Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

"Stirring the stew" is what I've heard it called when a company introduces a new version of a product every three or four years. When a new product is launched, sales generally rise rapidly to a maximum and then slowly decline. If the stew is stirred every few years, plotting the product's sales volume against time results in a sawtooth wave, without sales ever dropping close to zero.

About a year after settling into my new house, I decided to buy a pair of Monitor Audio Silver 10 floorstanding loudspeakers, which I had reviewed in 2014 for our sister publication Sound & Vision. I wound up buying three of them, with the intention of cannibalizing the drivers and crossover from one to make my own three-way center-channel speaker. But that project was long delayed, and I never got around to doing anything with the third Silver 10: It now sits in a closet as a spare.

In the realm of loudspeaker reviews, John Atkinson's measurements and my empirical observations have one important equivalency: Both are meaningless abstractions until confirmed by your listening experience.

Both are contingent on factors that are necessarily obtuse and not especially controllable.

This almost happened 13 years ago. Thinking the time was right for a Klipschorn review—2006 was the 60th anniversary of its design—I got in touch with a Klipsch representative, who requested photos of my room and details of its size and construction style. My reply was followed by a three-day lag in correspondence, after which came the disappointing news: "We're sorry: It won't work." The problem: There were baseboard radiators too near the corners of the room where the speakers would be installed; consequently, the Klipschorns couldn't be snugged all the way against those corner walls—an iron-clad requirement for their use.

Magnepan founder Jim Winey could be considered the patriarch of planar loudspeakers. His innovative leadership of and commitment to the technology over the past 20 years have propelled Magnepan to a position of preeminence in the speaker business. You won't find any hybrids rolling off the production line at Magnepan's corporate headquarters in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. The entire Magnepan line is devoted strictly to planars that use ribbon tweeters and quasi-ribbon midranges and woofers—not a stray dynamic woofer in the lot!

I'm fortunate to have reviewed in recent years not one but three different pairs of horn-loaded loudspeakers. My jaw dropped when I reviewed what would prove the finest loudspeaker to ever grace my home, the Volti Audio Rival. Second came a pricey but pleasing pair from handlebar-mustache king Gordon Burwell, the Burwell & Sons Homage. Then, at the urging of occasional Stereophile contributor Steve Guttenberg, I took on the fat-boy Klipsch Heresy III. As the Beatles used to say, I was dead-chuffed.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to spend a couple of afternoons listening to a system built around the late David Wilson's magnum opus, the Wilson Audio WAMM Master Chronosonic loudspeaker ($685,000/pair), which Jason Victor Serinus reported on in December 2016. In addition to the joy of simply listening to music on such exotic speakers, the experience provided insight into just how well the Master Chronosonics would work in a relatively normal-sized listening room—in this case, one measuring 21.5 feet long by a little over 18 feet wide, with a ceiling height of a little over 9.5 feet: not small in an absolute sense, but a lot smaller than the sort of space usually associated with speakers this large.