PSB SPEAKERS - Stratus Silver tower loudspeaker

The Stratus Silverⁱ is our new, fresh take on a famous product — one that many people refuse to rank second to its more expensive golden brother. Like the original Silver, it is a striking speaker system that offers superb performance at a price that keeps high-end sound within reach. Slim and elegant, and even more refined than the original in its updated enclosure, it offers wide range, silky high frequencies, powerful bass, precise spatial imaging, lifelike dynamics, and natural tonal balance. These qualities add up to convincing, "being there" performance with the whole range of music and movies in today's audio and video world.

Like the Stratus Goldⁱ, the new Silverⁱ offers evolutionary rather than revolutionary improvements. It offers a little more of the qualities that have made the original Silver so popular with home listeners and audio reviewers.

Performance Basics

The basic Silver acoustic design remains unchanged. The Silverⁱ is a three-driver, "2-1/2- way" system that uses the same 1-inch aluminum-dome tweeter used in the Stratus Gold

, combined with a pair of 6.5-inch woofers with heavy magnets, cast metal baskets, polypropylene cones and rubber surrounds. Its sophisticated crossover design operates both woofers at low frequencies, for bass response equal to that of a single, substantially larger woofer but uses only one of them through the midrange to the tweeter. The relatively small diameter of the single driver operating through the critical midrange provides better directivity and more consistent on-axis and off-axis response than a single larger woofer. This makes for a very smooth transition, avoiding interference between the drivers. The use of double woofers rather than a single larger one also allows a slim front face that contributes to imaging and helps create the modest footprint that lets the cabinet ease nicely into any décor.

The Silverⁱ's two woofers produce a lot of solid, extended bass. And its two-and-a-half-way design, which avoids extra and sometimes degrading layers of complexity in the crossover, helps yield the pristine midrange that many reviewers have noted. The tweeter, the same used in the Gold

, produces a top end that reveals the full harmonic bloom of instruments and the "air" surrounding them. The tweeter's placement between the woofers in the slim tower enclosure makes its vertical "sweet area" occur just in the range where your ears are likely to be when you are sitting down.

The Improvements

Following the lead of the Stratus Goldⁱ, the new Silverⁱ is visibly and audibly different in subtle ways that add up to still smoother, more seamless sound, plus some further visual elegance.

The Silverⁱ's new pedestal base provides an obvious difference — giving the system an appearance that's more substantial and more elegant at the same time. A small increase in interior volume allowed by the new base also contributes to bass response and efficiency.

A new port assembly, radiused internally as well as externally, is designed with today's demanding Home Theater movies in mind. It eliminates any vestige of "chuffing" on even the loudest and most subterranean bass effects. The port assembly also has a new, textured finish to improve cosmetics when the speaker is used without its grille.

The Silverⁱ uses higher-performance internal cabling that provides an extra margin for demanding, high-power operation. And its cabinet is now all MDF with wood veneers (or high gloss) around the outside — for a dressier, more consistent and more furniturelike enclosure. These small changes can make a real difference in a product that's meant to be lived with and enjoyed for a long time.

The original and still fresh combination of anodized aluminum corner extrusions and wood veneer panels with interlocked top and interior braces remains very much in evidence in the Silver

. The enclosure's solidity, as with the original, is the product of rigid internal bracing and cotton fiber damping. Resonances within it are near the vanishing point, and its aesthetics profit from the same level of attention, giving the Silver

the same detailed, rounded-corner elegance as the original. This is a speaker that always stood out from the crowd, especially in its distinctive "wet look" high gloss black version, and its new pedestal base makes it even easier on the eyes.

The performance of the original Silver drew opinions like the ones below from audio reviewers.

"The Silvers are, in short, wonderfully musical loudspeakers with a well-tempered middle voice that gives way to a naturally rounded top end."
—Lawrence B. Johnson, Stereophile Guide to Home Theater, Fall 1996

"These speakers out-classed all the others in soundstaging, throwing sonic images all the way to the side walls of the room."

—Brent Butterworth, Video, February 1995

"The Silver's top end was detailed and very clean….The Silver's bass response was surprisingly potent."

—Thomas J. Norton, Stereophile, July 1994

"We all agreed that these Stratus Silvers represent one of the best values in the industry."

—The Inner Ear Report, Summer 1994

We expect the Stratus Silverⁱ to do even better with those who hear it and compare it against their highest expectations. It is the latest product of Paul Barton's unique combination of engineering, research, and musicianship, and it takes the qualities of the original Silver to a new level of useful refinement.

The suggested US price is $1,899 in dark cherry or black ash wood veneers, or 2,049 in high-gloss black.

Please have a look at the Silver's specifications in HTML with US Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price or PDF, and make sure to include it in any search you might make among "Ultimate-Class" speakers. Our Dealer Locator helps locate where to audition the Silvers.

Owner's Guide PDF available in:

English (151K),

French (169K),

Spanish (172K).