Blog
T/9x Video Overview
The Flagship of the T/x Series
Hi, my name is John Hunter. I’m REL’s head designer. We’re here to introduce you to our new T/x range, which we’re very, very proud of. The T/x falls below S and Reference. And because of that, this is an extremely important range to us. This is where many people have their first experience of REL. So, it’s really important to us that you have a fantastic experience.
The T/9x, which we’re looking at here is the flagship of this range. And even though it’s the flagship, as you’ll see, it’s pretty compact. This is not a huge cabinet.
0:30
It’s driven by a 300 watt amplifier and dual 10 inch drivers. The one you see here on the front is active and has extremely long stroke.
And on every inward stroke, it drives a down firing passive radiator on the bottom. And the point of the passive is to fill out the lowest frequencies that sort of creep along the floor. T/9x is a brilliant piece. We’ll walk you through some of the specifics right now. The 10 inch drivers used on the T/x took months to pull together.
1:00
The reason for this is simple. We’re trying to get more dynamics out of this. These needed to be faster on the one hand. Great, but they also had to be able to handle more power, more about that in a moment, and they have more stroke. Why? Because we’re dealing with a desire to get deeper bass, more output, and in order to do that we had to completely retune the suspension.
So, what we have here is a very high power and very high, current 300 watt amplifier. This is a class A/B design, a class A/B is a classic amplifier with large transformers designed to output tons of current. And why is current important?
1:30
Think of voltage as something that will get a driver started current is that which will stop it and keep it under control. We prefer power supply designs that are really high current, because it’s important to us to have that start, stop control. What’s significant about this we’re using, by the way, exactly the same amplifier that we were with some revisions in the old models. The reason we use these is they are dead nuts bulletproof. We have hundreds of thousands of these in production and almost none of them fail. So reliability is incredibly important to me. It just, it can’t be any other way.
2:00
So, we wouldn’t casually move away from this. What we’re able to do though, as we’ve learned through doing the reference models, through doing two almost three generations of Serie S, we’ve gotten very, very good at titrating the last little bit of power in our limiters. So, with the ability to get all the power out we’re probably legitimately delivering about 60 Watts more to the driver on big peaks with this version now with the new limiters that we’ve developed versus the previous model. So one of the things REL is really famous for is our high level connections. This connects right here and we supply actually a 10 meter cable, which for those of us who don’t know metric it’s about 33 feet.
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What that allows us to do is connect up to your power amplifier, the same thing that is driving your main loudspeakers. We connect up to that. We take no power. I want to be very clear about that. We simply use that as a preconditioning signal to feed into our big 300 watt amplifier. And what that allows you to do is have a perfect seamless blend when you get it right. It’s exactly the same signal your speakers are receiving, and it allows us to do a perfect, seamless blend of our sub with your speakers.
3:30
When you do it properly, when you crossover properly, you cannot hear where one stops and the other begins. It’s just a perfect handoff and to get that right, our filter network up here is incredibly quick. Eight milliseconds, which I would guess is as fast as anything, maybe faster than anything else out there, except our reference units which are four millisecond.
So very quick, very fluid. The musicianship that comes through is incredible and that’s critical to us and it’s critical in home theater.
4:00
If I could just say that going back 15 years, 16 years ago, one of the things I was committed to doing when we purchased REL was taking a category that was back then brutally ugly and really making them something that people could feel proud to have in their home. With these latest ones, I dare say, we’ve really taken it to an entirely new level.
So, in conclusion, the REL T/9x is the flagship, and It’s an unusual flagship in that it’s really big, powerful, and very, very fast, but we’ve managed to slim it down to give it the appearance of something that’s really a medium, very comfortably medium-sized chassis.
4:30
It’s not big, it’s not blousy. It’s really quite tight and crisp. Given that these lovely radii that are almost a neoclassic form these days brilliantly finished and five coats of hand rub black lacquer. Everything that you see here, feel on this as authentic. It’s fast, it really is 300 Watts of class A/B power with a power transformer that big around bolted inside an active 10 inch forward firing and down firing 10 inch passive. This is an enormous amount of performance for a moderate level of cost.