Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

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Floor Loudspeaker Reviews
Vortex Screen loudspeaker
Robert Harley  |  May 07, 2020  |  First Published: Jul 01, 1989  |  4 comments
One of the joys of reviewing audio reproduction equipment is discovering a little-known product that provides an extraordinary level of performance and musical satisfaction at an affordable price. These components, sometimes made in a garage, reflect the designer's single-minded zeal for musical accuracy, not the sometime corporate mentality of meeting a price point or catering to the latest fad.
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Floor Loudspeaker Reviews
PMC fact.8 signature loudspeaker
Kalman Rubinson  |  Apr 22, 2020  |  57 comments
Back in the Dark Ages, loudspeaker design was commonly based on semi-enlightened experimentation, with new enclosure configurations appearing almost monthly in professional and consumer journals. One of those, published in Wireless World in October of 1965, was A.R. Bailey's transmission line, a long, selectively resistive, folded-and-sometimes-tapered tube that loaded the back of the (woofer) driver for low-bass reinforcement.
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Floor Loudspeaker Reviews
Vimberg Mino loudspeaker
John Atkinson  |  Mar 26, 2020  |  68 comments
The priciest loudspeaker ever to have taken up residence in my listening room was the Akira from German company Tidal Audio (footnote 1), which I reviewed in the November 2018 issue of Stereophile. Designed by Tidal founder and CEO Jörn Janczak, the Akiras cost $215,000/pair! "The sheer resolution of the Akiras continued to astonish me throughout my auditioning," I wrote in my review, concluding that "The Akiras are the best-looking, best-built, best-sounding speakers I have had in my listening room—as they should be at the price."
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Floor Loudspeaker Reviews
Rethm Maarga loudspeaker
Art Dudley  |  Feb 28, 2020  |  9 comments
Hi-fi is like cake. Most people enjoy listening to music, and most people like cake.

People who like cake tend to like different things about it. Some people like a flourless cake, some people like a fluffy angel food cake, and some like a cake loaded up with little pieces of carrot and God-knows-what-else. People who like hi-fi also tend to like different things. Some like punchy, forceful sounds, some like realistic, natural tones, some like texture and color, some like "air," and some like to hear things go whooshing from one speaker to the other. It's all okay.

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Floor Loudspeaker Reviews
Magico M2 loudspeaker
John Atkinson  |  Jan 24, 2020  |  84 comments
On a snowy day in March 2019, the first room I visited at the Montreal Audio Fest, hosted by retailer Audio by Mark Jones, featured the world premiere of the Magico M2 loudspeaker. The soundstaging produced by these elegant towers was palpable, the full-range tonal balance superbly uncolored. Both aspects reminded me of my experience of Magico's S5 Mk.II loudspeaker, which I enthusiastically reviewed in Stereophile's February 2017 issue. Accordingly, I made a note that the M2 was going on my "must review" list. Seven months later, Magico's Alon Wolf and Peter Mackay visited to set up a pair of M2s in my listening room.
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Floor Loudspeaker Reviews
Vivid Kaya 45 loudspeaker
Kalman Rubinson  |  Jan 22, 2020  |  27 comments
For a decade, the sound of the Vivid Giya loudspeakers, which I had heard only at CES in private demonstration suites, beguiled me. My positive impressions were completely consistent from one show to the next—but then, so were the host and the surroundings. I had to wonder how much those factors contributed to my impressions.
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Audacious AudioFloor Loudspeaker Reviews
Wilson Audio Specialties Sasha DAW loudspeaker
Sasha Matson  |  Dec 20, 2019  |  23 comments
There is change, and also continuity, at Wilson Audio Specialties, the company founded in 1974 by recordist and loudspeaker designer David A. Wilson. David's son Daryl Wilson was appointed president and CEO in 2016. David Wilson passed away in 2018. And in 2019, Wilson Audio Specialties released the Sasha DAW loudspeaker ($37,900/pair), designed by a team led by Daryl Wilson and named in honor of his father.
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Floor Loudspeaker ReviewsHistoricalJ. Gordon Holt
Hegeman Model 1 omnidirectional loudspeaker
J. Gordon Holt  |  Dec 03, 2019  |  First Published: Sep 01, 1973  |  15 comments
Ye Editor had his first exposure to a true omnidirectional speaker system 15 years ago, while he was employed as chief equipment tester for High Fidelity magazine. The speaker was a most unusual-looking device for its time, being roughly a foot square and standing 3 feet high, with a "cube" of grille cloth at the top like a cupola. Inside the cupola was an 8" woofer facing upwards. Directly above it was the weirdest-looking tweeter you ever saw.
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Floor Loudspeaker Reviews
Manger p1 loudspeaker
Herb Reichert  |  Nov 27, 2019  |  98 comments
Everyone who reads my loudspeaker reviews knows: I wish box speakers did not sound like box speakers. Plus! I wish all speakers sounded focused and transparent like LS3/5a's or vintage Quads. I also want them to be uncompressed and play large, with window-shattering power and floor-shaking bass. And while I'm wishing . . . I'll take a little glow and sparkle and voodoo magic as well.
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Floor Loudspeaker Reviews
GoldenEar Technology Triton One.R loudspeaker
Kalman Rubinson  |  Nov 22, 2019  |  47 comments
The GoldenEar Triton One.R is the successor to the original Triton One, improving on that model in both appearance and function, with features that first appeared in the Triton Reference.

Externally, the Triton One.R is a 54" tall by 8" wide by 16.65" deep tower that appears even slimmer than those dimensions suggest. In lieu of the sock-like fabric covering used on GoldenEar's less expensive speakers, the One.R, like the Reference, is finished in a high-gloss black, with large rectangular grille-cloth panels on the lower portions of each side and a curved, full-height front grille whose edges blend smoothly into the side panels.

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Floor Loudspeaker ReviewsHistoricalJ. Gordon Holt
Ohm Acoustics F loudspeaker
J. Gordon Holt  |  Nov 06, 2019  |  First Published: Oct 01, 1974  |  2 comments
We have still not received a pair of these for formal testing, which may be a good thing in view of our feelings these days about "updatings." (Our feelings about such are clarified in this issue's "As We See It.")
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Floor Loudspeaker Reviews
Trenner & Friedl Osiris loudspeaker
Ken Micallef  |  Oct 30, 2019  |  7 comments
Austrian loudspeaker manufacturer Trenner & Friedl has a thing for coaxial drivers. They're used in at least three of the company's eight loudspeaker models, including the diminutive Sun bookshelf speaker and the large floorstanding Taliesin. In these models, T&F eschew more conventional stacked drivers for a putatively time-aligned, wide-frequency range coaxial design.
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Floor Loudspeaker Reviews
Vandersteen Quatro Wood CT loudspeaker & M5-HPA monoblock power amplifier
John Atkinson  |  Oct 25, 2019  |  93 comments
"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.
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Floor Loudspeaker Reviews
Monitor Audio Gold 300 loudspeaker
Thomas J. Norton  |  Oct 23, 2019  |  35 comments
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.
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Budget Component ReviewsFloor Loudspeaker Reviews
JBL Stage A170 loudspeaker
Herb Reichert  |  Oct 16, 2019  |  27 comments
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.

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