Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

I first heard the Consonance Compact Monitor ($1680/pair) at AXPONA 2025. I called the room—Mike Stephens's Western HiFi of Farmersville, Texas—"one of the ... top five systems at AXPONA."

Recently I learned that a diner in Los Angeles had closed. I felt a pang of regret bordering on loss, even though I'd never set foot in the place. The Copper Penny was the La Brea Avenue greasy spoon Tom Waits mentions in the introduction to "Eggs and Sausage," on Nighthawks at the Diner.

Those of us who like to listen to music at room-filling scale may worry when we sit between a pair of standmount speakers. Sure, many of us have heard remarkably large and expansive sound from relatively smallish boxes . . . But it's always a crapshoot. Will that little two-way speaker excite my blood to musical ecstasy or boil it in frustration?

It wasn't too many years ago that no audio perfectionist would even consider owning speakers having woofers of less than a 12" diameter. Everyone knew that it took a BIG speaker to reproduce real bass, and pointed at the size of a double bass and an organ bass pipe as proof that there was no way of circumventing that particular law of physics.

There was no limo, just a walk filled with Christmas-in-Chinatown sights from the F train east down East Broadway, past 169 Bar, under the Manhattan Bridge, to the Dim Sum Palace. I was having a dinner meetup with an artist-writer friend named Joe who invited me to hear the wide-range AER drivers that he has bolted onto clear acrylic AER baffles with big, round, clear horns on the front.

There's something inherently suspicious about most all-in-one solutions. The audiophile brain, trained over decades of mix-and-match rituals, recoils instinctively. Where's the fun in a speaker that arrives with amplification baked in? Where's the journey of pairing, the thrill of synergy discovered at 2am after your sixth cable swap?

It's difficult to put a positive spin on moving. A recent survey ranked it as life's most stressful event, ahead of divorce, losing a job, or becoming a parent. Forty-two percent of respondents said it brought them to tears. Thirteen percent said it was worse than a week in jail.