Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

Three products are the subjects of lengthy followup reviews in the December issue of Stereophile: MBL's Noble Line N31 CD player-D/A processor, the GoldenEar BRX loudspeaker, and Alta Audio's Alyssa loudspeaker.

Let me tell you how I spent the month of May 1987: I had been musing about a comment made by J. Gordon Holt following the 1986 Summer CES that it seemed that the loudspeaker High End was populated exclusively by planar models: Apogees, Acoustats, MartinLogans, Magneplanars of various kinds, the Quad ESL-63, and an assorted Infinity or two. The problem is, however, that folks as a rule buy speakers made from boxes; boxes priced a little lower than the esoteric beasts so beloved of reviewers. "OK," said Larry Archibald, "how about reviewing some moving-coil loudspeakers? Tell you what. Let's make it interesting; make them box loudspeakers costing under $1000/pair. It'll give you a feel for the kind of affordable speaker that sells in quantity."

It was a "Wow!" audio moment I'll never forget. It happened just after Ladies Who Lunch, our regular Friday afternoon lunch-n-chat for audio poobahs at the Grand Sichuan restaurant in Chelsea. It was dark at 4 o'clock, and the first snow of winter looked enchanting under the 24th Street streetlamps. Audiophiliac Steve Guttenberg and I were accompanying our turntable setter–upper friend Michael Trei to Bob Visintainer's Rhapsody Music and Cinema, where Trei was scheduled to install a Lyra Etna SL cartridge on a TechDAS Air Force III turntable. I tagged along to chatter with Bob and listen with Steve to Alta Audio's tall, open-baffle Titanium Hestia loudspeakers. Rumor had it that this was a happening system.

Summer!

COVID-19 notwithstanding, summer—warmth, flowers, leaves on trees—has descended on Greenwich Village, my New York City home for the past 30 years. What hasn't descended are tourists, belching motorcycles, behemoth sports cars, beer drinkers, and the usual summer hell-raisers, the sort that would've sent legendary Village bohemians Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs running back to their cold-water flats.

The fog hung ominously thick as I climbed the 194 steps leading up to Red Rocks Amphitheatre. I'd been in Denver for the 2018 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, and the weather had suddenly turned damp and cold—unusually so for early October. Due to dense fog and possible ice, my drive in from another Colorado city had been slowed. Though I'm in good shape, I was unaccustomed to the altitude, which also slowed my pace. So, I was arriving shortly after the opening act had started.

I've been wrestling with my elders about new ways to measure loudspeakers, lobbying for methods that might correlate more directly with a listener's experience. And wouldn't you know? Right in the middle of this Socratic dialogue, I put the fresh-from-UPS, $1000/pair, Tannoy Revolution XT 6s into my reference system, plunking them down on my 24" Sound Anchor Reference stands in the same spot my Harbeth P3ESRs had been sitting. And I freaked! I was using the Rogue RP-7 preamp and the Rogue Stereo 100 (100Wpc) amplifier, and I could never adequately describe how bad the shiny white Tannoys sounded. Imagine sound that's thin, metallic, herky-jerky, dull, and rolled off completely below about 90Hz.

Reviewing a new loudspeaker from Totem feels like destiny—as if a formative moment 30 years ago has come full circle. That's because the first genuine audiophile speaker I ever owned was Totem's now-iconic Model 1, a product whose arrival altered many audiophiles' expectations of how much great—and wide-range—sound a small speaker can deliver. It's still being made today, at least in spirit.