I must admit that I had never heard of Brodmann pianos from Vienna. The only Viennese piano manufacturer I was aware of prior to the 2010 RMAF was Bösendorfer, and Brodmann's Bernd Gruhn (pictured) enlightened me, explaining that back in the day, Herr Brodmann had been Herr Bösendorfer's teacher. I mentioned that it was a coincidence that a second Viennese piano manufacturer was branching out into loudspeaker production—Bösendorfer launched an idiosyncratic line of speakers at a New York
Stereophile Show a few years back—only to find out that it wasn't a coincidence at all. The Brodmann speakers are designed by Hans Deutsch, who had licensed his designs to Bösendorfer. When that company withdrew from the speaker business, Deutsch approached Brodmann.
The Bösendorfer speakers had featured vibrating panels, which made them sound superb on piano recordings and colored on other kinds of music. The Brdomann speakers still feature vibrating panels below 130Hz, but sounded uncolored on the Joshua Bell recording of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. (Elecronics were an Electrocompaniet EMC-10P CD player, EC4.8 preamp, and AW250 power amp.)
Gruhn told me that unlike the Bösendorfer designs, the Brodmann's vibrating panels, one on each side, are loosely coupled to the cabinet, which reduces the coloration and allows the benefit of the large radiating area at low frequencies to be realized. The VC2, which was being demonstrated, uses a pair of conventional midrange units mounted on the sides of the speaker to cover the range from 130Hz to 1600Hz, with two dome tweeters mounted on the front of the cabinet taking over above that region.
