On the Bench: Fritz Frequencies Rev 5

Okay, I’m going to confess something — I’ve been holding out on you.

Shocker, I know.

It’s just that RMAF kinda bottled stuff up (that was a lot of posts), and I didn’t want to disrupt the flow. But … well, I do have a bunch of new stuff here that I thought I should tell you about.

First up was the Peachtree separates that have been here a little while now. They’re a lot of fun. Another newbie on my bench is this little wonder from Fritz Frequencies: a very pretty Rev 5.

The Rev 5 sports a 5″ Scanspeak Revelator (hence the name) mid/bass driver, paired with a 1″ Scanspeak tweeter, wired with Fritz’ customary series crossover from Acoustic Reality. The bass-reflex cabinets present a tidy little package at only 13″ tall, but they’re deceptively robust — each weighs 25lbs. Bass performance is a respectable 45Hz, with the typical 20KHz treble extension. My demos have a custom curly cherry finish that is quite striking and the entire package looks very posh. I’ve run them with a $27k Vitus Audio SIA-025 integrated, $4k Odyssey Audio monoblocks, a $4k Luxman L-505u integrated, $11k Pass Labs XA-60.5 monos, and an $18k BorderPatrol P20 push-pull 300b amp — all handled the little Rev 5’s with aplomb, and all of them sound lovely and quite distinct. Available directly from Fritz for $2,100, you can color me impressed.

While there are less expensive loudspeakers on the market, I can’t think of any that use this level of parts-quality and combine it with this level of fitment. The sound? I’m still not quite sure how all that comes out of something that small. I could easily and quite happily build a modest system around these guys and be insanely happy.