Teufel Ultima 60 Floorstanding Speaker Review
Russell Williams checks out the new stereo speakers from Teufel and is pleasantly surprised by the offering from the direct sell company.
“Now, I must confess that in the rush not to prejudice this review by reading too much in advance, the one thing I didn’t know about the Ultima 60s until quite late in the day was their price. Finding out that the Ultima 60s only retail for £178 each; that’s £356 per pair, was quite a surprise to put it mildly. At £360(ish), to my knowledge the number of true three way, four driver floor-standers is not large.
It became apparent during their stay, that here is a pair of speakers comfortable crunching out rock, pop, dance and electronica in general in a confident and often impressive fashion. They go loud and comfortably off not a lot of Watts and equally, their easy going nature isn’t going to result in a forensic dissection of less than stellar kit further up the audio chain. Equally, they sound good when fed a really first class quality pressing, but don’t descend into sounding like a transistor radio when presented with a mix clearly dynamically compressed for radio airplay. Those CDs that sound good in your car, will still sound good at home if the Ultima 60s are involved. This is not a bad ability to have at any price.
Equally, I found then to be capable 2.0 movie speaker; not everybody has the room or a partner willing to accommodate more than a pair of coffins in the front room. Whilst I won’t kid you that these will replace a full 5.1 rig, they’re at least as capable as some of the offerings I’ve heard being sold as subwoofers when it comes to rattling the furniture. Then again as they offer the equivalent radiating area of an 8” woofer in a 40L cabinet and there’s two of them, so it shouldn’t be a surprise they’re no shrinking violet in this regard. Push them against a wall and they should lift you clean out of your seat on the big hits.
The flip side to all of this is that those with a taste erring toward small scale vocal and/or acoustic recordings where the source material quality tends to be more of a given, may find they are better served by a simpler speaker that maybe doesn’t make such a concerted bid for full bandwidth, high volume status at the expense of ultimate detail retrieval and accuracy. Subtle tonal shadings and the finer touches of instrumental technique tend to be glossed over by the Ultima 60s, which leaves them feeling a touch bland and expressionless in exactly the way they’re not with more mainstream fayre.
And this I think sums up the Teufel Ultima 60s; in trying to tick all of the boxes, they might have missed a few goals that a simpler design might have hit. In theory a three way is great, but it doesn’t really offer any additional output over a two-and-a-half way and certainly does add an extra level of cost and complexity to fit into a given budget. The plinth looks nice, but is more expensive than and less effective than supplying spikes and rubber studs for those with wooden floors. A gloss black baffle is nice, but it isn’t very glossy and I’d happily trade it for something plain and have an extra internal brace to damp the cabinet.
I don’t want to damn with faint praise. If you have mainstream tastes, want a capable room filling loudspeaker on a budget, then I heartily recommend you take Teufel up on their eight week (Yup! That’s 8 weeks!) return or exchange policy (return shipping at your cost) and if they do stay put, remain safe in the knowledge that they come with a twelve year warranty. If your tastes are less mainstream then there are likely to be speakers better suited to your purposes and this compromise is reflected in my marking below.
Put it another way; if you favour Radio 1 or 2 over 3 or 4, these may be right up your street and you can add one notch to the music and overall scores.”
Read the full review at AVForums.com/Reviews
