PSB 1000 Speaker System Review

PSB Speakers — the company’s name is derived from the initials of its founder and chief designer, Paul Barton — are designed and manufactured in Canada. Over the years, the PSB product line has grown in size and diversity, always maintaining the high standards of its creator, formerly a professional musician.

The new PSB 1000, though outwardly resembling other currently popular columnar speakers, differs from them in many respects. According to Barton, it features a newly designed woofer and tweeter and a cabinet that is constructed for exceptional rigidity and freedom from vibration.

Rated to handle up to 150 watts of input, the PSB 1000 is a “two and a half way” system, with its two 6-1/2-inch cone woofers mounted one above the other and flanking the single 1-inch ferrofluid-cooled dome tweeter. The woofers operate as a vented system, with a single 2-1/2-inch port below the lower one, which serves as a sort of subwoofer, handling the bass range up to a few hundred hertz. The upper woofer’s response (which also covers the full range of the lower driver) continues upward to the vicinity of 2.1 kHz before crossing over to the tweeter. According to the manufacturer, each of the long-throw woofers combines a treated, compressed-felt cone and a highly efficient magnet system in a rigid, nonmetallic basket.

The tweeter’s 1-inch dome is a blend of textile, linen, and silk that PSB says provides an exceptionally smooth and uncolored response over a wide frequency range. An extended cavity beneath the dome’s surround is said to lower the tweeter’s low-frequency resonance to well below the 2.1-kHz crossover frequency. The result of these and other design features is said to be an audible gain in natural, precise timbres in the vocal range and a remarkably accurate overall frequency response of 45 Hz to 20 kHz +1.5 dB. Low-frequency cutoff is given as -10 dB at 29 Hz.

On the outside, the PSB 1000 resembles many other tower speakers, but inside it’s as unusual as its drivers. PSB says that the enclosure is assembled from high-density, non-resonant wood composites using rounded, extruded corner moldings that make it extremely rigid. That rigidity can easily be verified by a simple knuckle test. Rapping any portion of the cabinet exterior produces a sharp click, strikingly free of any ringing or other sign of cabinet resonance. The rear panel of the enclosure has dual sets of gold-plated binding posts with jumper straps suitable for bi-wiring.

The rated sensitivity of the PSB 1000 is a relatively high 92 dB sound-pressure level (SPL) with a 2.83-volt input signal. Its nominal (and minimum) impedance is specified as 4 ohms. Our measurements confirmed that figure and also showed that the system impedance was unusually uniform. We measured a minimum impedance of 4 ohms between 100 and 300 Hz, which rose to a rather uniform 7 ohms from 700 Hz to 20 kHz. The bass peak of 15 ohms occurred at 60 Hz. Presumably there was another impedance peak in this vented system, but it apparently occurred below 20 Hz and therefore did not appear in our measurements.

Our frequency-response measurements confirmed the exceptional qualities claimed for the PSB 1000. The room response, averaged for the left and right speakers, was within ±4 dB from 50 Hz to 12 kHz. Close-miked on-axis measurements at 18 inches from the tweeter showed a response that was flat within 5 dB overall from 45 Hz to 20 kHz. A similar measurement midway between the lower woofer and the port yielded a response flat within ±4.5 dB from 20 Hz to 2 kHz.

Perhaps most impressive of all the measurements, however, was the quasi-anechoic MLS response at distances of 1, 2, and 3 meters from the speaker. The “worst” result was a ±2-dB variation from 300 Hz to 20 kHz at 3 meters. The best was ±1.5 dB at 1 meter over the same frequency range.

Those figures represent by far the flattest response we have measured from a speaker over the major part of the audio range. They do not necessarily mean that anyone will experience such response uniformity in actual use (the MLS measurement excludes many reflections that will inevitably appear in a real-world listening situation), but they certainly speak eloquently for the care that went into creating the PSB 1000.

Probably the most “conventional” characteristic of the speaker is its horizontal dispersion. The response curves on-axis and 45 degrees off-axis diverged above 3 kHz, with a drop of about 13 dB at 15 kHz. That is not unusual, especially for speakers with 1-inch tweeters, but it contrasts sharply with the PSB 1000’s superb on-axis performance.

System sensitivity measured 94 dB, slightly higher than rated. With an input of 1.78 volts (equivalent to a 90-dB SPL at 1 meter) the bass distortion was less than 1 percent from 60 Hz to 2 kHz, with a minimum of 0.6 percent at 100 Hz.

The sound of the PSB 1000, as might be expected from its measurements, was excellent. It was well balanced and free of such common vices as shrillness or boominess. The bass was solid and clean with music having substantial content as low as 30 Hz. In short, this is one fine speaker.

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