Why so underwhelmed by Revel F208 audition???

You may be like me. I prefer intrinsically damped speaker drivers. Paper pulp and doped fabric - no metal or ceramics for me.

the problem with a rigid driver is that it MUST necessarily have internal vibrations (hit a wine glass with a spoon or think of a bell). This is unavoidable physics. I find rigid drivers often sound hashy and lack the natural sparkle that you get from a damped driver - it is all about timbre and the decay that some people are more sensitive to than others.

Your PMC 22 are paper pulp with a soft dome tweeter and in my mind there is no surprise they sound sublime

That said, some rigid driver designs are better than others. Focal sound pretty good for example - light rigid drivers can be driven by smaller cheaper drive motors and they have a flatter frequency response but they all vibrate internally which can affect timbre - some have added rubber damper dots to ceramic drivers to try to band aid the problem (like putting your hand on the cymbal after hitting it to "choke it") others have used stitching on the rubber surround to dampen the cone (common for a while with polypropylene cones)

Not all pulp paper and soft drivers are superior - being less rigid the designers must worry about breakup of the cone. So it is not completely black or white but what advantages/shortcomings that you as the listener are prepared to accept.

I just bought a pair of F208’s and was hoping to find them a big upgrade to my Focal Chorus 826v towers. Immediately, I noticed that they did have a much more authoritative bottom end. However, to my surprise the Focal Chorus 826v clearly outclassed them in every other way. Although I’m not a huge country music fan, I find the Brooks and Dunn track "My Maria" to be a great track to audition speakers to, because it has really well recorded drums, that challenge the mid-bass reproduction abilities of most speakers.
Amplifier was a Parasound Halo A21, Marantz Av8801 processor, Sony ES 400 Disc Bluray changer.
When I played the track back to back between the Focals and the Revels, the Focals brought out all of the detail on the cowbell, and the snare drum and reproduced them with a very 3 dimensional quality. Additionally the cymbals had more sizzle with the Focal tweeters. The Revels by comparison, couldn’t come close to the imaging, or detail of the cowbells or the punchiness of the snares in the drum recording. The vocals weren’t quite as well projected either.

I was there with my best friend that helped me with the set-up, and we unanimously agreed that we were hearing the same things. He was actually going to buy the Focals, but he even admitted that I’d be crazy to replace the Focals with the Revels. This should really speak volumes to the quality of the Focal Chorus 826v, since its a generation older, and two price points down from the Revel F208. Just makes we wonder how badly the Focal Aria 948, must kick the crap out of the Revel F208, since they are the same generation and price point. Pretty bad that Revel got beat so badly by a competitors "previous generation, and 2 price points down."

The only thing I can think of is that maybe the Revel’s weren’t broken in fully, but I bought former demo models that had done several days worth of demo duty at an A/V convention... so they certainly weren’t straight out of the box.

I cannot stress enough how disappointing and overhyped the Revels are.  And you are absolutely right about the Aria 948's absolutely embarrassing them.  The Revels are the least holographic and open speaker you could imagine at their price point.

I think the Revel / Harman marketing machine is at work.  And way too many people take their (very flawed) testing procedures to heart and have expectation bias when listening to them.  

I owned a pair for awhile (mainly to build a home theater out of) and sold them after a few months.  I too thought they'd get better after break in and they never opened up no matter what I fed them, and I even tried stuff that has no business being paired with a speaker of its price.

I think their concerta line is more respectable per dollar by far.

I was in the same shoes, I compared Focal Aria 936 to Revel F208.

Neither myself nor the two salesmen were impressed to the Revels. All 3 of us favored the Aria 936 by a big margin. 

Take my advice and wait for "F208 be" with new drivers/crossovers/beryllium tweeter if you are insisting on Revel. 

Another -vote against the Revel speakers.