Von Schweikert Ultra 55
Achieving room-filling, high-quality sound in a hotel room is difficult enough. Getting it in a cavernous ballroom is even more problematic. Yet, over the past few years at AXPONA, RMAF, and most recently at the February 2020 FLAX (Florida Audio Expo), Von Schweikert Audio, in association with The Audio Company of Marietta, Georgia, has managed that—and, other than the approximately 100 bodies occupying every seat in the house, they’ve done it without any room treatment, or without any that I could see.
At various shows, the company delivered equally impressive sonic goods with either the monolith-like $325,000/pair Ultra 11 or with the far smaller $100,000/pair Ultra 55 reviewed here ($95,000/pair for the passive version, without the powered woofers). The Ultra 9, priced between the two, fills out the Ultra line. While big rooms usually have “hot spots” of good sound and “dead spots” of poor sound, the Von Schweikerts seemed to shower everyone with good sound, wherever they sat or stood.
At one show, I played Side 2 of Abbey Road (PCS 7088) digitized at 24/96 from an original UK pressing; the crowd sat transfixed through a whole side of a very familiar record. People got up teary-eyed or even weeping outright. A few said they’d “never heard it like that.” That was in part due to my analog front end’s decoding of an original UK pressing, but it was also because the system in the big room delivered the kind of well-balanced sonic presentation you don’t often hear in hotel rooms, big or small. It surprised me.
Familiar elements on that record, and on others I spun on vinyl there, usually get ruined or disappear entirely in hotel rooms: the bottom end goes soggy or bloated; transients lose their grip or are sharp. But in that room near the Tampa airport, they sounded ideal, or at least recognizably similar to how they sound at home under much better
