Las Vegas
– Snell is adding a center-channel speaker to its fledgling high-end Phantom
series and plans to follow up with a Phantom subwoofer in the summer and an LCR
by year’s end, said VP/brand manager Bob Graffy.
The $7,500 center channel,
due at the end of March, will join the recently shipped Phantom tower, priced
at $20,000/pair and $25,000/pair, depending on finish. The tower borrows
technology and design elements from the flagship $50,000/pair
Illusion tower and brings them to a smaller footprint at a lower price with a
design tailored to conventional living rooms, the company said.
The Illusion tower was built as a
statement piece. The Phantom tower, although about 80 percent of the
Illusion’s size and about half the flagship’s price, delivers almost all of the
performance characteristics of the flagship except for total output and bass
extension, the company said.
Like the Illusion and Phantom tower, the Phantom center channel
can be triamped or triwired, biamped
or biwired, or powered by a single amp channel. The center channel, displayed at International CES, features dual 8-inch aluminum woofers and dual 4.5-inch magnesium midrange
drivers mounted over and under a low-resonance 1-inch SEAS XL silk dome tweeter.
It delivers bass down to 40Hz.
The planned subwoofer and LCR weren’t on display, but Graffy said
the LCR would be a two-way model, perhaps about 20 inches tall, and could serve
as a surround speaker.
