Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

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Martin Colloms  |  Oct 25, 2024  | 
An ancient connection: Monitor Audio began in 1972 when John Bartlett, founder of the innovative retail chain Audio T, introduced me to Mike Beeny, manager of an Audio T branch near Cambridge, and Mo Iqbal, a local electronics wizard. Mike suggested that Mo and I join him to start a loudspeaker company. Monitor was a fashionable hi-fi term, and I suggested we name it Monitor Audio Ltd. Each director put £300 into the company account. It was registered as a PLC at an address in Teversham, Cambridgeshire. We rented an upper floor office in a warehouse close to Mo's home, since Mo worked all hours. There was additional workspace in his huge double garage. Mike directed sales, Mo was responsible for production management and accounts, and I took the position of technical director for research and development. I also helped supervise production. Lorna Parker was our office secretary.

After launching a handful of increasingly viable designs, we reached a then-astonishing turnover of £1 million in our first year and enjoyed a very successful showing at the Paris Festival du Son. But by this point, I was close to an overwork-related breakdown and reluctantly resigned.

Brian Damkroger  |  Oct 18, 2024  | 
Active speakers make sense. The amplifiers, crossovers, and drivers are designed as a unit, so the design isn't compromised by the need to interface with components with unknown electrical or acoustical characteristics (except for the room, and that can't be helped). Concurrent design and testing of the various pieces can result in an integrated, through-designed system. Plus, the elegant simplicity that active speakers bring to a system just appeals to me.

Like many audiophiles, I've found myself intrigued by the variety of approaches that are taken to achieve the same goals: point source, line source, panels, horns. Whenever I've heard horns paired with a flea-powered amp, the dynamics have always impressed. I've consistently heard a jump factor that makes music feel remarkably alive. The combination of these two traits, though—horns plus active—is quite rare.

Sasha Matson  |  Sep 13, 2024  | 
How many times have you been told by parents and teachers that everything successful must be built on a strong foundation? It's true in music, where the low frequencies are the foundation the music rests on, like the basement framing a building. If you get that part wrong, where are you? Sitting in the mud, that's where. With no chance to address beauty in the midrange, texture and air above, or other tasty things.

Youngstown, Ohio–based loudspeaker manufacturer SVS made foundations its specialty, starting at the company's very beginning in 1998, when it started by designing subwoofers and only subwoofers. The company didn't start offering regular loudspeakers, with midranges and high frequencies, until 2012. Over time, SVS's high-value speakers got more ambitious until earlier this year, at AXPONA, it introduced its most ambitious loudspeaker yet, the full-range, three-way Ultra Evolution Pinnacle ($4999.98/pair).

Rogier van Bakel  |  Aug 30, 2024  | 
It's funny how we discover some music in unexpected, twisting ways. A friend recently sent me the real estate listing for a beautiful home in Deer Isle, Maine, about an hour from where I live. I gawked at the pictures and calculated I'd need to work for Stereophile for another 127 years before I'd have enough dough to buy it. Then I noticed something unusual on one of the walls of the place: lots of gold records. Google helped me figure out that the house had belonged to the late singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg. I knew the name but was unfamiliar with his music. Minutes later, I was playing the studio version of "Nether Lands," seemingly named after my country of birth. A beautifully orchestrated piece with restrained woodwinds and soaring strings, it reminded me of the best of Van Dyke Parks and of some post–Pet Sounds Brian Wilson songs. I played it straight through three times.

Part of the reason I was so smitten with the recording lay in the engaging, naturalistic presentation it received from the handmade-in-Switzerland Piega Gen2 811 floorstanders ($30,000/pair) that had just made their way to my listening room.

Robert Schryer  |  Aug 23, 2024  | 
Ah, Denmark. Land of the Vikings and blue-eyed, blond-haired folk with faces sculpted just so. I loved my week there as a Stereophile correspondent and member of a scraggly scrum of audio journalists whisked to DALI headquarters on a promotional junket.

Aside from its universal attractiveness, what struck me during my stay in the southernmost and smallest of the Scandinavian countries was how by North American standards the more densely populated cities I visited, Copenhagen and Aarhus, seemed orderly and clean. Cars, pedestrians, and cyclists kept tightly to their lanes. I saw no cigarette butts on the sidewalk and only sparse pockets of graffiti. There seemed to be a natural, sequential flow to everything—an evenness and balance that was close to idyllic.

Outside its bigger cities, Denmark looks pastoral, with long stretches of grassy fields sporadically interrupted by broad bodies of water, and bucolic towns that seem to have sprouted in the middle of nowhere. It's in these towns that a lot of Danish hi-fi is made: DALI in Nørager (population 1143); Dynaudio in Skanderborg (population 20,000). Skanderborg contains evidence of human settlements belonging to the earliest Nordic Stone Age, starting some 100,000 years ago.

Dynaudio doesn't go back quite that far; the company was founded in 1977...

John Atkinson  |  Jul 25, 2024  | 
Loudspeaker company GoldenEar Technology was founded in 2010 by audio industry veteran Sandy Gross after he left Definitive Technology. With a design team based in Canada that included Martyn Miller, who is still GoldenEar's senior acoustic engineer, GoldenEar produced a series of relatively affordable speakers that garnered favorable reviews in Stereophile. The most recent of these was the BRX (Bookshelf Reference X) standmount, which I reviewed in September 2020 and have been using as one of my reference loudspeakers since.

The BRX was the last GoldenEar speaker to be produced under Sandy Gross's aegis; in January 2020, the company was acquired by The Quest Group, the parent company of cable company AudioQuest. At the 2023 High End Munich show, Quest announced a new GoldenEar speaker, the floorstanding T66, said to be the first model in a new series.

Ken Micallef  |  May 30, 2024  | 
Evaluating a loudspeaker that would become Stereophile's 2011 Product of the Year, Art Dudley, at the time the magazine's editor-at-large, wrote, "The Voxativ Ampeggio went beyond sounding good: More than once, with too many records to mention, I found myself stopping to marvel at its brilliantly good pitch certainty. In terms of being able to simply nail a note, whether in isolation or tucked within a whole string of the little bastards, I've heard few other speakers this accomplished. And while it's one thing to focus on such a characteristic for a moment at a time, it's quite another to bask in it subconsciously—and the Voxativs allowed me to do just that."

"I've now encountered a single-driver dynamic speaker I could live with," Art concluded. "In most audio reviews that's faint praise, but in this one it's a revelation."

Jim Austin  |  May 24, 2024  | 
My first encounter with an Audiovector loudspeaker was at the 2019 Toronto Audiofest. Driven by colorful (both sonically and visually) Alluxity electronics, the R 3s sounded pure and very fine. As I sat listening to the R 3 Arretés, the R 8 Arreté, their big brother, sat quietly in the corner, seemingly pleased with the performance of its smaller sibling.

I ended up reviewing the R 8 instead of the R 3, which in retrospect hardly seems fair:It was the R3 I heard that day, the R 3 that attracted my attention and got me interested in the brand.

Sasha Matson  |  May 01, 2024  | 
Review samples of some new high-end audio products do not grow on trees. They are more like dray horses trouping from one destination to another. After the US premiere of the Technical Audio Devices (TAD) Grand Evolution One (TAD-GE1), a floorstanding speaker from TAD's Evolution series, at the 2023 Capital Audio Fest, the review pair came to stay with me in Upstate New York for a couple of months before traveling on to the 2024 Florida Audio Expo for another public appearance. After that, they returned to John Atkinson for measuring—then off again on another journey.

The TAD Labs GE1 is a three-way, three-driver design. Up top is TAD's proprietary Coherent Source Transducer (CST), a 5½" coaxial tweeter/midrange driver. Two matched 7" woofers fill out the middle of the front panel.

Brian Damkroger  |  Apr 26, 2024  | 
I jumped at the chance to review T+A's $47,900/pair Solitaire S 530 loudspeaker for a few reasons. First, because T+A is a well-established company with an approach I like and respect: They make hi-fi equipment of the highest quality but with prices that, though substantial, are in line with their technology and execution. Their stuff is very handsome with impressive industrial design, but T+A doesn't do audio jewelry. What's more, though T+A is aggressive in R&D—their "Company" webpage says, "Actually, we're scientists ..."—but they are selective in the use of new technology. The third reason I was interested in reviewing a product from T+A is that their prices and technical level place them in a market segment I know well.

What I didn't know until recently is that T+A makes loudspeakers, and they're quite different from the loudspeakers other companies make. I only learned this when I started hearing about the S 530 and its larger sibling, the S 540, from friends—friends whose ears I trust.

Rogier van Bakel  |  Apr 04, 2024  | 
All photos by Rogier van Bakel. Compositing by David Evett.

For Christmas in 2020, a friend sent me a gift: a coffee mug decorated with a one-out-of-five-stars rating for the annus horribilis the world had just been through. The caption on the ceramic read, "VERY BAD WOULD NOT RECOMMEND."

True, the pandemic year and the lockdowns had been no fun, to put it mildly, but that doesn't mean there were no positives. Every day, rain or shine, my 10-year-old daughter and I played soccer on the field behind our house. We—pointlessly, I concede—trained our shepherd to walk backward on command. I savored having more time to read, watch movies, and take naps when the urge struck. Finally, I used the long stretch of weeks, then months, to rekindle my lifelong infatuation with music. Thousands of old and new recordings kept me balanced and tethered me to the rest of humanity during the dark days of social distancing. Rarely had music soothed and comforted me more than during the 10 months before the vaccines arrived.

My musical appreciation—reverence at times—was due in part to the new Tekton Moab floorstanders . . .

Tom Fine  |  Feb 16, 2024  | 
Back in August, I received an email from Editor Jim Austin. Subject line: "Want to do a big review?" He had my attention. Jim wrote that he had visited Bowers & Wilkins parent company Masimo Consumer in Carlsbad, California, for a demo of the brand-new B&W 801 D4 Signature and 805 D4 Signature loudspeakers. (That visit was chronicled by Jim in the September 2023 Industry Update section.) B&W had offered Stereophile the first US review of both products—look for John Atkinson's review of the 805 D4 Signature in the coming months—and Jim thought the big 801s would be "right up my alley."

Indeed! The voice of my full-range system in the living room is a pair of B&W 808 speakers, ca late 1980s. The smaller-scale system at our house upstate features a pair of B&W 805 D2s. So, outside of my mastering studio, most of the music I listen to is through Bowers & Wilkins speakers. I am accustomed to and enjoy B&W sound and styling.

Sasha Matson  |  Jan 25, 2024  | 
Wilson Audio's new Sasha V loudspeaker (that's "V" as in victory, not "five") extends the line that began in 2009 with the debut of the Sasha 1 model. The installation manual includes a page titled "Sasha Evolution," with elegant line drawings of the various versions of the Sasha loudspeaker—now four—which were preceded by the two-box WATT/Puppy combo, which dates from 1989. The Wilson Audio Specialties Sasha V ($48,900/pair) replaces the prior Sasha model, the Sasha DAW, in the Wilson lineup.

The hefty, floorstanding Sasha V maintains a close family resemblance. The new Sasha's width and height are almost identical, logging 14½" and 45 1/16", respectively. The cabinets gain an inch in depth and now measure 23 15/16". The cabinets' subtle beveling is slightly different; probably only recent Sasha owners would notice. Extra thickness in the cabinets adds 9lb for a total of 245lb per speaker.

John Atkinson  |  Jan 10, 2024  | 
Three products were recently subjected to second opinions: I reviewed the revised RS250A version of HiFi Rose's RS250 streaming D/A preamplifier and the optional DC1 DAC module for Audio Research's I/50 integrated amplifier; Ken Micallef wrote about his time with the Volti Razz loudspeaker.
John Atkinson  |  Dec 29, 2023  | 
When I reviewed the Concept 50 loudspeaker from the UK's Q Acoustics in August 2022, I concluded that the Concept 50 lowers the sweet price spot for affordable tower speakers to $3000/pair. Now I have another pair of Q Acoustics loudspeakers in the house for review. Like the earlier speaker, the 5040 is a slim, elegant-looking tower with a vertical D'Appolito drive-unit array comprising a 0.9" fabric-dome tweeter positioned between the two 5" plastic-cone woofers. But the price is half that of the Concept 50: $1499/pair. Will this be a new sweet spot? We shall see.

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