

2009: The SR17 Supreme is introduced with an Esotar T330D tweeter and further refinements.

Proprietor/designer/craftsman Alan Yun has continued tweaking the Supreme over the last decade, and though the Dynaudio drivers he prefers are out of production he’s stockpiled enough units for years of production and repairs. The enclosure, recognizable by its trapezoidal shape and depth, is manufactured in China by a shop that does cabinet work for a number of high-end marques, with final assembly performed by Alan’s own hand. He shared a bit more about their production:

California has strict environmental regulations. The paints on cabinets are governed by strict rules, and is why there are fewer and fewer cabinet makers in California. Many manufacturers now find their production overseas.

Actually our cabinets were rawly made in China, painted, and the final detailing is done by me, also putting sonic materials inside the cabinets. This job is pretty tricky for tweaking the sound. The crossovers were handmade by me, matching components, soldering, etc. The drivers were fitted carefully and precisely by my hands with European-made T-15A screws. Final testing and listening are all done by me in my workshop. 😅 Therefore, the SR 17 is rather unique. I am also the original designer of this shape/type of speaker cabinet since 1996. I did research and to the best of my knowledge there were no similar designs then.

Large, but not ungainly, atop Dynaudio Stand 6′s

The depth of the cabinet - 15 inches, to be exact - gives it a rather top-heavy look on a typical stand, but it’s mitigated by the elegant tapered profile. My pair was impeccably finished on all sides in rosewood veneer. Rapping down the sides revealed it to be very solid, but not as fanatically braced and damped as my old Merlin TSM monitors or the Audiovector SR 1. Each speaker weighs around 26 lbs. The bi-wire terminals are recessed, which made them a bit of a pain, particularly as they have larger rectangular posts that will take 1/4" spades only in certain directions - I recommend banana terminations.

The crossover sports just 4 components, with 1st order high-pass (tweeter) and 2nd order low-pass (woofer) filters. Parts quality - Solen metallized polypropylene capacitors, a generic-looking wirewound resistor and an air-core inductor - is solid but hardly fancy, a deliberate decision by Alan who isn’t much of a believer in expensive boutique parts. Based on the results he’s achieved here, it’s hard to argue.

Cardas jumpers sounded better than the stock bridges to my ears. Stick with bananas for the cable termination - spades are awkward.

Setup

The SR17 is fairly efficient (nominally 90.5 dB/watt @ 8 ohms), but more importantly it's easy to drive - my Ayre AX7e, known for being rather limited in the power delivery department, sounded open and effortless. Alan Yun said the Dynaudio drivers love current and will benefit from powerful amplifiers, yet will sing with low-powered tube amps. I can confirm it loved the grunt of the 300wpc Bryston 4B Cubed, yet I never felt lower-power amps like the Ayre or Bryston B60 integrateds were lacking for dynamics. And my favorite pairing by far was with the 55-watt Valvet A4 Mk.II class A monoblocks sporting a single pair of bipolar output devices. (Incidentally, Alan’s favorite amp paring with the SR17 is the 30-watt Pass Labs XA30.5, which @mgd-taww can attest to being a magical combo.)

Similarly, I found the SR17 easy-going when it came to cables. My preferred cable had more to do with the amp used, but I got good results from a single run of Audience Au24 SX [review], Cardas Clear Light and DH Labs Q10 Signature cables. With the Audience, I felt the speaker was the sweetest and most dimensional; the DH Labs brought out more bass power and treble brilliance; while the Cardas brought out more upper midrange presence. With the Bryston 4B3 amp, I settled on the Cardas; with the Ayre and Valvet, the Audience was the clear winner. Unlike with the Audiovector SR 1 Avantgarde Arreté (review forthcoming), I didn't find bi-wiring to lend a noticeable improvement, but I did prefer replacing the stock metal jumpers with nicer Cardas ones from my Merlin TSM's for a little more refinement.

As with any high-quality monitor, stands are important. Something around 24-25” height seems right, though I wouldn’t be afraid to sit them an inch or two lower as the speakers are capable of projecting good image height. A trend these days is to decouple speakers from the stands/floor, but the SR17’s are “old school” in that they prefer tight coupling, meaning heavy suckers with spikes and a judicious amount of BluTack on the top plate. My old Osiris stands, heavy dual-column steel beauties loaded with sand, were a perfect match, but sadly I sold them with my Merlin TSM’s; they were replaced by higher-WAF but inferior-sounding Dynaudio Stand 6’s, which in stock form are quite light and choked the sound of the Silverlines. Fortunately I was able to get them to a better place with some tweaks; not as good as the Osiris, but close. A better choice sonically might be something like the Target Audio MR stand with the four pillars mass-loaded.

Pulling them out further improves imaging, but they still work well relatively close to the back wall.

Placement was pretty standard for a monitor speaker - keep it at least a couple feet from the back wall, with a 2:3 width-to-listener distance ratio and toed in about halfway. In my room, which has a number of living constraints, I had the back of the speaker about 21” from the wall, tweeters 76” apart and the plane of the speaker 8 ft. from my ears. While many small-box monitors rely (often excessively) on rear ports for low-end boost, the bass tuning on the SR17 is far more subtle and sophisticated - putting my ear to the port, I heard a fairly modest amount of output. I remarked this to Alan, and he described the port as more a method of pressure equalization than bass volume. This means in a pinch I could push the speakers as close as 12" from the wall without fear of low notes booming out of control. All in all, for being such a high-performing design, the SR17 is remarkably easy to live with.

The Sound

The first thing my wife, a professional oboist, noticed about music through the SR17 is how dynamically alive it was. I had just wrapped up my review of the Silverline Minuet Grand, a superb $2k speaker that is no dynamic slouch itself. And even though the SR17 was fresh out of the box and Alan warned me it would take some time to run in, the very first notes from the SR17 sung with expressiveness and vibrance. I think it took all of 15 minutes of listening to Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra streaming radio for her to remark, “I like this speaker.” She’s normally nonchalant about hi-fi, and yet has ears that can pick apart sonic deficiencies in about 90 seconds, so that amounts to a rave! And what made it so immediately engaging wasn't some artificial emphasis or hype; it was a feeling of unimpeded dynamic flow that makes most other speakers sound a bit drab. The SR17 lets music breath freely, carrying you with the ebb and flow of a tune and conveying every turn of a phrase with a sense of ease and conviction.

The next thing we noticed is how natural and palpable everything sounds through the SR17. Tonally, the SR17 is on the very slightly warm side of neutral; it combines reassuring solidity and density from the mid-bass through the midrange with an open, extended top end and fine harmonic resolution. Its ability to paint with a wide palette of tonal colors brings out the distinctive character of instruments and voices, making orchestral music a delight - just put on a Living Stereo recording such as Debussy’s Iberia [Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify] and the front of your room will explode with the virtuosity of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s playing. Scale it down to smaller stuff like a Beethoven string quartet, and you’ll savor the finer gradations of timbre between the cello, viola and violin.

What you won’t notice is any discontinuity between the woofer and tweeter. These Dynaudio drivers were made to work together, and the minimal crossover mating them is superbly executed. The upper midrange around the crossover point is seamless, and I can’t remember a single moment over the course of hundreds of hours of listening when I noticed the tweeter sticking out on the face of the speaker, something that ails even the finest, most expensive dynamic speakers from time to time. In this respect the SR17 is up there with the very best and is utterly free of listening fatiguing.

As a violinist, I feel obliged to point out the Silverline’s superb reproduction of the violin G string. If you ever want to test out a speaker’s tonal truthfulness in the lower midrange (right around middle C, 262Hz), put on the 2nd movement of the Glazunov violin concerto performed by Jascha Heifetz [Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify], or the 2nd movement of the Sibelius concerto performed by Lisa Batiashvili [Tidal, Spotify]. This is oh-so-tricky to get right; as the lowest string on the instrument, it’s the richest and deepest; and yet the violin is not a viola or cello - it’s a more subtle and delicate richness. Speakers that lack body will sound thin and washed out and minimize the difference in timbre vs. the D string above; woolly or bloated speakers will thicken it or blow the instrument out of proportion. The SR17 performs this balancing act better than anything I’ve heard in my living room, or in most any system for that matter. It rides the line between warmth and clarity in that register, lending tangible realism to piano, male vocals and low brass instruments as well.

Going down the frequency range, the SR17’s extra cabinet volume vs. a typical mini monitor gives it power and scale more akin to a floorstander. My room is a 17 x 19 x 8.5 ft. open layout living/kitchen area with floor-to-ceiling windows and an offset listening point along the long wall, so while not huge, it presents a bit of an acoustic challenge that smaller speakers have struggled to fill. The SR17 had no trouble projecting a big, bold sonic image, and can cleanly play as loud as you’d reasonably want in such a space. It has sufficient body and power down to 60Hz or so to give music real foundation, with meaningful output down to 40Hz. I think Silverline’s quoted 32Hz bottom limit is a bit optimistic (or perhaps you just need the right room), and I preferred the speaker with my REL T-9 subwoofer providing a little extra oomph. But for a great many listeners in moderately-sized spaces, this will be all the speaker you ever need. Listening to “The Elephant” from Saint-Saëns Carnival of the Animals [Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify], a track I’ve heard on some very full-range speakers (e.g. Focal Grande Utopia EM Evo), the double bass is big and present, lacking a bit of rumble that was easily provided by flipping on the REL sub. Piano left hand similarly has nice weight, never sounding diminished in scale as typically happens on small monitors. Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées song cycle from the album Paysages by soprano Susanna Phillips and pianist Myra Huang [Tidal, Spotify] is a lovely test of colors, with ethereal vocals floating above dark undertones from the piano’s lower register. The Silverline possesses suficient extension and body to bring out these contrasts with depth and balance.

At the opposite end, the old-school Esotar tweeter is still one of the most musical high frequency transducers around. It balances detail with smoothness, extends low enough to mate perfectly with the woofer, and never sounds strained - a substantial upgrade in resolution and realism over the typical metal or silk domes in lesser speakers. In top-end extension and speed it might be bettered by some of the newfangled devices like Focal’s beryllium or B&W’s diamond domes, Scanspeak’s latest Revelator or the fantastic AMT in the Audiovector SR 1, but it’s a relatively small sin of omission and a worthwhile trade off to avoid any hint of unnatural edge or ringing. And it still has plenty of sharpness and sparkle, lending nice bite to trumpets and sheen to triangles and cymbals.

Last but not least, there’s that soundstage - present and tactile, but never in-your-face. Particularly when coupled with gear with sufficient resolution to relay subtle ambient information, e.g. the Pass XP10 preamp, there’s a real sense of the layout and layers of a symphony orchestra. The hi-res LSO Live recording of Mendelssohn’s "Reformation" Symphony with the London Symphony/Gardiner [Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify] paints a vivid picture of the stage of the Barbican, with brass fanfares anchored closer to the back wall of the fan-shaped stage, and the smaller string section sounding up front and intimate. An interesting twist in this performance is Sir Gardiner had the violinists standing to emphasize the virtuosity of Mendelssohn’s writing, and while I can’t say I would have been able to tell this from listening alone, the Silverline does convey a subtle sense of freedom and space to the violin section that I’ve missed when listening to the recording on other systems. And it has no trouble imaging well outside the bounds of the speaker, with percussion and harp on the extreme left of the stage floating eerily behind and beyond the left speaker.

I think my wife put it best when I asked her one day how the system sounded with the Silverlines: “this is what I imagine it sounded like in the concert hall.” While I’ve broken down a bunch of its strengths in audiophile terms above, it’s the way it puts everything together into a musically vivid whole that makes it special. There’s an evenness of tone, a naturalness of perspective, an ease of dynamic expression, a consistency of refinement from top to bottom that gives music a sense of rightness that allows one to forget the hi-fi aspects and focus on the musical performance. In this respect, Alan Yun has crafted something truly masterful in the SR17 Supreme.

Caveats & Comparisons

I’ll nitpick a few things that were relatively minor deficiencies to my ears, but may weigh more heavily for people with different tastes. These were highlighted in my own home by direct comparison with another very fine monitor speaker, the Audiovector SR 1 Avantgarde Arreté ($6,200 in premium finish). I also have my long-term reference, the Merlin TSM-MXe (around $6k several years ago) as a baseline.

First off, I suspect the Silverline’s hint of lower midrange warmth, while sounding natural and consonant with much of my favored acoustic music, may come from a bit of otherwise well-controlled cabinet resonance. It gently highlights the woody quality of acoustic instruments, but with electronic music it comes across as a slight coloration - a bit like wearing orange-tinted sunglasses that make everything look a little less cool. It’s very subtle, and not enough to sound overtly “boxy” or throw voices off, but it’s not transcendentally-clean like the Audiovector or, say, a Magico. My sense is Alan wisely tuned the SR17 cabinet for this response, as additional bracing would just make the resonance peakier and higher in frequency where the ear is more sensitive; as it is, it’s a gentle and diffuse coloration. Part of this may also be the sonic signature of the Esotec woofer’s magnesium silicate polymer cone, which I’ve heard in a number of speakers and to my ears trades better damping for a hair less crispness vs. some of the fancier treated paper or composite cones out there. On the plus side, it never sounds dry as some of those drivers can, but with Erlend Øye’s Unrest [Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify] or Carley Rae Jepsen’s Emotion [Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify] I found the Audiovector conveyed more of hard-wired immediacy and edge suitable for those albums.

Taking turns with the Audiovector SR 1 Avantgarde Arreté

Another area where the Audiovector came out slightly ahead of the Silverlines was in resolution during loud dynamic peaks. The Audiovector is truly special in this regard, being designed for minimal signal compression and sounding incredibly collected the louder you play them. The Silverline also plays loudly with ease, but vs. the über-clean Audiovector it’s very slightly thicker and more congested. Case in point are the fortissimo climaxes and interruptions in Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri overture [Tidal, Spotify] - when the orchestra comes crashing in after the pianissimo pizzicato opening, both speakers are clean and explosive, but the Audiovector sorts out the different instruments playing in unison for that brief moment a hair better, while the Silverline has more low-end oomph.

As mentioned prior, the Silverline’s superb Esotar tweeter isn’t the state-of-the-art in extension. It has plenty of resolution, but if you favor extremely extended and airy highs, e.g. the 52kHz-rated AMT tweeter in the Audiovector will give you more of that. I don’t think that ultimately matters so much for musical enjoyment (and many people can’t hear very well above 10kHz anyway), but it does make a subtle difference in realism. It also makes the Silverline’s treble a bit more forgiving of poor recordings and upstream components (silver cables could work) - it’ll never, ever burn your ears off.

The $7,500 price tag of the Silverline puts it squarely above the very crowded $5k-and-under monitor crowd, but short of the $10k+ “super monitor” category. Comparisons with other speakers are more conjecture on my part as I haven’t heard them in my own room... but I’ll mention a few things I’ve gotten a good listen to at shows, dealers, and other people’s systems.

Paradigm’s Persona series seems to be mentioned quite frequently in audio forums these days, and I heard the Persona B monitor ($7,000) briefly at RMAF. I’ve also listened to the floorstanding Persona 3F a bit, and there’s definitely a common house sound - fast, crisp, detailed and dynamic. I’ve never warmed up to either of them - they’ve struck me as rather strident, with instrumental interplays like oboes and clarinets playing in harmony tending to sound compressed. The Silverline by comparison may sound a bit thicker, but it has far more natural instrumental timbre to my ears, is less bright and thus easier to match to more systems, throws a more dimensional and properly-placed soundstage, and is very nearly as “fast” without sounding edgy. I’m honestly at a loss as to why the Personas are garnering so much praise, so maybe it’s just me? A similar argument could be made for the B&W 805 S3 ($6,000) - while I haven’t auditioned them specifically, I’m pretty familiar with the 800-series sound and again, it’s not my cup of tea. The Silverline’s balance and openness just strike me as much more natural than anything I’ve heard from B&W. So if the likes of B&W and Paradigm leave you a bit cold, the SR17 Supreme might be a step in the right direction.

An obvious comparison is to Dynaudio’s own bookshelves, specifically the Contour 20 ($5,000) and Special Forty ($2,995). You can read about them in my quick review from a dealer audition, and while I haven’t heard them head-to-head, I posit that the Silverline a worthwhile step up in coherence and musicality. If you can’t stretch the budget for the Silverline I think the Special Forty would be a good alternative, but it does not have the near-reference level neutrality of the Silverline. In the past Dynaudio had a bit of a reputation for not being as good at implementing their own drivers in complete loudspeakers as other companies were, and while I think their latest efforts are much improved, Alan Yun still seems to be squeezing more out of the old Esotar/Esotec drivers in the SR17... methinks this is a reflection of Alan’s sharp ear and painstaking hand-tuning.

A few more offhandish observations based on extremely limited auditions, so take with a block of salt: I heard the Wilson Audio TuneTot ($9,800) at a dealer shortly after its release. With the caveats that it’s designed for a totally different use case, it was in an unfamiliar setup and this pair wasn’t fully run in, I didn’t find it nearly as compelling or expressive. I got a good listen to the TAD Micro Evolution One ($12,495) with a couple different amps and found its midrange rather dry, upper midrange a bit peaky and its bass lacking fullness and extension vs. the Silverline. The Artist Cloner Rebel Reference ($16k w/stands) wowed me at RMAF - it seemed to have more speed and resolution than the Silverline, though the upper midrange was a hair pronounced. It would be an interesting comparison, even at twice the price. Another interesting monitor at RMAF was the Stenheim Alumine Two ($13k) which was super clean and detailed, but perhaps not as liquid. A more logical competitor/upgrade could be the Sonus faber Electa Amator III ($10k) that I also heard at RMAF. That speaker absolutely blew me away with its expressiveness, natural richness, insane dynamics and huge presentation in the show setup. It’s the speaker that I’m most dying to compare to the Silverline.

And to wrap up the comparison to my Merlins and the Audiovectors - I sold my beloved Merlins shortly after receiving the Silverlines, and wound up purchasing both the Silverlines and the Audiovectors as I just couldn’t decide between the two. That should give you an idea of just how much I like them both; I’ll have more to say about the Audiovector in a forthcoming review.

Verdict

It's been said speakers mirror the personality of their designers, and if you've met the talented and affable Alan Yun no doubt you’ll feel his influence. Much like the man behind it, the SR17 Supreme is sharp, earnest and engaging, yet easy-going, with an unforced warmth and great attention to detail. There’s something grounded and unfussy about the way it allows music to flow forth, feeling like it's taken an expressive limiter off of a recording without hyping it in any way. It checks off many of the audiophile boxes too - imaging, tonal balance, bass power and extension, etc. etc. - but focusing on those mechanical aspects, as excellent as they are, would be selling Alan’s accomplishment short. The SR17 Supreme is first and foremost a faithful and thoroughly enjoyable reproducer of music, one capable of strongly evoking the beauty of the original musical event. There are countless 2-way monitors superficially like this one, but few that I know that are so meticulously and lovingly tuned to such great effect.

I've spent a lot of words espousing this speaker, but I think it's deserving of it, not just because of the obvious quality of the product, but because Silverline is a small manufacturer flying under the radar without a big dealer network or advertising budget. While Alan continues to develop his entry-level Minuet and Prelude lines at a more rapid pace to keep up with market demands, he doesn’t pen up new versions of his reference models every couple years to generate hype. He’s instead chosen his design fundamentals wisely and focused on perfecting their execution through years of painstaking refinement, much as the late Bobby Palkovic @ Merlin Music did. Like Bobby, he has a great ear for music, does a lot of the production work himself, and gains most of his sales through word of mouth. This does make it trickier to find than the big brands at a typical shop, but I strongly encourage seeking out an opportunity to hear it. The SR17 Supreme is a special speaker, and it won't be leaving my living room any time soon.

Silverline Audio P.O. Box 30574 Walnut Creek, CA 94598 USA

#audiophile #audio #hifi #loudspeaker #speaker #review

3 notes · View notes