The New PMC Finestria Speakers Now On Demo - Utterly Incredible!

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Hi Everyone,

A lot of you already know that HiFi Lounge forming is directly connected to PMC, for those who don’t know the story basically myself and Wendy attended a PMC open day around 10 years ago where we heard the mighty BB5 XBD’s, we were so blown away we bought a pair of MB2i’s for home, as we couldn’t fit the BB5’s in our living room, I absolutely loved those speakers and that moment inspired us to sell our house and to attempt to become a HiFi dealer and to set up HFL, so bearing that in mind I am so honoured to now have the first pair of PMC’s epic new Fenestria Speakers on Demo in the UK and one of the first in the world, it really does feel like we have come full circle from that first experience of PMC all those years ago.

These have now been installed with the help of PMC and although they are a pretty big and heavy speaker they actually come in several smaller boxes which makes handling and installing them not too difficult at all really, good thinking PMC, you will be able to see from the pictures below.

So most importantly how do they sound? well funnily enough until we installed them I hadn’t even seen or heard a pair but my faith in PMC didn’t let me down, I stayed here till 10pm last night listening to a real variety of music from the Carpenters, Bowie, Yello, Muse through to Rammstein and all I can really say is that PMC have created a truly incredible speaker that reveals so much and really pulls you into the music, the mid range which sits in it’s own “nest’ to give it the best performance possible is like nothing I have heard before, vocal’s just hover in mid air in front of you with such a lifelike presentation and the depths the bass go to really did test our demo room which was pretty awesome :)

There are an amazing amount of firsts in these speakers that I won’t go into now, I’ll let PMC cover those in our open day hopefully next month but the most important aspect for me is that I really didn’t want to go home last night as I just wanted to listen to my entire music collection again so I just wanted to say a huge congratulations to everyone at PMC involved in developing the Fenestria, it may have taken 5 years but the end result is completely captivating.

At £45,000 they are certainly not going to be for everyone but if you could consider a pair of Fenestria’s I urge you to just come along and have a listen as I am sure once you have fallen under their spell you will be figuring out which organ to sell to have a pair in your life, I can see I will certainly be having many late nights here from now on, sorry Wendy.

We will be announcing details of our Fenestria open day shortly so please watch this space, please see below for a selection of pictures of the installation of the Fenestria into our Naim room, I did get quite carried away so there are quite a few, sorry :)

http://hifilounge.co.uk/pmc-fact-fenestria-speakers

Serious Packaging!

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Decided to unbox them at PMC as easier to transport out of the crates.

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They made it safely all the 2 miles from PMC HQ!

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Goodies Box!

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Now this is what you call a crossover which sits in the Fenestria’s base!

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The top part twists and locks into to place with the help of this template!

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Thanks to Tom and Keith from PMC for helping with the install.

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Starting to look like a speaker now.

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Here is the ‘Nest’ which holds the Mid and Treble Units, beautiful piece of Engineering in itself.

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Tom and Keith Carefully installing the Nest section.

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Next up is to attach the Planar Wings, what a gorgeous finish.

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There we go, one Fenestria installed, do it all over again and we can have a listen.

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Ta Dah, here is the other one, actually not too difficult to assemble at all, definitely a 2 person job though.

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Fine Tuned by Peter Thomas himself, how cool is that :)

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I’m busy running these in daily now so if your are passing and would like a listen please feel free to pop in anytime.

Cheers,

Paul.

Great pictures but I’m very surprised to see so many cheap (as chips) electrolytic capacitors and basic, wire wound, resistors in the crossover! Yes there are some reasonably posh components in it ( a handful of Mundorf resistors and a couple of posher ((but not the best)) ClarityCap capacitors) but very little (only two of the inductors are air cored even!) considering the retail price of 45K - have a look at Tidal for really posh crossovers, for example...

Remarkable speakers though and I would love to hear them.

Update, 1 week later!

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Hi All,

A week in and a lot of listening hours later I thought I would just do a little follow up to my thoughts on the PMC Fenestria’s, the good news is that they are still amazing, more so now that they are starting to run in and free up, to get a different flavour of them as I have been running them on our Naim 500 System, I installed a pair of Bryston 7B3 600 watt Mono Blocks fed by Chord Electronics Dave with Blu II and the top of the range Melco, it definitely is a very different sound to Naim and I can see people preferring one or the other as both are excellent, all it has made me wonder though is what would a Naim Statement or a pair of Bryston 28B3 sound like on the Fenestria’s :)

As they have run in the sound is becoming more open and the depths the bass go down to now is really incredible, I have to say I have become totally addicted to these speakers, I know it is the biggest cliche in the book but I really am hearing things in recordings I have not heard before, the other evening I had to re-wind 2 tracks to listen to parts of them again to make sure what I heard was in the recording and not outside and it was the speakers revealing more information, incredible. Another thing I would say these speakers excel at is playing poor recordings well, it is easy for a speaker to shine with a well recoded track but unfortunately recordings vary massively but somehow even below par recordings are very listenable on the Fenestria so not sure how PMC achieved this with such a revealing speaker, good job guys.

There is one major problem though, Wendy has become a Fenestria widow, as once my day finishes in the shop I go into our Naim room for a quick listen and I then get the classic case of ‘Just one more song’ syndrome and before I know it I check the time and it is 10pm and I have to pull myself away as I need food and sleep, it is great though as it hasn’t been since I had my original MB2′s that I have experienced this, OK duly part to the last 6 years getting this place up and running but it really is great that the Fenestria has re-ignited my passion to actually stop and listen to music again, thanks PMC :)

If you are passing please feel free to pop in for a listen anytime, well to be fair if you do come in I won’t let you leave until you have had a quick listen :)

Cheers,
Paul.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by YNWaN

Great pictures but I’m very surprised to see so many cheap (as chips) electrolytic capacitors and basic, wire wound, resistors in the crossover! Yes there are some reasonably posh components in it ( a handful of Mundorf resistors and a couple of posher ((but not the best)) ClarityCap capacitors) but very little (only two of the inductors are air cored even!) considering the retail price of 45K - have a look at Tidal for really posh crossovers, for example...

Remarkable speakers though and I would love to hear them.

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I have to admit I am not technical at all, all the can say cheap components or not they do sound pretty epic :)

Hi Paul
I listened to these speakers at the festival of sound at Hammersmith
Awesome sound and looks, they were playing a grace jones track they just conveyed
Every last ounce of music out of that track.

Bernie

Hi Bernie,

Yes I am still spending far too much time listening to our demo pair, I really am hearing stuff in recordings that are just hidden by other speakers, all very addictive to be honest.

Regards.
Paul.