A couple of years ago German loudspeaker maker ELAC employed ex KEF and TAD engineer Andrew Jones, it proved a good move especially when the budget Debut B6 garnered itself so many awards. Since then Andrew has introduced his favourite loudspeaker technology to ELAC’s range in the form of concentric mid/treble drivers, where the high […]
Every audiophile begs, buys or borrows equipment over the period of their love affair with home music reproduction. Depending on the influence of ‘external factors’ (room size, domestic acceptance, aspiration vs available budget) the one component which tends to cause the most grief is the last one in the chain – the loudspeaker. Why? Well, […]
The problem with Sven Boenicke is he always plays good (see: my kind of) music at the Munich High End show. When you have heard to same old tunes in a dozen rooms it’s a breath of fresh air to come across a space where they have contemporary music that’s relaxed and untainted by audiophilia. […]
In an age when a 50inch television is considered normal it is increasingly rare to find anyone who has loudspeakers that are much bigger than baked bean cans. And yet who ever reached nirvana watching the telly! I know that Fargo is pretty good but transcendant it is not. We know that this is all […]
Having established itself as a highly credible entry level to mid market brand Q-Acoustics has rather rashly gone and built a high end loudspeaker. This is fabulous news for the canny audio enthusiast but is tricky terrain from a commercial perspective. The nearest parallel I can think of is the Ford GT40, a seriously capable […]
Way back in the day when Tom Evans was modifying Pioneer CD players with clock upgrades, let’s call it the nineties, he got enthusiastic about Jordan full range drive units. It happens to a lot of people but most stick them in wooden cabinets and make another me too product, Tom had a different idea. […]
Introduced in 2016 the Dynaudio Contour 20 is the smallest member of a range that keeps the longstanding Contour name alive for Dynaudio. Evolution has not only changed the size but also the drivers, the looks, the materials and the crossover into a modern product, looking extremely fresh for the Danish who have always been […]
Being bitten by the super-tweeter bug a few months ago I took the opportunity to try a pair of ELAC 4Pi Plus.2 super-tweeters at home. This is an omnidirectional ribbon tweeter that has been on the market for a very long time and has been incorporated into some of ELAC’s best loudspeakers in the past, […]
I imagine that even the youngest readers will have heard of the most famous BBC monitor speaker the LS3/5a, originally developed in 1975 for use in mobile recording vans to monitor speech. It was the successor to the LS3/5, and created because KEF no longer made the necessary drivers. The ‘a’ version made use of […]
I heard a pair of the new Totem Sky monitors on a visit to a dealer, it was only a short listen but long enough to recognise the sheer quality and make me want to hear them at home. A couple of weeks later I picked them up and since then they have been making […]
What's the connection between F1 racing cars and transmission line loudspeakers? Yes, you’ve got it, airflow. In an F1 car you want low wind resistance and equally low turbulence in the car’s wake because that causes drag. In a transmission line (TL) you want the air to be able to flow out of the end […]
Active loudspeakers are hot, once the preserve of studio monitoring, speakers with built in amplifiers can be found across the board from Bluetooth boxes through soundbars to serious hi-fi. A brand that has been nibbling away at the affordable end of the audio market is Audioengine, an American company who’s direct approach at the Munich […]