News & Updates

One thing stands out about REL at 35 -We’re more committed to the relentless pursuit of perfect bass than ever. At no time in our history has there been more energy and more projects streaming toward release than at any previous period in our history. The Past. Let’s begin with our legacy customers…you know, the folks that got us here. We took a few weeks off from development of new products to go back and begin reimagining amplifier solutions for some of our best sellers from 15 years ago. Our original factory had taken these boards out of production, so we’re looking into incorporating our modern amplifiers in rear panels designed to fit some of these older models perfectly. Only REL would think to assign engineering talent to creating a new lease on life for models that are fifteen years old. But we take care of our own. You’ll hear more about this project in second half of 2026. The Present. Of course, we continue to evolve the state of the art at every achievable price point. Fantastically high-performance traditional subwoofers will always be our foundation, as the release of the new generation of Serie S demonstrates. We’ve never seen so much interest and demand for new products as these have generated.  But we have to be free to respond to how our customers use our products. As homes and interior spaces evolve, so too must our designs. Which brings us to…The Future. What’s changing is the way people want their subwoofers to serve them. Many of these shifts stem from the modern home itself. The rise of open-floor-plan living has pushed us to explore solutions that are anything but traditional. We first ventured into this space back in 2011 with the original Habitat, long before most dealers or installers were ready for it. And honestly, REL in 2010 wasn’t yet the sales, education, and marketing force needed to fully support such a new idea. Today, we’re ready. And next year, we’ll begin unveiling something designed specifically for these expansive, architectural spaces – a beautiful, high-performance solution created to disappear into the home while delivering the kind of immersive bass you expect from REL. There are other categories in which we’ve done all the core engineering to deliver incredible-sounding (and looking) solutions that take home integration to a new level. The challenge now lies in adapting those designs to modern home construction. One prototype, running for two years, delivers absurdly deep, loud bass so powerful that it makes walls creak, groan, and rattle. Sigh, we’ll keep working on how to turn your home into something as well built as a REL needs to be. Behind all this is our highly evolved, but still very human engineering. We’re completely open to the latest technologies, as drivers and amplifiers continue to evolve and improve at a pace we couldn’t have imagined 20 years ago, much less 35. However, we’re also musicians and we have yet to hear, for example, anyone’s digitally enhanced crossovers sound as natural as our all-analog designs. Power, specifically very high-powered, yet still very reliable amplifiers will begin making more appearances in our future projects. Power can be used for many aspects of sonic improvement. For example, a small cabinet volume can have far greater extensions into deeper bass than we currently see on the market by using analog filters. Imagine radical new versions of our PerfectFilters, paired with amplifiers delivering two to three times the power we currently use, and drivers built to match producing a compact sub that reaches down toward 20 Hz with ease. I believe REL is that rare company, the one that has the bones to weather the next 35 years successfully. I certainly plan to be here for many years to come. Will we be discussing the latest Serie W that is packaged into a 3” cube (75mm) with 10,000 watts delivered on a chip the size of your littlest fingernail that plays flat to 22Hz? Who knows. What we can promise you is that as our world evolves, REL will continue to be there. Still offering beautifully crafted, elegant solutions delivered at fair and reasonable prices to lovers of music, movies and any kinds of home relaxation and entertainment that reveal themselves to our future selves. Maybe we’ll even be building solutions to amplifiers that were built and sold “way back” in 2025 that old timers (I’m talking to you Millennials!) still love and want to be able to fit a newly reengineered solution into. Because a company that seeks to experience a bright future surely must honor its own rich heritage.

35 Years in the Making. A Launch to Remember.So we did a thing… For the first time, we opened the gates of REL HQ in Berkeley and welcomed press, audiophiles, and content creators from around the world for an exclusive two-day event celebrating the launch of the all-new Serie S line.From private listening sessions that showed how transformative a REL can be in the home, to a walk through our 35-year legacy, we lifted the curtain on what drives our passion. Guests toured our headquarters, discovered the craft behind our subwoofers, and then stepped into the energy of live music with Grammy Award-winning Ruthie Foster.Day two carried us deeper—record shopping with Michael Fremer, followed by a live tour of the legendary 2200 Studio (the revival of The Plant). We traced music’s journey from artist to album, connecting what inspires us on stage to what we recreate at home.We listened, we learned, we laughed, we shared meals—and we celebrated both where we’ve been and where we’re headed. To everyone who joined us: thank you for your excitement, your content, and your energy. The new Serie S is here—and it’s only the beginning.

The below text is a transcription from the video. Our new Airship Direct is designed literally to plug in and meld perfectly with your new Serie S subwoofers. We call it the Direct because it literally directly plugs into a socket on the back. The beauty of REL wireless is really simple. Most wireless for audio is an afterthought. It is produced by large factories that are turning stuff out for computer wireless all the time. It's not voiced. It's not designed to actually be a high production or high quality audio product. It gets you wireless and it gets you strangled sounding wireless. It's thin. It's often set up as a compressed digital file format, so that you're destroying the music in order to save it on the other end. It's not how it works. So, ours actually streams in real time at all times, which means that you do not want to have a decent robust Wi-Fi system. Don't try hooking this up, you know, with your teenage child that's upstairs playing very fast, very high data rate games, while your wife and daughter are trying to stream something. All of this on a decrepit Wi-Fi system. This is an enormous package of data and it's continuous and there's no compression. So, we're literally sending it as though you were sending ultra-high resolution music to wherever your speakers are because that's exactly what we're doing. So, what we do with it is a little different. We actually replace the front half of our filter board in the transmitter because you need to be able to connect up to your power amplifier if you're doing high level. You need to be able to connect up to the LFE out if you're doing music and theatre and those have to actually be handled in the transmitter. So, the transmitter is an outright bargain in this entire context. We then stream over a combined data stream to this. It has very little latency. It's incredibly quick like everything we do. Somewhere in the range of 15 to 20 milliseconds of group delay typically for the entire thing. That includes actually doing the step down circuit for the high level to step down. All of that. And then we send it pure unmitigated. It is exactly the way you would want to do it if you had access and the engineers to do it. We did it for you. This plugs in and it locks in. There are two Allen head bolts that come in here. You're going to snug those down, and you're going to do nothing more than turn it on, turn on your transmitter, and you'll hit pair, and you're done. By the time you release pair, you'll see this light goes steady on, and you've got sound. It also is designed to work with our standby circuit. So, if you're somebody that uses standby, it will go to sleep. It will not burble and make any noises that terrify you at 2:00 in the morning, and it will stay dead silent until you play something loud enough to trigger it. So, it is such a well-thought-out system now. We've been building iteratively improved versions of this for 15 years. We're really good at this. We get feedback all the time that other subwoofer manufacturers are always telling people to just buy ours. It's better. So, the Airships are top-of-the-line. This is for the Serie S and future models that'll be coming out using this plug-in circuitry.

It’s fun and easy to look back at the past 35 years. REL has been almost exclusively responsible for elevating the rising consciousness in audiophile circles that ultra-high-quality subwoofers make an enormous improvement in the quality of high-end 2-channel systems. Some reviewers have gone on record saying, “if If you’re not using a REL Line Array, you’re simply not hearing your system.” We only state that hearing music Full Range is as natural as—well, life.We take in sounds throughout our entire lives in “Full Range.” We just don’t realize it. But when we listen to most systems—and they’re not full range—something’s missing. Indeed. A Brief History: So, if the past was all about rejuvenating the notion of a High-Level Connection to a subwoofer (What—you thought it was a good idea to listen to a flawed connection that sends a different signal to your subwoofer than the one being sent to your speakers?), or our Theatre Reference Connection system that uniquely enables a single subwoofer to properly restore the full, rich timbres of speech, the spatially natural recreation of space and the ultra-dynamics of special effects (LFE) bass in movies... Or perhaps you’re one of the lucky ones who daily enjoys the speed and openness, not to mention the shattering dynamics, that our Reference Filter Boards deliver in our No.31 and No.32 models? These, and more, are part of what makes REL both great and unique.We think about bass from the perspective of musicians—what live music sounds like, either on stage or near it. A Glimpse Into the Future: What, then, does the future hold?Let’s start with what it likely won’t hold: 1. Heavier-than-air gases inside our cabinets.Nope. It was a technique I’d filed away for years but ultimately had to discard.Back in my retail days, I auditioned (and passed on) a pair of speakers designed by Mike Wright of Dayton-Wright. He was a brilliant man who built rare electrostatic speakers—and hit on the idea of using a heavier-than-air gas called sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) to enhance the bass output of a small box speaker. Think helium (a lighter-than-air gas makes your voice pitch higher). SF6 does the opposite—deepening pitch and enhancing bass. He even figured out how to trap the gas inside what looked like a normal, sock-covered black box. But SF6 is now listed as a gas that aggressively destroys our atmosphere. And while I love the idea of a subwoofer the size of a T/9x making bass like an S/812...I like the idea of breathing even more. As should you. 2. The rotary-blade-driven subwoofer.Yes, really. Not all subwoofers use conventional drivers. It’s possible to use alternative methods—and they can work. But... the challenges. The cabinet had to be enormous. Air-sealing the edges of the blades at the exit vent? Difficult. Then there was rise time—how fast it could respond to fast transients, especially in home theater. Let’s just say you could measure it with a sundial. Deep bass? Yes.Fast? It was not. Back to Our Glimpse of the Future: Where might the future take us? First off, I’d love to revisit a concept we tried 15 years ago. It was at least a decade ahead of its time: a pure planar form that floats just off the surface of a wall—and puts the room to work creating remarkable bass. Imagine a 4” thick (110mm) cabinet capable of reaching into the lower 30Hz range with active drivers (and into the mid-20s with passive ones), mounted on a wall—or sitting near one on the floor. Something that looks sleek and modern—but hits like a sledgehammer. Open floor plan rooms can be a challenge. With few wall boundaries and large cabinets scattered around, it can kill the aesthetic of a beautiful, open space. But…what if you didn’t have to sacrifice looks for sound? What if you could have your cake and eat it, too? That’s the idea—and we hope to bring it to life in the not-so-distant future. I’ve been using a small version for a couple of years as my center-channel sub in a high-performance HT/3D system, and I’ve never heard a better center sub. Plus, it looks so cool mounted just below our 11’ (133”/3.35M) screen and center channel speaker. A sleek black form that floats on the wall and rocks the room. Naturally, we’d have to offer it in gloss white too. Ultimate Theatre: I’d like to challenge myself to produce an infra-bass generator for state-of-the-art theater applications. Not a conventional subwoofer—but one that handles only bass below 20Hz. Physics demands far more power (we’re talking 1500–2400 watts) and either a very large driver surface (30–50 inches / 762mm–1270mm), or some creative combination of compact cabinet volume and multiple drivers. Probably dual 18” drivers. And no, they won’t be cheap. But home theater keeps evolving, thanks to brilliant minds like Trinnov (France) and newcomers like Acurus (USA), who are building 32–36 channel processors that unlock stunning 3D theatrical experiences never before possible. They’re Called Reference for a Reason: We will, of course, continue evolving our Reference systems—and our (increasingly) near-Reference models like Serie S—to take advantage of new materials and higher-wattage amps. Right now, I can’t think of a way to improve the No.31 or No.32... but eventually, we’ll discover something that moves the needle. And when we do, we’ll test it, refine it, and bring it to life. But not anytime soon. These models are the foundation of our future, and they allow us to push innovation into our more affordable ranges. And that’s not just talk. The T/9x SE already uses a carbon fiber center cap derived from one of our Reference models. It’s clearly an upgrade over the standard T/9x. Turns out, chasing the state of the art is good for everyone. Sometimes the Future Looks Like the Past: I really like what we’ve done with the Mid-Century Modern Classic models. Both the Classic 99 and Classic 98 have been solid hits, embraced for their performance and style. I’m actively thinking about how to evolve this idea of honoring design trends we all love. That doesn’t necessarily mean bigger, pricier RELs in walnut that play louder and deeper, though that’s not off the table. We’ll continue studying emerging trends to see if the ‘60s and ‘70s have anything worth embracing. After all, Mid-Century Modern spans from the 1930s to the early ‘60s. And yes—we’ll look at design trends from the ‘90s too. Signing off for now... One thing is certain: the future looks brighter than our glittering past. Everyone involved in product development wakes up every day thinking of new ways to make RELs perform better, look better, and become easier to use. Ultimately, we aim to serve you…your space, your music, your life…better than anyone else.