Flagship PerformaBe Series Floor-Standing Loudspeaker Plays with Transparency, Detail, and Impact: Revel F328Be Features Three Eight-Inch Woofers, Reference Tweeter

Equipped with newly devised woofers and tweeters that advance the cutting-edge in engineering and sound, Revel PerformaBe F328Be floor-standing loudspeaker makes its presence known by way of pin-drop clarity, ravishing dynamics, and a driver array that seemingly shouts "go big or go home." And let's just say the flagship of Revel's award-winning PerformaBe Series isn't going anywhere. Once you hear the three-way design, we suspect it will be staying in your listening room for years and years to come. Four available high-gloss finishes and truly elegant looks further make it a showstopper in any space in which it resides. What's more, its 91dB sensitivity rating and recommended amplifier power range (50-300 watts) mean F328Be proves a cinch to drive.

Bolstered by three eight-inch Deep Ceramic Composite (DCC) aluminum-cone drivers with cast frames, a 5.25-inch DCC midrange transducer, and an advanced one-inch beryllium dome tweeter driven by massive 3.35-inch dual ceramic magnets with a sixth-generation Acoustic Lens waveguide, F328Be plays with remarkable transparency, timing, and soundstaging. Difficult-to-reproduce aspects valued by audiophiles of all stripes – finite microdetails, three-dimensional images, deep-register bass frequencies – come through with ease, poise, and balance. No shrinking violet, F328Be knows the importance of gracefulness but also can rock out, registering energetic passages with soul-shaking power, punch, and impact.

Inside, Revel's crossover networks utilize all film capacitors and air core inductors in the midrange and tweeter circuits. Combined with traditional high-order crossover slopes and proprietary Acoustic Lens waveguide geometry, transducer integration on F328Be becomes seamless. On the rear, dual bass ports join dual gold-plated speaker binding posts. Magnetically attachable grilles and metallic-black-painted top panels complete a 50.9 x 13.5 x 17.6-inch (HWD) all-rounder ready to ably take on all comers in its price class – and any type of recording you throw at it. 

"When listening to the Revel F328Bes, they simply got out of the way and let me enjoy a cohesive, well-balanced, dynamic and three-dimensional presentation at a variety of listening levels. There are other speakers that provide more resolution or extension at either end of the frequency spectrum, but you would be hard pressed to find a speaker that provides a more balanced, coherent, and nuanced presentation, especially at this price point."
– Brian Kahn, Home Theater Review

State-of-the-Art Tweeter
The heart and soul of the Revel Performa Beryllium range is the incredibly competent dome tweeter from which the series derives its name. Due to its large scale as well as its dynamic and efficiency requirements, F328Be was going to require a tweeter even more capable than the one used in F228Be. Revel's Chief Engineer, Mark Glazer, worked with the development team to create a new transducer that incorporates details including a vented pole piece and distortion reduction ring along with massive ferrite motor structure as the motive force behind the one-inch beryllium dome. This new design provides F328Be with the high-frequency performance necessary to render incredibly accurate and detailed response, even at very high listening levels.

Large Waveguide
When crafting the waveguide for the F328Be, the team pushed the envelope even further with evolutionary changes designed to improve high-frequency coverage into the room along with acoustic integration with the midrange. The resulting footprint of the waveguide was increased, which allowed space for a smoother transition section to the outer perimeter. This served to virtually eliminate the minute diffraction that was found on the edge of the fifth-generation design.

Superb Low-Frequency Extension
Starting with the eight-inch DCC cast-frame woofer from the F228Be, Revel's acoustic design team made evolutionary improvements by refining the motor magnetics structure to push dynamic capabilities further. There is also the obvious addition of a third woofer in the enclosure. A third woofer won't do much to improve things if it doesn't have the internal volume to optimize its inclusion. To accommodate the roughly 50% increase in internal volume, the depth and height of the enclosure were increased significantly while retaining the original width of the dual eight-inch F228Be cabinet. The resultant stack-height of the five transducers in the F328Be configuration required a change of how the bass tuning would need to be done. Maintaining a front-firing port as on the smaller F228Be would have pushed the tweeter height beyond an acceptable level. To keep the tweeter at the correct height for the size of the loudspeaker, the change was made to a rear-ported design with dual custom-tuned flared ports. The changes to the low-frequency section resulted in greater low-end extension than F228Be, along with improvements in dynamic capabilities at all volumes.

Attractive Enclosure and Functional Bracing
The enclosure of F328Be follows the attractive curved shape of the smaller F228Be and F226Be models with the included arched black metallic top panel and integrated gloss black plinth. Five window-pane internal braces and a one-inch thick baffle ensure maximum rigidity and a sonically inert cabinet providing a solid foundation for the transducers. Dual sets of speaker binding posts provide a secure connection and the option of single-ended or bi-wire terminations with a variety of connectors.

Direct Ceramic Composite Cones
DCC is a plasma electrolytic oxidation process that uses a plasma discharge to create a coarse ceramic coating on both sides of the aluminum core. The deep ceramic layers sandwiching the aluminum core provide constrained layer damping that push cone breakup modes outside of the passband, allowing the driver to maintain ideal pistonic motion throughout its range. DCC cones combine with optimized motor magnetics to deliver improved mid- and low-frequency performance.