Revel

The brand

History

Revel was born from a single sentence. In the mid-1990s, the legendary Dr. Sidney Harman — founder of Harman International — gave his engineers one mandate: "Make the best loudspeakers in the world." To fulfil it, the company recruited Kevin Voecks, a disciple of the renowned acoustics researcher Dr. Floyd Toole, and placed at the new brand's disposal the largest and best-equipped acoustic R&D facility in the world, on Harman's campus in Northridge, California.

What set Revel apart from day one was abandoning guesswork in loudspeaker engineering in favour of the scientific method: double-blind listening tests, developed by the researcher Sean Olive, in which neither the listener nor the operator knows which speaker is playing — the speakers are placed identically in the room by motorised rails, behind an acoustically transparent fabric, in a room with controlled lighting to eliminate any visual bias. A product only reaches the market when it has been proven to beat the competition in these tests.

This scientific discipline produced, in 1997, the Ultima Series and its Salon model, instantly acclaimed as one of the best loudspeakers ever made; and later the Salon2, which according to Harman itself has never been beaten in blind tests by any competitor. Over three decades, Revel has introduced its own technologies such as the beryllium tweeter, the Acoustic Lens Waveguide (now in its sixth generation) and DCC (Deep Ceramic Composite) cones, establishing itself as Harman's reference brand for absolute precision in sound reproduction — in 2025, Revel celebrated 30 years devoted exclusively to the pursuit of perfect fidelity.