Running in the family – PMC twenty5.24i floorstanding louspeaker

Date: 2021-05-21

It should not come as any great surprise to find that the audio industry thrives on specialisation. Within the church of hi-fi there are, of course, manufacturers that only produce components in a single category and do very well out of it. There are also those that take pride in being able to make a complete system, keeping the entire process inhouse. Between the two exist infinite variations on the theme, but the setup here is sufficiently unusual to be worthy of comment.

Mention PMC to anybody with at least a passing understanding of the hi-fi sphere and they’ll talk about speakers. The company has a superlative track record in the construction of both domestic and professional audio monitors, all tied together by the use of transmission lines to augment and shape their bass response. In some ways, the twenty5.24i is almost the standard of what many of us expect a PMC speaker to be. It’s a slim, two-way floorstander that combines a soft dome tweeter with a woven driver that exits via a transmission line that is nearly 10 feet in length.

Even though the basic formula hasn’t changed, PMC has been hard at work on the details. This latest iteration features all the evolutionary developments the company has been working on. This means the transmission line exits in the specially developed ‘laminair’ port and that those smart outriggers you see at the bottom of the cabinet have been exactingly engineered to improve the way that the speaker couples to the floor. Without looking like it has changed much of anything, PMC has in fact, changed just about everything.

If the twenty5.24i is PMC doing business as usual, the Cor is anything but. The company wanted to make an amplifier, so it did. It isn’t the start of a planned range or a piece of brand building, in fact more than anything, the Cor is a physical manifestation of the company scratching an itch. It is an amplifier built as PMC feels that amplifiers should be. This means you get 95W into 8ohm, a useful spread of analogue inputs and tone controls that are actually designed to be used in such a way to facilitate that.

Cor blimey
The front end comes from Bryston, a company with an entirely symbiotic relationship with PMC that shares a similar attitude toward fripperies. The BDP-3 is a network streaming front end designed to function in environments that would leave rivals flummoxed and sulking and features a degree of customisation that simply isn’t present elsewhere. Outputting to a BDA-3 DAC, the duo oozes a ‘built to survive the end of the world’ feel that I’m hugely fond of. There’s something charming about the way that, by eschewing any conscious aesthetic, Bryston wound up with one of the most distinctive design languages in the industry.

The trio of units feel special in an entirely pragmatic way. The 24i is a compact and elegant speaker, but there’s a heft to the way it is built that never lets you forget it’s related to speakers designed to withstand anything the professional world can throw at them. The Cor is infused with the same feeling of purpose. That giant volume knob isn’t a design flourish. It gears the pot so you can set exactly the right volume rather than an approximation of it. The Bryston might have swathes of setup menus, but once it is set the way you want it it stays set that way – seemingly impervious to what your network might be doing in the meantime. This is heavy-duty hardware that manages not to dominate the space it is in.

Hanging out
It will fill it, though. Keen to hold off talking about sledgehammer bass for at least part of this review, I begin with Exile, the recently released duet between Taylor Swift (yep, really) and Bon Iver. This stunning, goosebump-inducing work is not about low end, but it lives or dies on the perception of scale and this system delivers it perfectly. Both Swift and Justin Vernon are convincingly sized and the supporting music hangs behind them in a way that extends far beyond the position of the speakers themselves. The piano that anchors the track sounds big and convincing and when the gentle application of low end happens towards the end of the track, it’s beautifully understated. The 24i can hit like a hammer when you need it to but, crucially, when you don’t need that blunt force, it’s exceptionally dextrous too.

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