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PSB Platinum T8

A wonderful loudspeaker

By Michael Jones

April 2004

PSB Platinum T8 loudspeakers. $12,999

Imagine that you’re a successful loudspeaker designer with many years of well-received loudspeakers under your belt. Your speakers are constantly well reviewed, but often with the tag of being great value. You know that you can do even better. Plus there’s always that nagging feeling that your creations might not be taken seriously by some simply because they’re not expensive enough.

If you were Paul Barton (the P and B in PSB) you’d roll up your sleeves, get out a fresh piece of paper and work to create an even better speaker than before. The result is the PSB Platinum T8.

Runaway

Normally if you had told me that a loudspeaker had seven drivers per speaker, I’d run the other way, as many (most?) such speakers fail to integrate the sound and create a sonic mess. But being a good engineer who also listens carefully, Paul Barton looked at some potential problems and came up with some great solutions.

Deep bass reproduction is about moving air, which normally requires large drivers. A high dynamic range from a loudspeaker requires moving air. Current aesthetic requirements among speaker buyers require a slim loudspeaker cabinet. A slim cabinet and large drivers are a difficult mix – it’s hard to fit a 380mm (15”) woofer into a cabinet 270mm wide!

But three 200mm (that’s eight inches for the metrically challenged) woofers have a similar cone area to a 15 incher, with the benefit of fitting inside the cabinet. Plus it is easier to match the smaller bass drivers with those used in the midrange.

There’s two 110mm drivers used to cover the midrange from 300Hz to 2200kHz. Like the woofers, the midrange drivers are made from woven fibreglass. Between the two is a 25mm aluminium tweeter, said - with an eye to SACD and DVD-A formats - to extend to 40kHz.

On the back is a second tweeter. PSB’s blurb suggests that this offers bipole operation, which is piffle - a midrange driver would be needed on the rear to achieve this. I greatly preferred the speakers with the rear tweeter disabled. Leaving it on gave voices a “covered” sound (imagine someone talking with a hand in front of their mouth).

The Platinum T8 is available in either cherry (lovely!) or black ash (for the unimaginative) real wood veneers. Unusually, the top and bottom of the cabinets are die-cast aluminium. The same material is also used for the front baffle.

Who put the bomp?

Let’s look first at the bass. After placing the speakers where they seemed to sound best in my room, I reached for my sound pressure level (SPL) meter and test tones from a Stereophile test CD. To my amazement, outside of the peaks at 50 and 40Hz caused by my room, the bass response of the Platinum T8 was within a 5dB envelope from 200Hz right down to 20Hz. That is incredible performance.

Listening showed that the bass was well sorted from a musical point of view, with bass instruments displaying their power and articulation. Most speakers muddy the bass, obscuring instrumental definition and clouding the pitch of bass instruments. Not so with the PSB. Even pushing the Platinum close to the rear wall did nothing to muddy the sound, merely making the bass a little more prominent.

Take the Tribute for Miles CD, recorded after the death of Miles Davis by arguably the top jazz musicians in the world. Ron Carter’s upright bass sounds like the big, vibrating instrument that it is, with power, definition and clear pitch. Tony William’s drums are similar, and when he works the kick drum hard you can really feel it.

Studio generated music also benefited from this. Peter Gabriel’s work always has a lot going on in the lower registers, but many speakers turn this into mud. Playing my CD of his fourth album, I could clearly hear things happening in the bass that I had previously been unaware.

I can see for miles

 “It images like a mini-monitor,” said one visitor. He’s right - the T8 has an extraordinary focussed imaging ability, like a small speaker, but with the scale and image size of a larger speaker. It’s unusual to find a big speaker with this ability.

There were other ways in which the PSB sounded like a good small speaker. Voices, for example, never turned chesty or resonant, the way they can with many speakers.

The dynamics from the Platinum T8 are wonderful. There is no sense of dynamic compression, even when listening at louder levels.

Three steps to heaven

This is an extraordinary speaker - a “complete” speaker. It is both sonically excellent and musically involving. I’ve reviewed many hi-fi components over 17 years – this is one of the few that I greatly miss when they’ve gone back.

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