Børresen X3 loudspeakers The Børresen X3 followed the mighty Stratton Acoustics Elypsis 1512s into the listening room, it would be hard to imagine two such different designs. The Stratton is a metre wide, has ten and 12 inch drive units and costs over £80,000, the X3 is 34.5cm wide, has drivers that do not exceed […]
Q Acoustics 5040 loudspeakers The new Q Acoustics 5040 has me wondering whether somewhere in their sound labs, Q Acoustics’ engineers have secret ingredients in bottles labelled ‘Thrills’, ‘Spills’ and ‘Miscellaneous audio wizardry’. I’ve now had the pleasure of listening to several different speakers from this Hertfordshire-headquartered company, and every time my opening and closing […]
Perlisten S7t loudspeaker To paraphrase the Rolling Stones, we can’t always get what we want, and I wanted to hear the Perlisten S7t a long time before these substantial loudspeakers arrived at the listening room. But it was worth the wait. There was a lot of noise around Perlisten on launch because the range arrived […]
Pearl Acoustics Sibelius loudspeaker The Pearl Sibelius is a rather different loudspeaker to the run of the mill, and in more ways than one. What you notice is that there’s only one drive unit, what’s less obvious is that the cabinet is made of solid oak and that it has quarter wave loading. The latter […]
Kudos Titan 606 loudspeakers I have enjoyed a number of the Kudos loudspeakers during my tenure with the Ear so the opportunity to hear the Titan 606, the largest model yet to grace my listening room, was one I jumped at with enthusiasm. Regular readers may recall the positive impression that the C20 and the 10A […]
Blumenhofer Fun 13 Mk2 floorstanding loudspeaker I was introduced to Blumenhofer Acoustics exactly a year ago when I reviewed their Tempesta 20, a rousing hybrid-horn that lingered so vividly in my memory it was impossible to ignore eleven months later when it was time to nominate The Ear’s Best of 2022. Keen to hear more, […]
Curvi BMR Mk2 loudspeaker It takes quite a lot of courage to adopt a relatively new technology in a market where the norms are already well established, but that’s exactly what Curvi founder Dr Chris Liauw (a materials scientist) has done. It’s almost on a par with the development of the electrostatic transducer in the […]
Goldenear Triton Seven The Goldenear Triton Sevens are the smallest of the floor standing loudspeakers in the flagship Triton range. When I first heard about Audioquest’s acquisition of the Goldenear loudspeaker company in early January 2020 my reaction was a simple one. Why? Why would Bill Low, owner and CEO of one of the world’s […]
The best of the best that we have reviewed on the Ear over the last 12 months
Transmission line loudspeakers have a lot to answer for, at the tender age of 20 my audio expectations were reset when I heard a pair of IMF TLS 80. I genuinely thought I’d reached audio nirvana with this chunky floorstander. A subsequent downsizing of rooms forced me to explore other options, but I often wondered […]
Loudspeakers can sometimes be the make or break of a system. After all, having got the system nicely set up, the right front end, amplification and cables a house move brings a new room and the delights which came before evaporate, then the realisation dawns that, no matter what, despite the rest of the system […]
With JBL launching so many retro style models in recent years there is a tendency to forget that this is an up to the moment, technologically driven company that also makes modern loudspeakers. The brand has enviable heritage for sure but that doesn’t mean it can afford to keep on making speakers the way it […]