Revival Audio Atalante 4 speakers
It was at the Oslo Hi-Fi Show last year that I first managed to hear Revival’s Atalante 4, and pretty impressive it was as well even in the starkness of a Scandinavian hotel bedroom. When the pallet arrived I was thankful to have extra hands available to cope with unboxing and setting up; these are hefty units.
Revival Audio is based in Mulhouse, France, close to the German border in the wonderful Alsace region. Formed in 2022, a relative hi-fi newcomer it might be but behind it lies a great deal of experience and professionalism spanning four decades and work across many well-known audio brands.
The co-founding figures behind the company are design engineer Daniel Emonts and CEO Jacky Lee. Daniel brings over 30 years of experience and is the name behind many legendary transducers from the likes of Altec-Lansing, Focal and, most recently Dynaudio. He began building speakers aged just 14 and has dedicated his life to acoustics. Jacky Lee also worked at Dynaudio, ultimately as Chief Commercial Officer, having previously been with IBM in his home country, Taiwan. The duo have proven themselves to be ideal partners for a solid commercial engineering enterprise producing highly-competent designs which don’t cost the earth.
Two models were launched initially in the Atalante range, the three-way 5 and the smaller Atalante 3 which I enjoyed so much that I purchased a pair to use as a reference. The company prefers to make components in-house, rather than buying off-the-shelf. To keep costs down, and the price really competitive, the drivers are designed at Revival’s French facility, sourcing materials from top-tier suppliers globally, with final assembly and testing carried out in France. The company’s supply chain is one of its strong competences and a shrewd move because it allows Revival to offer a lot of speaker for the money.
Design
Very crudely, the new three-way floor-standing Atalante 4 can be thought of as a model 3 at the top, with the addition of a substantial bass cabinet housing a pair of dedicated drivers to handle the bass. The retro design of the Atalante range cabinets is the result of collaboration with the French and Japanese design duo of Aki and Arnaud Cooren of A&A Cooren Design Studio based in Paris. The cabinets certainly are to a very high standard. Finishing touches include, for example, a laser-etched Revival logo in the roundel on the front. Finish options are the supplied real walnut veneer or black, both with over-sized outrigger feet for stability.
This is a three-way design but with four drive units, the low frequencies (below 550Hz) handled by twin seven-inch bass units per cabinet. The cones are of sandwich construction using Revival’s unique blend of braided basalt fibres and felt, as found throughout the range. This is seen by Revival as the best balance between rigidity and light weight, with its high damping construction providing fast and smooth responses with tight bass dynamics. The basalt extracted from grey igneous lava stone, gives it sustainability credentials above all those plastic speaker cones. The sandwich features basalt-fibre fabric as the top layer, a polymer glue with felt in the middle, and a customised foam-based cone as the bottom layer. Hundreds of hours of R&D were involved to determine the best-sounding solution the team could produce.
Midrange is handled by a 135mm diameter cone of similar construction, with the tweeter the same 28mm soft-dome as found in the range’s other two models taking over at a respectable 3kHz via a second-order crossover network of minimal design. Behind the dome with its overly-large magnet assembly is a sizeable chamber to help absorb and control rear reflections. This means we don’t have the usual softness and early roll-off found with many soft domes.
Set-up
I can see why floorstanders are sometimes referred to as ‘towers’, the Atalante 4s are no wider than my Atalante 3s but considerably taller such that they become something of a focal point in my modest-sized listening room. Given the Atalante 4s’ 38Hz lower-limit I decided it was wise to keep them away from walls although foam bungs are included in case the reflex ports have to be sited at a closer-than-ideal distance. In this case, it might be wise to adopt some kind of amplifier correction, such as DSP. For those who are anti-spikes (Ed, please note!) loose metal discs are included to avoid perforating the floor with the 38kg mass of each tower.

I connected my heavyweight Hegel H600 with digital sources including a satellite tuner, Hegel’s app for internet radio stations, and Qobuz streaming via the fine Auralic Aries G1. Although the review samples were supplied as ‘run-in’ I left them playing with Swiss Klassic for several days before settling down to listen and a further week of auditioning went by before the listening panel assembled.
Sound quality
The similarity in sound with my Atalante 3s was immediate: that gorgeous natural sound with entertaining and involving soundstage of admirable width and height. What I also discovered straight away was that, while many floorstanding loudspeakers are simply too wayward in their response to work well in my room, the Atalante 4s were not creating any unwanted resonances, no nasty boom or bass anomalies. The lower frequencies are clearly very well controlled and yet all there, down deep – I would say that 50Hz was extremely evident and even audibly down to 40Hz.
Switching to the Hegel H190 (a better match in terms of pricing) and the results were also superb (albeit without internet radio). Nonetheless, it shows that even with their quoted sensitivity of 89dB and low-ish 4 Ohm impedance, the Atalante 4s are not a difficult load to drive and drive loudly when needed. There was plenty of headroom offered from the smaller Hegel across a wide range of material.
Two things sprung to mind as I indulged in my every day (if non-audiophile) repertoire: firstly, that the larger speakers tended to highlight poor mono dialogue on ancient recordings, while more modern soundtracks provided a much-more 3D effect than I am used to, such that the excitement level from the likes of Johnny English Strikes Again increased the entertainment factor enormously.
Listening panel
The panel assembled and we reconnected the mighty Hegel H600 for maximum effect and to get the most out of the Atalante 4s. The first track selected was Bill Wyman’s Je Suis Un Rock Star from the early ‘80s. This solo single from the Rolling Stones’ member is certainly of its type and, while the panel’s feet tapped away to the beat,, I remarked how unforced the sound was. Here was this fascinating combination of an almost spoken vocal with multi-layered backing overflowing with detailed electronica and yet it was not overly-forward. The sound was not being forced into our laps, as with so many modern speaker designs. If anything, I felt the presence region to be slightly recessed as later confirmed by an in-room plot revealing a minor dip at the 3kHz crossover. Lyrically cheesy it may be, but this song is very catchy and portrayed so well via the Atalante 4s which created a gloriously wide and deep soundstage accompanied by incredible imaging. What’s not to like?
Moving to Who Will Buy? From the soundtrack of the 1968 film Oliver, and a track featuring a stunning dynamic range from a distant solo vocal at the start, to full orchestra and chorus some six minutes later. On some lesser loudspeakers this falls rather flat and is altogether underwhelming. Not so with the Atalante 4s, we were treated to a superlative performance with detailed treble, a natural (dare I say heavenly?) midrange and bass aplenty. What I liked particularly was how every part of the audio spectrum was in just the right proportion, as the mixing engineer in the studio envisaged. Too many loudspeaker designers seem to think they know best and create a product that sounds unnatural. This may produce an extremely exciting result but there’s no realism to such an approach and I am delighted that it’s not one followed by Revival.
Foot tapping continued with Oasis’ Don’t Look Back in Anger. Phil Spector invented the wall of sound in the 1960s but here we hear the Gallagher brothers using it to great effect in the mid-‘90s on one of their biggest hits. With the neighbours away for Christmas we turned up the volume (quite a lot) and marvelled at the SPL generated by the Atalante 4s without hint of break-up distortion. Everything hung together well, so well that these could certainly double as party speakers.
Finally, we went all nostalgic and wallowed in the late ‘60s sound that is Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young created on Teach Your Children. CSNY produced some great harmonies, soothing melody, and rich instrumentation in this track written by Graham Nash (while he was a member of The Hollies). I was struck by the absence of any HF zing, but plenty of treble information to add to the overall balance and they seemed to like being driven by the big Hegel. Despite the age of the source material (digitally remastered, of course) the vocals were extremely detailed while the backing retained the speed and agility required to carry the track along nicely. The low-frequency energy filled the room and provided a sense of the performance taking place in front of us such that we could forget about the loudspeakers and concentrate on the music.
Living with the Atalante 4s
The panel departed and I continued to enjoy all that the Atalante 4s had to offer during my daily diet of speech-based material and classical repertoire. If anything, I found them to excel on acoustic music, they reproduced large-scale orchestral material with dynamic ability as well as handling smaller, choral works and baroque with an intimacy that brought the performance into the listening space.

This is where I admit to usually preferring a bookshelf design, not least because many floorstanders just don’t suit my acoustics or taste but also for their imaging abilities. Yet Revival have blown that rationale out of the window with the Atalante 4s by creating a design that’s so controlled, so refined and so well poised.
Conclusion
This first floorstanding model in Revival’s top-notch range, the 4, is clearly a huge step-up from the Atalante 3 that I use every day in so many areas, not least bass extension and the ability to create a huge sound that’s both realistic and enjoyable. Surely two key facets of true loudspeaker craftsmanship. But it’s more than that.
For a grown-up version of the 3 we need to look to the larger, three-way stand-mount Atalante 5 which has a very similar balance and reminds me of BBC design principles. This new model is a slightly different beast, producing a livelier sound quality with more aggression to the presentation. There’s more of a punch than I experience with the 3, it’s gutsy by comparison and as such suits rock and pop extremely well.
I spent £900 on Tontrager stands for my Atalante 3s; for only another £100 outlay I could have bought the new Atalante 4s (had they been available at the time). So, it’s a real non-brainer for a anyone wanting a resolute loudspeaker, whereas the 3 leans towards being more of a monitor loudspeaker. Revival have been astute in catering for a slightly different customer base with its latest creation and therefore widening the brand’s overall appeal. The new Atalante Four is something of an audio bargain, not least because it is so well designed, comes in a glorious cabinet and makes great music.