CES 2014

Infinity Rises From the Ashes With New Reference Series

Brent Butterworth  |  Jan 10, 2014  |  First Published: Jan 11, 2014

While Infinity's been a successful brand in factory car audio for decades, Harman International's enthusiasm for the marque on home products has waxed and waned over the years. With the new Reference Series, Infinity's trying to re-establish its cred in the living room.

In a large display at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas during the CES show, Harman showed nine new Infinity home speakers plus a new high-end Infinity Bluetooth speaker. The home speakers all use a CMMD metal/ceramic dome tweeter with a waveguide design borrowed from Revel's great Performa3 series speakers. The three-way models also have a 3.25-inch flat-piston CMMD midrange driver, plus woofers in various sizes.

The tower speakers in the line are the $1,099/pair R263 at left and the $899/pair R253 at right. Both have the same midrange and tweeter arrangement. The R263 has two 6.5-inch woofers, while the R253 has two 5.25-inch woofers.

The full line includes two bookshelf speakers, two center speakers (one of them a three-way model), two subwoofers and a bipolar surround speaker with dual tweeters. They'll be available sometime in March or April at specialty audio dealers nationwide.

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plhart's picture
Submitted by plhart on January 11, 2014 - 3:30pm

As designer in 2004 of most of Infinity Beta series models the main difference I see is in the towers. In the new Reference Series the woofers are 5.25" and 6.5" whereas in the Beta Series the tower's woofers were 6.5" and 8" respectively. Re: the waveguide. As far as I know, the wave guide design, patented by Harman for its constant acoustic impedance output properties, was first utilized in the Infinity Beta series and then later transferred to select Revel Performa models at the time, around 2005-2006. (Unless this is a completely new design).