This pair of Philips 22RH480 speakers recently caught my eye locally, I have not been in the market for new gear recently but these speakers have a lot of right elements in their design that caught my attention.
There is not a great deal of information on these speakers in North America, a few French blogs have some info.
From what I learned so far is these are circa 1969 vintage, Philips product did not make it to the North American market very often probably due to a lack of distributors, so these could have come over via an estate.
The Philips 8" woofers have cast baskets, Alnico magnets and rubber surrounds, there is a nice Philips 4" full range with a whizzer cone acting as the mid range and a Coral horn tweeter. The cabinets are the the Dutch mid century design style with walnut veneer cabinets.
In my mind all these components add up to make a very nice speaker.
Although a little shy in efficiency for a 2 watt single ended tube amp, they do sound sweet, next I tried the 20 watt push pull tube amp, but this was not as nice of a sound.
The new
Yamaha CR-420 that I picked up this week sounded really nice with these speakers.
Since the cabinet is a acoustic suspension design the 8" woofer is tight sound with respectable bass as the cabinet size is a decent size. The mids with the 4 inch full range and whizzer are really nice and the Coral tweeter adds just enough sizzle at the top end.
Over all this is a pretty impressive speaker from Europe, a really good mix of components seem to work well.
I like the gems like this that get overlooked in the market place as everyone is stuck on Pioneer HPM's or JBL's
Jan. 8 2018
A little update:
I have been running these speakers for a few days off the SE Tube amp 2WPC, These speakers have pretty solid bass down to 50hz and roll off from there, the bass is really tight. The mid range is luscious without any hints of nasal or chestiness in vocals. The Coral tweeter does the highs in perfect fashion.
Overall these speakers remind me in some senses of what you would get out of a Braun speaker, polite, correct and smooth. The difference is the cone mid range with the whizzer, it will beat the big Braun dome anytime in my view, and that is a pretty tall order.
These speakers seem to command a pretty respectable resale on the used market and I can understand why if you are serious about your hi-fi, that is it for now, I got more listening to do.
