Revival Audio Sprint 4 speakers, an “entry level” high end audio “Best Buy” by Pursuit Perfect System

This is a review written by Terry Ellis June 2025.

For the pursuit perfect system video review please see the YouTube channel link here

Made a big impact

HiFi on Youtube can be a place of hyperbolic video titles and sensationalism and while I hate that personally, it often feels disingenuous, I appreciate its the game that has to be played. Never hate the player, instead hate the game. I often review a lot of very expensive HiFi products because who wouldn’t given the opportunity, but also because its useful to learn what is possible, it helps me to be a better judge of everything else. So when an “affordable” speaker like the Revival Audio Sprint 4 comes in for review, a speaker that delivers sound at the same kind of quality level as more expensive speakers then I am in a position to call them a high end audio bargain with total conviction.

This is my third Revival Audio speaker review and one I did not want to do right now. I wanted to have my hands on the new Atalante Évo 7 speakers with the big soft dome mid range driver and 15” bass woofer that’s a speaker that really appeals to the greedy audiophile in me. The Atalante 7 are expensive speakers so you expect a very high level of sound quality with a high price tag. I am sure they will sound amazing but if they do there will be as much surprise for me compared to how I have been feeling about the Sprint 4.

I am by my own admission what I call a “greedy audiophile”, someone who is drawn to the expensive shiny stuff looking for the best performance but sometimes we all need humbling, bringing back down to earth and I am glad that happened to me. The SPRINT 4 are quite a standard looking tower speaker with a very reasonable I think £1790 price tag for the pair, yet they have been punching well above their weight in my smaller room comparing very well to speakers costing twice as much and five times as much and that is no small thing.

Devil in the details

The Sprint 4 is a two and a half way double rear ported tower speaker. I have found some two and a half way speakers can trade off some mid range clarity for the extra extra bass but that is not the case here at all or its very mild if it is even a negative. I like the look of these speakers more in the flesh than I thought I would from their photos. I like the contrast of the darker and interesting shaped baffle against the light oak finish, it helps to keep the very classic, old fashioned in a way speaker looking more modern and still standing out.

The Sprint 4 is quite a slender tower speaker with a compact overall footprint. It is a smaller tower speaker so still accommodating for smaller rooms like I have. The outrigger or legs design is simple but elegant and that keeps the floor footprint compact but still very stable and I think this is much better than the massive wood plinths used on speakers like the Bowers 602 s3 I reviewed last year here. The Bowers cost about the same so make a good comparison, and they are good sounding speakers for the money too but the finish on them I dont think is as nice as the Revival. Its far more simplistic and a little cheap feeling by comparison. The Sprint have a wood veneer finish and it’s quality feels nice in your hands as it is on your eyes. The Rear ports are pretty sizeable which is a good sign for the bass we can expect, however I am never a lover of speaker cable terminals that are recessed into the back of the speakers, however the terminals are at least nice quality.

Coming back to the drivers, the Sprint 4 features a one inch soft dome tweeter that uses their patented ARID technology behind it to control the back sound wave with a claimed 95%+ of the rear sound being absorbed into a chamber, down to a claimed 650Hz. This is impressive technology and definitely helps with the treble clarity that is excellent from these speakers. I get a little more excited with the seven inch mid bass and bass woofers that use BSC for the cone material. BSC stands for a basalt sandwich construction and basalt is a material made from lava stone. This uses a 3 layer construction with a basalt and a specific felt and glue layers used to create a light but damped driver cone, one that has a unique almost carbon fibre like aesthetic. It sounds a little like carbon fibre too and I don’t mind that at all.

There is a photo of the crossover on the Revival website and visually it looks quite simplistic and that is because we don’t have any scale to judge it against but Revival are not hiding it from anyone. Revival say its a crossover that has been hand tuned from both measurements and listening.

Looking baffled

The darker baffle on the front of the speaker is removable and has the fancy name of ELYTRON. It’s there to act as a wave guide for the drivers to control the directivity of the speaker and to remove the hard sharp edges of the cabinet from the view of the drivers. It makes sense then that the ELYTRON baffle covers the full width of the front of the speaker. Something else a little unusual is the material its made from, it’s clearly some kind of resin but it’s a not a rock hard as looks, but it’s not soft either. It is magnetically attached so you can remove it to install the individual driver grills from behind it. Double unusual you might say and you would be right.

Why is speaker directivity important, well its like how a camera lens can focus on a specific thing, for the speaker it helps to focus its sound more towards you the listener and less towards the rooms reflective surfaces. This is very important in a non acoustically treated room that is has many reflective surfaces and is a reverberant space., but even in my extensively treated room I could still hear how focused, organised and composed the Sprint 4 sound. This is a big positive for them but it did seem to make them a little more sensitive to their positioning in my room and their toe in amount too.

The Sprint 4 is a 4 ohm speaker with an 89db sensitivity so not massively demanding on your amplifier and I think they are pretty flexible for amplifiers in terms of their sound too which is always helpful.

Sound quality exceeds expectations

This is a really easy speaker to clarify its sound, it’s a modern sounding speaker and that means its sounds fast and clear. Its a fairly neutral speaker too so no real obvious stand out character to speak of and it has a very organised and smooth in the main sound but one that is lively and upbeat too. It’s not looking to obviously soften the music to make it more pleasing, the Sprint 4 are looking to be more honest than that for good or bad depending on how you see it. They do all of that with nearly everything right and that is what stands out about them, there is nothing obvious as any kind of sound trade off for speakers at this price. They deliver a very high standard of sound quality overall and not just for the price, very high full stop.

I ended up doing this review in reverse order compared to how I like to, because I had been spending a few days listening to a very interesting valve preamplifier from American manufacturer BAT, the VK90. This is a very high end, very high performance valve preamplifier. I was listening to it with my current best power amplifier the Esoteric S03 and with my Mission 770 speakers and this system was sounding fantastic in the main. The VK90 does music with a very big scale and lively energetic presentation, with real “wow” factor and the track called Mud on the album The Way, by Dorothy, was sounding wild for the size of the music in my small room and the sheer amount of rock music energy and intensity was intoxicating. It turns out this is a real torture test track for your systems overall speed and composure and it was pretty immense to listen to on this system.

I then changed out the Missions for the larger Audio Solutions Figaro M2 speakers and there was an obvious uptick in the sound in some key areas. Music was more cutting through and clear, especially in the vocals, there was a lot more deep bass power and presence so the scale of the system grew up noticeably and there was even more edge of the seat energy and excitement to fast paced music. This was now an even more fun and wild listen to the same Mud track.

Next it was the Sprint 4’s turn with this excellent system and I was fully expecting to feel like the guy who gets kicked down the well in the movie 300 with the expected massive drop in sound quality going from £11k speakers to a sub £2k pair. Yes the music lost some outright energy and clarity, the bass was not as tight or as impactful and not as clear in its dynamic shifts around my room, especially the deeper bass. The vocals lost some organic character and the overall presentation was less refined but the treble was maybe a little nicer, a little softer and that worked better with this system, but in the main the music delivery as a whole was very close for its quality.

That is because the sprint 4’s sound stage organisation and layering is fantastically good, as mentioned they sound very focused so spatial cues or instrument positioning and layering is excellent from them, not excellent for the money, excellent. Their vocals sounded precise, clean and clear with a very nice tonality and they had a lovely floaty holographic 3D nature to them that most speakers do well these days, but here the vocals had better focus and clarity than I expected for speakers at this price. That is because there was no the softening or muddying of the vocal region that even some more expensive speakers can have at times so that was all extra impressive to me. Their bass was great for being full and pleasing for most music but it was not smothering or slow. The Sprint 4 can deliver a fast bass when they are needed to and can create a wide sense of space in the middle of the sound stage at the same time which is great.

But when music is supposed to be impactful and punchy, feel it on the body with harder hitting electronic tracks the Sprint 4 did an excellent job of punching quite hard while keeping the dynamic vibe of this music going. They don’t do that for the very deepest of bass notes but you don’t really notice this unless your very actively thinking about it or maybe comparing to a speaker that can. The bass is not perfect but its very satisfying in most ways I think are important.

The treble was clean, clear and fast with just a little bit of sweetness to it, but not softened or rolled off sounding. This means music always retains its sense of liveliness and speed with a good amount of height to the overall sound stage and it means rock music fans will be happy with these speakers as they can jam. The sprinkle of sweetness I think helps to just soften off the harshest notes we can get in some music but you very much still hear them as harsher notes but they dont bite you with it. It’s a nice compromise between the two and overall I think the Sprint 4 deliver an excellent treble for this price of the speakers.

Amplifiers

While music did not sound as good overall as from the more expensive Figaro speakers I was still struggling to find anything to overtly fault about the Sprint 4. I found myself thinking about the smaller things or nit picks or the refinement of the music delivery, but each time a criticism popped into my mind I had to remind myself of their price. I was judging them against a speaker five times more expensive and they was holding their own really, again in my smaller room so call me massively impressed by that.

Looking at the comparison with the Mission 770 is a little more interesting because the Mission’s have a far more of an obvious character, slightly warmer, slightly darker and richer in the vocals with the goal of making all music sound more pleasing. The Sprint are more of a characterless speaker, so leaning more neutral meaning the HiFi system you use with them needs deliver the character you want to hear. This did make me think about testing different amplifiers to see if the Sprint would change too and how much, or might they be a “one trick pony” speaker? Could this be their Achilles heel?

I changed the big pre power setup for a more modest size and priced Galion TS34 tube integrated amplifier. I thought the Galion should add valve character to the music so it would test if the Sprint would show me this and and how much. The Galion with its EL34 valves softened the sound some and added a sense of romance and sweetness to the vocals as I expected to hear so the Sprint passed this test. The Galion is about eight amplifiers in one with all its different sound modes. Listening to it in class a and class a/b modes, class a sounded far the richer and bolder and more musically densely pleasing and the Sprint delivered that difference no problem. I could also easily hear the subtleties of the differences between the Galion modes A,B and T showing to me the Revivals are a very honest, clear and modern sounding speaker that you can mould to some degree with your amplifier choice.

I tested the Mud track again but this time the Galion could not really keep up with the crazy intensity of certain passages of this track and the music became thick and mushy losing its composure. Showing to me that the £1790 Sprint 4 speakers were capable of resolving the clear difference between a £3k integrated and a £25k big pre power amplifier setup from a timing and music control point of view. That is how good they are in that regard and you can call me massively impressed by that too.

To make sure and test things further I changed to a closer priced integrated amplifier the Cambridge Audio EXA100, a really nice integrated for the money, it costs £1999. Straight away the sound was a leaner or really just less tonally dense compared to the valve amplifier. The Sprint easily showed me the massive difference in the music’s presentation of class a valve amp and a class a/b solid state so you can really pick your preferred poison here. That is mostly what I was looking to test here, can the Sprint resolve this difference and they did exceptionally well. Once I had adjusted to the new amplifiers sound I was quite happy listening through some of my most recent preferred tracks and albums. The Cambridge was easily able to drive the Sprint too and they sounded just as lively and energetic, clean and composed as I had come to really like about them by this stage. With a nice vocal albeit a more “grey” sounding vocal timbre compared to the Galion tube amp and there was more tension in the sound at very high volumes with less well produced music. This again showed how honest and clear the Sprints are and that did make think with a speaker like this the system you put before them will be very important and you might want to spend more on the system than the speakers. That might seem like a silly thing to do but not with these speakers, I feel they can scale up very well to give you more.

Final thoughts

One major negative for some will be there is no matching centre speaker to make a full Sprint AV system, this is something many other brands offer and I know is important to some. If that is not you, I think the aesthetics come next, how much do you like the look of the Sprint speakers and how will they look in your room.

I say this because if your are happy with the Sprint 4’s looks they are an excellent speakers in pretty much every regard and would be a great choice. Providing you want a speaker with a modern sound and not one deliberately designed to sound more characterful like the Mission 770 or Wharfedale Linton speakers for example.

Taking that comparison further I had the Wharfedale Super Linton speakers here recently and I feel the Sprint 4 held their own with them in my room too for less money so that is very praise worthy. They are not perfect speakers, we cannot expect that but they do make it very hard to find clear or obvious fault with them at the same time. Credit where credit is due, I think the Revival Sprint 4 are a high end audio bargain of a speaker and I wish every review was this easy.

A Serious Bang for Buck Award is granted in recognition of a products stand out high performance being significantly greater than its perceived price point