HE 2007

Please forgive my so very foul language, but when I walked into the Loiminchay room, I just had to shout: "What the FUDGE?" Seriously.

That's the truth.

The Loiminchay speakers look like nothing else I've ever seen. "I know nothing about this brand," I said to Montague Luxuries' Mark Montague.

"Well, that's because we're absolutely new," he responded.

The designer, Patrick Chu, is better known for his fine pens. "How did he go from pens to loudspeakers?"

"Well, he's also an audiophile and a collector, and everything he's interested in is about quality of life. He's been hiding for five years, working on these speakers."

"Basically," said Patrick Chu, "I made a speaker to give myself trouble."

For Chu, loudspeaker design is about defining physical limitations and accepting the challenge to work within those limitations. Driver and crossover placement, cabinetry and lacquering, and everything in between are painstaking processes. A special challenge for Chu is the act of working with vibration in the subwoofer cabinet. With the Patrick 3 (starting at $50,000/pair), Chu has attempted to combine two design philosophies. While trying to utilize the vibrations of the speaker body in a way that mimics the natural resonance of say, an acoustic guitar, Chu also fights vibration by mounting the woofer in concrete block.

And the name, Loiminchay, is a combination of elements, too. "Loimin" is the Chinese word for "delightful understanding." (Hmm?) And "Chay" means "atelier or studio." So, we have delightful understanding studio.

"Can you explain that again?" I asked.