PSB was founded by famous Canadian loudspeaker designer Paul Barton and his wife Sue (Paul and Sue Barton… get it?). Their company became so successful that the privately owned Canadian Lenbrook Group (which also owns NAD and Bluesound) made the couple an offer for it that they couldn’t refuse — particularly since the group wanted Paul to stay on as lead designer for all PSB products.
Barton is renowned for being a ‘sound quality first, looks second’ designer; an engineer who won’t sacrifice sound quality for fashion — and this philosophy is a little on show with the new Synchrony T800. They’re not exactly small, nor are they exactly sculpted like some modern tower speaker designs. They also have rather blocky-looking outrigger feet at each tower’s base that are, again, not exactly good-looking. In a world where most large and expensive loudspeakers are rather curvaceous, the T800 are decidedly boxy!
So even though the T800 are touted as ‘cost no object’ designs, we suspect that, unlike some speaker manufacturers who shall remain mercifully nameless, Barton was unwilling to spend more money on cabinets than on the drivers and crossover networks built into them!
THE EQUIPMENT
We have to admit that we were initially baffled by the description of the design of the Synchrony T800 as being a ‘transitional’ bass reflex one, so this was one of the first aspects of the speaker we investigated. It turns out that Barton has extended a type of crossover design used in many two-way loudspeakers that sport two bass drivers in combination with a single tweeter, for use in this four-driver, three-way loudspeaker. We can’t recall ever seeing this type of design previously.
But before scrutinising that further, let’s first look at the most important aspect of the Synchrony T800’s design — because it is by far and away the most important: the fact that it’s a true three-way design, sporting three large-cone (203mm diameter) drivers to deliver low frequencies, a single, somewhat smaller-cone driver (133mm) to deliver midrange frequencies, and a single 25mm titanium dome driver to deliver high frequencies.
The importance of the three-way design is that it eliminates a serious loudspeakers that do not have a dedicated midrange driver. This distortion occurs whenever a single speaker cone is called upon to reproduce low and midrange frequencies simultaneously, which is what happens in all two-way (and 2.5-way) speaker designs.
