I was 17 years old when I got into the audio business. My dad started a stereo store in Orange, CA, where we not only sold stereo equipment, but we also made and sold home audio speakers. It was there that I found out that most speaker companies didn't actually build their own speaker drivers. Nope, most of them simply built enclosures and filled the holes with various drivers built by OEM suppliers. It was a real eye opener for me then, but made a lot of sense after I found out just how much work it was to combine a tweeter and a midrange with a woofer in the proper enclosure, and then design a crossover to make it all go together. To have to do all that and design and manufacture the drivers themselves was out of reach for most companies, and still is today. Don't get me wrong, there were a few speaker manufacturers that did it all, like JBL, but not many did then and even fewer do now.
It was at that time that I first heard of a little Norwegian loudspeaker manufacturer that was founded in 1950 called SEAS. Back when we were doing home audio, we used several of their OEM drivers - from tweeter to mid to woofer - all of them with superb quality, design and yielding wonderful sounding results. I was excited when I heard that SEAS actually branded a system with their name and brought them to market here in the U.S. a few years ago. I'm more excited that I have the opportunity to review a set.
Impressions
Like a kid in a candy store, I snatched the box with the newest edition of the SEAS. Inside was a note with the retail price. I was a little set back when I read that these speakers were going for $999. For that much money, I thought they better be really, really good or else!
As I grabbed the box, I immediately noted how likeable the presentation of the carton was. It was nicely sized - not too big and not too small - and had a handle sticking out the top of it. I like handles on boxes... don't ask me why. And, the packaging inside the carton was excellent. There's no way you could damage these speakers with out running over the box a couple of times - at least that's what I think.
The PS165/1 is a 2-way component system with a pair of 6.5" midwoofers, 27mm silk-dome tweeters and passive crossovers. The speakers are proudly marked "Made in Norway" and are dead sexy looking. The very first thing you'll see when you open the carton are the brilliant white cotton lab gloves that SEAS included. A nice touch.
In preparation for this review, I started my homework on the Lotus Performance Set PS165/1. Interestingly, I found out the company retooled their Performance line of speakers to more closely match their higher line of award-winning Reference speakers. Serious people, these Norwegians are.
After removing the gloves (OK, I put them on), the next item to remove from the box were the grilles for the midwoofers. I like these! The perforated metal grille section was formed in a very high-quality die stamp as evidenced by the crisp edges and bends. It fit perfectly into the slot of the plastic mounting ring that holds the mesh in place. The mounting ring is of a rigid plastic composite with an outer diameter that has been minimized to help improve installation fit. I wish every manufacturer would take the time and energy to get their grilles this well engineered to fit together.
Below the mesh in the box were the 6.5" midwoofers. These drivers have many unique features. The frame is extremely stiff and is made via an injection-molding technique. This improves the precision of the metal basket to keep the critical components in perfect alignment during construction. Don't be fooled by the mold technique - the basket is not plastic but, in fact, made of zinc.
The woofers use a cone material made of black, woven fiberglass. Its design is said to offer a reasonably low-resonance frequency (Fs) of 64Hz to help reduce door resonance for a snappier midbass sound. At the cone's outer edge, SEAS uses a thin, pliable low-loss rubber surround, while a plastic phase plug fixed atop the motor's pole-piece to help smooth the frequency response sits in its center. A large 1.5" aluminum voice coil former sits around the outside of the phase plug with barely a millimeter or two separating them. The voice coil former is anodized black to dissipate heat better and improve the power handling of the two-layer voice coil.
Out back, the magnet structure uses a bumped back plate making room for extreme cone excursions. SEAS added a rubber cup around the magnet system for protection and (what may be one of the best marketing lines I've heard) "to reduce enclosure reflections."