SVS Goes Big With The New 16 Ultra Series – RMAF 2016

The past few years have been an intriguing look into loudspeakers for SVS. Their floorstanding and bookshelf efforts have taken a serious swipe at both surround sound and 2 channel applications. But this year at Rocky Mountain Audiofest SVS bought it all back to their roots – deep-reaching, bottom-dwelling teeth-rattling subwoofer roots.

The time has come for a fresh flagship to be added to the SVS subwoofer line. The new kids on the block harness the power of a 16″ driver and even more thump and low reach than before. Sound in the room on the 8th floor of the tower was robust throughout the low end but still controlled, even for the slightly smaller room size the demo resided in. The 16″ subs will come in both a sealed (SB16) and ported (PB16) variants and also include whopping 1,500 watts continuous (5kW peak) “Sledge” amplification.

For their new biggest and boldest, SVS bought out a few new party favors including a 8″ edge wound voice coil and fully discrete MOSET amplification. Another first for SVS is the inclusion of a front panel display.  This informational display provides additional assistance when it comes to controlling the 16’s new custom DSP, which can also be navigated via an included remote or even from a corresponding phone app. The latter connects through bluetooth and works on both Apple and Android platforms. From the app you can adjust overall volume, crossover points, EQ, and even polarity on the fly.  The SB16-Ultra will cost $1,999 and the ported PB16-Ultra will land at $2,499. Expect ship dates around November 15th of this year.

We got a chance to sit down with SVS’s president Gary Yacoubian to go over all of the finer talking points on the new flagships, you can see it all in the video below.

More information: https://www.svsound.com/pages/16-ultra-series/