It’s a nostalgic name for a brand-new manufacturer based in France, and whose speakers are being brought to Australia by Audio Marketing. Please welcome to our shores Revival Audio.
Audio Marketing’s Tim Wallis points out that although launching only in late 2021, Revival’s foundations are strong, with its co-founder, CTO and design engineer Daniel Emonts having long industry experience including stints with Altec-Lansing, Focal-JMLab and most recently nearly six years at Dynaudio, where he was senior R&D engineer of acoustics.
His Revival co-founder Jacky Lee was also resident at Dynaudio, ultimately as Chief Commercial Officer, having previously worked with IBM in his home country Taiwan before leading the business establishment of Dynaudio China from 2016, after Chinese company GoerTek acquired majority shares in Dynaudio in 2014.
So Revival kicks off with a solid grounding in both engineering and commercialisation. Its first speakers are the Atalante series pictured here, consisting of two models in just one finish (“Thank you!” notes Tim Wallis).
Despite ‘angel’ funding for the Alsace-based company coming from ‘Tech (China)’ based in Shenzhen, both Atalante models are fully designed, engineered and assembled in France using all ‘in-house manufactured’ components: the company declares firmly that “We DO NOT buy off the shelves!”
Revival also notes that “Sound is an Art, on top of its science nature”, and that a Revival Audio product equals “an Art Piece of Sound”. So for the aesthetics they have collaborated with the award-winning A+A Cooren Design Studio based in Paris. Yet they also state that as a principle they want “no gaudy design to stack up the price...”
The result is the Atalante 3 priced here at AU$4000, with a seven-inch woofer, and the much larger Atalante 5, priced at AU$8000, with dedicated midrange and a 12 -inch woofer.
Both models share the company’s ‘RASC’ 28mm soft-dome tweeter, which has an asymmetrical dome suspension and a large ferrite magnet which promises to achieve neodymium levels of control without the cost (and using a more eco-friendly material).
The tweeter also features an interesting back-chamber damping system which seems not entirely disassociated with the ideas behind KEF’s MAT tweeter damping.
The label ‘RASC’, which is also applied to the midrange of the large Atalante, appears to refer to the coating used on the domes, which Revival says took “hundreds of hours of experiment... and brings perfect break-up control and the most accurate, smooth sound reproduction.”
The 75mm midrange on the Atalante 5 also carries an innovation in ARID+ (Anti Resonance Inner Dome), an inner dome blow the main inverted dome which has been shaped using simulation software to avoid resonances and to guide waves behind to be absorbed in the back chamber.
The two differently-sized woofers on the two models also use new materials, notably basalt, extracted from grey igneous lava stone, and touted as being sustainable, recyclable and not, like many cone materials, derived from petroleum products. Revival’s bass cones are a sandwich with basalt-fibre fabric as the top layer, a polymer glue and a felt in the middle, and a specially customised foam-based cone as the bottom layer. This has been labelled as BSC (Basalt Sandwich Construction).
Both Revival Audio Atalante models have optional dedicated stands available for AU$749.
We’re told the new brand should arrive here in Australia in time for Christmas.
