Product Design & Insights

This article shares the brief and colorful (groan) journey REL has taken to produce two gorgeous new finishes in our Special Edition versions of the T/9x. Last year, we reintroduced a red that for legal and political reasons we call Italian Racing Red. People who own cars with a prancing horse on their flanks will recognize it as Rosso Forza and yes, the brand starts with an “F” and ends with an “I”. This year, we’re pushing the boundaries of color even further with the introduction of two bold new shades: a striking yellow and a fiery orange. But these aren’t just any colors; they’re the result of a meticulous process inspired by some of the most legendary cars on the planet. Let’s face it – color is irresistible. It’s what draws us in, captivates us, and keeps us coming back for more. Just like how 4K pulls you into its vibrant world, our new T/9x colors are designed to grab your attention and never let go. No one knows this better than the billionaires who run F-1 Racing. For sheer retina-sizzling punch, the color schemes that are applied to each car’s body are designed to do one thing and one thing only: grab hold of your eyeballs and keep them fixed on their car. But it wasn’t always so. Ferrari’s racing red used to look more like burgundy. Here’s a picture of that color reissued in the late 90’s. When we decided to expand our palette to include a gorgeous and fresh yellow and a deep, richly-hued orange, we looked to exotic cars and race teams for inspiration. Why not, the work that goes into creating a unique hue for the world’s greatest cars runs into the millions. So, were we able to simply grab McLaren’s Orange in a rattle can and spray our subs? Believe me, there were days I wished we could. Just as with the subtle Grey T/9x, applying bright colors to a relatively modest-sized subwoofer like our T/9x requires careful scaling of the color in question. A color that looks incredible on a Lamborghini may not work on a subwoofer barely over one cubic foot (.0283 cubic meters) in size. We know, we tried. And we tried. And we tried about 20 more times. What works when applying paint to such a small object, is to interpret the color and intensity so that it reads correctly on the object. Take our Tangerine Dream orange color. We started out shooting samples in Porsche’s GT-3RS orange. Impossible to get the correct formula. The NSA doesn’t keep secrets as well as Porsche when it comes to this rare shade. So, we sprayed cabinet samples in McLaren’s Orange (over the years, there have been about 15 variations of what you may think is “McClaren Orange”).  Didn’t cut it. We shot versions using Porsche’s “standard” orange as used on, among other things, their 2008 Boxster Special Edition. For some reason, the way light struck the surface, it looked as though a vanilla milkshake had fallen into the paint can. So, we mixed a custom color we call Tangerine Dream, a half shade deeper than P-car’s orange, and a little brighter than McOrange. Unique, maybe a tiny bit like the 2008-12 Fire Orange M3 but with the flame banked a tiny bit. We could have called it REL Orange, but somehow Tangerine Dream better fits its personality. Then we turned to our fresh-as-Spring Yellow. By now, we had discarded trying to reuse anything directly from a factory. Same drill though, you think it’s going to be easy, and the more you think that, the more you’ll struggle. So, we went straight into the “We want the vividness of the C-6 Corvette Velocity Yellow, but without the “why did I leave my sunglasses home today” effect that color has. Also, it looked terrible in real living rooms. So, custom color matching again and we arrived at a wonderful yellow, a yellow so pretty that the first 6 women we showed it to all said (pretty much instantly) “I want to buy that!” I’m going to say that again v-e-r-r-y slowly… six women agreed on a color instantly. Without any prodding. Do you know how much money Dupont, PPG, Sikkens, and every other paint company would pay to get that reaction? Then we had to give it a name. With apologies to the Automobile Club de l’Oust who sanctioned the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans, I hit on the only name it could possibly be. Le Mon Yellow, to bring it back to high-performance cars that inspire us. Of course, being a part of our Special Edition mini-series of T/9x’s we had to apply the full monte, so on went the triple chrome plated cast and machined solid billet feet. We use triple chrome plating; triple refers to the old-fashioned, more expensive method for chroming. We use pure copper, with nickel plating on top of the copper, and then finish with an extra-long bath in chromium to leave a deep lustrous chrome. Yes, it costs more. Yes, it looks about 100 times better than doing it the slapdash way. And, of course, all our drivers in the SE range are that next step beyond the standard T/x drivers. The use of 6000 series carbon fibre in the center cap produces incredible  stiffness yet reduces moving mass significantly. This alone is enough to add an extra 1.2 dB, not a huge increase in output, but a significant indicator that the amp is not having to work as hard to produce the same output, which means that it plays even louder than a standard T/9x. Look at it this way, the custom paint alone costs more than the $150 we charge for any of the SEs (last check red ran $735/gallon) the orange and yellow are within a stone’s throw of that. We  add the extra performance of the carbon fibre for free because we wanted there to be an audible improvement, not just a color upgrade. Thanks for riding along on this colorful adventure with us. Every time we push the boundaries—whether it’s through performance or design—we do it with one goal in mind: to bring you closer to the perfect sound experience. And with these Special Edition T/9x subs, we think we’ve done just that. Thank you for reading our latest blog. We strive to provide content that’s both entertaining and educational. If you have questions or suggestions for future articles, reach out to us at contactus@rel.net. We value your input and will do our best to respond within a few days. With over 160 years of combined experience, we’re committed to making your audio experience exceptional. If you found value in this piece, please share it with friends who might benefit.

In interior design, white defines space and creates opportunity for the eye to travel. It is this duality that seems always to follow white. When applied to objects – simple, everyday objects like a subwoofer – white allows the object to ascend. From being an everyday tool, it becomes something special, a design element itself. Something iconic. REL has offered subwoofers in high gloss white for almost twenty years. We did so then and do so now because as designers ourselves we grasp that subwoofers, necessarily larger than some may find ideal, become very much more agreeable to place into a well-designed living room when beautifully finished in five to twelve coats of hand rubbed high gloss white lacquer. The color white means so much to so many. White is the color of purity. The Native Americans saw white as representing peace, of snow. In Japan, white is considered the sacred color of the gods, while to the Chinese white corresponds with metal and represents gold. There it symbolizes brightness and purity. To some, it is funereal, the color of mourning. To others, the color of purity and joy that signifies a wedding. But perhaps the best explanation of white comes from modern color theory. White is the sum of all colors; every frequency of visible light is present in white. That simple reality underpins why it can mean so many things to so many. Put all the colors in the rainbow together and one gets white, the sum of all things. Everything can harmonize with white, nothing and no one is left out. Many rooms are painted in shades of white, or in various pastels, soft shades of yellow, light blue or pink tones abound. Beautiful light greys have become honorary members of the pastel brigade. When we set out to build a white finish for our home theatre range of subwoofers, we already had the paint portion of it down cold. REL White seems to be a pure white, but it contains a single drop of brown and a hint of cinnamon so faint you’ll never see it. I think our paint shop just waves a can of antique red over the base white without dropping any paint in. But there it is, ready to pull subtle hints of red, tan, pink or beige from the room’s paint into its whiteness when given the opportunity. The top looked brilliant, but something was missing. Back to that in a minute. The paint was a no brainer, but what about the main body of our subwoofer cabinets? Our black finish features a horizontally oriented line grain that looks like our cabinets were milled from solid aluminium, then dragged across a belt sander at medium speed with a medium/coarse grain to the sandpaper and once the deep graining got into the aluminum, we yanked it off the machine and dunked it in a black anodizing bath and left it in there for an afternoon. The resulting finish has s deep black texture that feels intense. For our white finish, we selected a finer grain pattern than worked for the black cabinets. Turns out that if the white is grained too deeply, it stops reading as white and turns grey. Using a finer line grain to the tooling results in a soft sheen that adds a little shimmer to the cabinet, softening it even further than straight white alone would have. Then we fine-tuned the minor details that are critical for building visual interest in our designs. For the sides of the rails on our HT/1510 Predator MKII we replaced the black carbon fibre-look strip with a silver -and grey carbon fibre-look contrasting composite treatment. This decorative trim is critical to how our Predator MKII’s look when used in a line array of 6 (3 stacked per side). Even the grilles came under a microscope. Alex wanted the white grilles to be as flat and opaque a surface treatment as possible, leaving just a modest white scrim that Eileen Gray would have been proud of. Without giving away how we pulled off the flat, no circular driver cut out poking through the grille cloth look, please just know that it was intricate and tricky. But we pulled it off. The final touch took some two months to get perfect. At this point we had a beautiful box; 15mm thick gorgeously finished gloss white top panel, contrasting-but-shimmery line grained white cabinet body propped up on gorgeous rails or light grey feet. And a perfect grille. But something was missing. The top wasn’t finished, it was missing our crown logo. Our first samples arrived with the same dark grey used on our black versions. They looked harsh, grating. Like prison garb on a super model. Over two months carefully working back and forth with our painters, and we eventually arrived at a soft gold logo that features just a hint of rose gold. Turned out to be the perfect finishing touch to allow the white to stand on its own. We hope you love these as much as we do. Know that the entire design team on both sides of the pond put over 10 months into getting the final white treatments perfected. We’re really proud of it, we hope you will be too. We feel it helps our customers to know the journey and the remarkable attention to detail that even something as seemingly simple as producing a white version of our award-winning HT range receives before it is allowed into production. We wouldn’t have it any other way. We simply won’t build it if we wouldn’t have it in our own homes. Speaking of which, the final sample of the white HT/1205 MKII has been happily tucked between my chair and the grey sofa in our (pastel yellow) entertainment room for the past few months. Gorgeous, and I just love seeing that gold/rose gold treatment on the top logo. Great work to everyone on the team. Thanks everyone. That’s a wrap. Thank you for reading our latest blog. We strive to provide content that’s both entertaining and educational. If you have questions or suggestions for future articles, reach out to us at contactus@rel.net. We value your input and will do our best to respond within a few days. With over 160 years of combined experience, we’re committed to making your audio experience exceptional. If you found value in this piece, please share it with friends who might benefit.

When someone of Steve Guttenberg’s stature recommends our Classic 98 as "for $1399 you're not gonna get an amplifier that does it like this does... this is going to deliver more of a sonic upgrade than any other component you can buy for $1399," one tends to take that seriously as a design team. So, what did we do? We set about building Classic 99. Yeah, we’re gluttons for punishment. The brief was clear from the start—not always the case at the outset of a new project. Sometimes, it takes a more meandering journey as various options are explored. In this case, we knew the clear and obvious path to making Classic 98 better. Note I didn’t say “Make it bigger so it will play louder (it does) or go lower (it also does that).” I specifically said making it better. A bigger, better driver and tons more power were staring us right in the face. Not because they play louder and go deeper, but because with the right tuning, we felt we could bring out more nuance, more emotional involvement, more air in the soundstage, and clarity in the critical upper-midrange-to-low-treble region that is a sticky issue in many high-end systems. Better, because REL means making every sonic cue more completely and fully realized, and even though the new Classic 99 is a beast when used in home theatre, we always voice using revealing 2-channel cuts. They’re not our favorite music, these are cuts we’ve learned to trust over the years that reveal some “tell” in a development prototype that leads us to improve seemingly minor aspects. But, once we get those “minor” issues resolved, it allows us to unlock more dramatic improvements. We call these hang nails. A professional pitcher in baseball (presumably also true of a world-class cricket bowler) may be able to throw 100 mph, but if a tiny blister or sore spot develops on the index finger of his throwing hand, he has to come out of the game. His accuracy will suffer and not only is it insanely dangerous to have a wild pitcher throwing 100 mph, his game will go to hell with balls spraying the dirt around the catcher. Not good. So, we first set about creating the new 12” hand-thrown paper center cap—these take 24 hours to create a twelve cone versus hot pressed, flat paper stock that can be produced at the rate of several hundred a day. The center cap is not only responsible for the stiffness in the structure of the cone, but it’s also most responsible for texture and delineation in the reproduction of music, so it is always something that needs special attention. At 12” in diameter instead of 10” we would have 45% more surface area to work with, meaning that pressurization of the room would be easily achieved. And, while we wouldn’t need it, our geometry allowed for an extra inch (25mm) of fore and aft travel. Which is a lot more output. We pressed into service one of our 500-watt Class D amplifiers, then limited it to 450 watts (which was probably 100 watts more than we needed) to deliver greater impact and that sense of effortlessness that wonderful big amps often possess. Then we fine-tuned the PerfectFilter™ in our filter set to take the best advantage of all this largesse, including a cabinet that is some 40% larger in internal volume than Classic 98 offers. And it all came together with just a few tweaks and generational improvements over a 6-month cycle. And we had it…or so we thought. But something was missing. Classic 99 was seductive out of the box. Precisely because when a big, confident subwoofer strides deep bass into the room, it is easy to be seduced by the whole bigger/deeper/louder thing. When a subwoofer goes bigger/deeper/louder it’s easy to conclude that it’s “better”. But we didn’t sign off on it. What was missing was the last bit of what we started off saying we were going to get. Delicacy, air, openness. When you hear it, it’s instantly identifiable as right, in the way that live music has “it”. Old Quad electrostats have it. Quad 63s don’t (sorry guys). Martin Logan CLS have it, Apogee Duetta Signatures have it, and it’s far easier to gain this clarity and graded nuance in stand-mounted speakers than in bigger floorstanders. So, one night I got out a stack of my business cards. They happen to be exactly 1mm thick. I carefully added one card layer at a time (4) underneath the feet until the thickness we were hearing disappeared and at 5 business cards worth of shims (5mm) the sound was perfect. So, I called our CAD genius Ryan and asked him to add 6mm. Why 6? Because sometimes we’re all idiots. What difference could 1mm make? A LOT as it turned out.  A couple of weeks later, we got the (wrong) 6mm taller feet in, bolted them on, and…they sucked. No truly. We had lost all the weight and body our new design had in spades. Panicked, I sent an email to our metal factory asking for a set at the 5mm increase to be built as fast as possible. Nervously, we sat down to listen, and whew! The relief we felt when, after 10 minutes, we swapped out the too-tall 6mm versions for the 5mm ones and we had the best of both worlds. The fine-tuning of a larger slot to relieve the build-up of pressure on the bottom was exactly what we needed. Turning this from something most people would have been happy with (I guarantee you no competitor is listening at this level of criticality) to a design that we believe will be seen as important, as really special is why we do this. It’s why I hoped twenty years ago when our team started this journey, that we could put out meaningful designs, that would add to the discourse in this wonderful hobby of ours. We give you Classic 99. We do so proudly. This REL is special, it is meaningful and powerful and makes an utterly beautiful sound. And, it will pound the hell out of most rooms without breaking a sweat. Classic 99, the beautiful beast that we fell in love with along the journey. Enjoy! Thank you for reading our latest blog. We strive to provide content that’s both entertaining and educational. If you have questions or suggestions for future articles, reach out to us at contactus@rel.net. We value your input and will do our best to respond within a few days. With over 160 years of combined experience, we’re committed to making your audio experience exceptional. If you found value in this piece, please share it with friends who might benefit.

It’s not what we do—it’s who we are.We build things that are beautiful because we can’t imagine doing it any other way. So, what’s our process?  Take, for example, our vibrant, high-impact lacquered colors, inspired by the world of Formula 1 and endurance racing. This project began because we love cars and audio gear, and we thought: “We’re not the only ones who love these two passions. Let’s find a way to bring them together.” Our first finish was a color reminiscent of Rosso Forza—a shade famously used on Italian race cars for decades. We simply call it Italian Racing Red. While Ferrari may now be the most recognized racing team in the world, the history of red as Italy’s racing color goes back nearly a century. In fact, Enzo Ferrari himself—yes, the man, not just the team—was Alfa Romeo’s team manager in the 1930s before founding his iconic brand. The Art of Getting It Right The secret behind these special finishes—and why they take so long to develop—lies in building multiple samples. Painting MDF (medium-density fiberboard) doesn’t produce the same result as painting metal or composite-bodied race cars. To make the color appear true on our subwoofer cabinets, we must first identify the right primers. Once the primers are sorted, we experiment with lacquers from various suppliers. Interestingly, the exact same paint code can look subtly different depending on the supplier—Sikkens of Germany, for example, versus PPG, an American company. After we’ve completed all the basic sample boards—flat panels about 6” x 10” (160mm x 250mm)—we select the closest match to the desired color. Then, we scale up and paint a full-size cabinet sample. Here’s where things can get tricky. A color that looks perfect on the several square meters of a curvy race car can look entirely different on a subwoofer cabinet, which has less than one square meter of surface area. Scale matters, and how light interacts with a flat subwoofer panel differs greatly from how it plays off the aerodynamically shaped surfaces of a race car—or even a flat sample board. The Final Call Ultimately, the responsibility of deciding what looks right often falls on me. If I’m unsure, I’ll consult my partner Alex, an exceptional photographer with a keen eye for design. Together, we fine-tune the paint formula, often revisiting earlier samples or switching to a different base formula entirely. The first Italian Racing Red finish took us over a year to perfect. Over time, we’ve refined our process, and we can now go from concept to final product in about six months. When Black and White Aren’t So Simple In the world of paint, nothing is more challenging than black—except ultra-high-gloss black. While we won’t disclose trade secrets, we use a pure polypropylene paint that is ultra-glossy, highly scratch-resistant, and offers excellent coverage. These qualities are crucial for products like ours, which are often placed on the floor where they’re prone to scuffs from shoes. The Natural Beauty of Wood Recently, we had the chance to work with wood again—and we couldn’t be more thrilled. So, why don’t we offer more wood finishes? It’s simple: subwoofers are meant to complement main speakers, and every brand has its unique finishes. For example, Bowers & Wilkins uses a black-and-orange hue for their rosewood, whereas Monitor Audio’s rosewood leans more toward a dark purple tone. It would be impossible to create a wood finish that satisfies customers of both brands equally. For our Classic models, walnut was the obvious choice. Nothing reads “authentically vintage” quite like walnut, and our cabinet supplier sourced a stunning walnut veneer with only minimal input from us. Yes, it’s significantly more expensive than off-the-shelf veneers, but the results speak for themselves. Almost every review of our Classic 99 and Classic 98 models highlights how this walnut veneer elevates the design beyond anything available “back in the day. Why We Do What We Do As I said at the beginning: it’s not just about what we do—it’s who we are. We love creating beautiful objects of enduring quality because we believe you love them too. We craft things that last—designs that feel as good as they look, enhance your living space, and, of course, sound incredible. We pour care and attention into every detail because we can’t imagine doing it any other way. It’s this passion and dedication that make a REL, well…a REL. Thank you for reading our latest blog. We strive to provide content that’s both entertaining and educational. If you have questions or suggestions for future articles, reach out to us at contactus@rel.net. We value your input and will do our best to respond within a few days. With over 160 years of combined experience, we’re committed to making your audio experience exceptional. If you found value in this piece, please share it with friends who might benefit.