Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

It wasn't so much a vow as a prediction: After selling my last pair of Ticonal-magnet drivers and the homemade horns I'd carted around to three different houses, I supposed I would never again have a Lowther loudspeaker in my humble house.

That remains literally true: The 7" full-range drivers to which I'm listening today are from a German company called Voxativ; the horn-loaded cabinets from which they play were also designed by Voxativ, and are made in Germany by the Wilhelm Schimmel piano company. And, with all due respect to Lowther, the 75-year-old English loudspeaker firm that launched a thousand DIY fantasies—not to mention a thousand very lively wavefronts—the Voxativ drivers and horns take the Lowther concept further than anyone else of whom I'm aware.

Sometimes, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls. Other times, their words and ideas are made manifest through a lifetime of diligent and thoughtful work. As an audio prophet, the late Jim Thiel was one of the latter type. For decades he stood in his pulpit, quietly preaching to the audio world the importance of time and phase coherence in loudspeakers. His commitment to these ideas led to speaker designs that exclusively used first-order crossover networks, and driver designs and layouts that made possible time- and phase-coherent response. The speakers he created in turn built his company, Thiel Audio, into one of the more recognizable fixtures of high-end audio.

Every few years, it seems, Sony offers a statement product. Sometimes they do it to define a new product category—the SCD-1 introduced to the world the SACD/CD player. Sometimes they do it because they can, as with the outstanding ES SS-M9 and ES SS-M9ED loudspeakers, enthusiastically reviewed by John Atkinson in Stereophile in September 1996 and August 2001, respectively. So when I heard that Sony would introduce a special new speaker at a "by invitation only" event at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show last January, my interest was piqued. I've always kicked myself for not buying a pair of ES SS-M9s ($3500) when I could have. The ES SS-M9EDs were even better, said JA—and, at $16,000/pair, a lot more expensive. Now, a decade later, Sony has decided to make another "statement."

Direct Acoustics is a loudspeaker company in Weston, Massachusetts, that sells, by mail-order only, just one product: the two-way, floorstanding Silent Speaker II ($748/pair).

Its seemingly paradoxical name refers not to any inability of the Silent to create sound, but rather is intended by its maker to indicate two aspects of its performance. First is the ability of the loudspeaker boxes to "disappear" in the sense of not being readily apparent as sound sources. Well, okay, everyone wants that. The other intended sense of Silent is that the woofer and its loading arrangement were designed to minimize stray noises created by the woofer's excursion, or by the movements of air within, or in and out of, its vent or port.

In the May 2009 issue, I gushed over the performance of Linn Products' remarkable little bookshelf speaker, the Majik 109 ($1590/pair). In particular, I was struck by how I'd never heard any speaker at any price whose high frequencies sounded more natural, detailed, or pure than the 109's. Then, wondering what a pricier Linn speaker might sound like in my system, I asked Linn which was their most expensive model that also incorporates the 2K tweeter-supertweeter array used in the Majik 109. The answer: the floorstanding Majik 140 ($2995/pair). Once I'd worked through my reviewing backlog, two 140s were on their way to my listening den.

As B&W's 800 Series has evolved, Stereophile has reported on its progress. Lewis Lipnick reviewed the Matrix 801 Series 2 in 1987, and Wes Phillips wrote about the Nautilus 801 in 1999. I reviewed the B&W 800 Signature in 2002 and the 802D in 2005. This is getting to be a habit.

Two years ago, I was drawn to the Wilson Audio Sophia Series 2—then as now, the company's entry-level floorstander—by its good reputation among lovers of low-power tube amplifiers. "Forget the specs," they said. "Sophia is the one to hear." In fact, with its 89dB sensitivity (slightly lower than most of Wilson's other domestic loudspeakers) and mildly challenging impedance curve (less daunting than those of its stablemates, but not by a lot), the Sophia seemed, on paper, no better than average for use with flea-watt amps. But when I tried a pair at home with my 25W Shindo Corton-Charlemagne mono amps, I was impressed: The Sophia Series 2 was, as I suggested in my "Listening" column in the February 2010 issue, the product that will forever mark Wilson Audio's progress toward not merely excellent sound but beautiful sound.

The Snell Type C/IV's design has been highly influenced by both the testing methods and philosophy of Canada's National Research Council in Ottawa. Other well-known loudspeakers to have benefited from the NRC's testing facilities include the Mirage M-1 and M-3, PSB Stratus Gold, the Waveform, and Camber 3.5. The NRC provides a variety of services to loudspeaker designers, notably use of their testing facilities which include a full-sized anechoic chamber. In addition, the NRC is heavily involved in carefully controlled blind listening comparisons between loudspeakers, used to aid the loudspeaker designer while the product is under development. The NRC doesn't provide design services, but rather the means of testing and evaluating work in progress and finished products.

Despite not offering design aid, many loudspeakers created with the NRC's testing and listening laboratories share some common philosophies. Chief among these is the belief that flat amplitude response is far and away the most significant factor in listener preferences and thus should be the paramount design goal. Many NRC-influenced loudspeakers share steep crossover slopes, wide dispersion, smooth off-axis response, and pay considerable attention to the way the loudspeaker interacts with the listening room.

Last July I reviewed the $4850/pair Hales System Two Signature loudspeakers and enthusiastically recommended them. In fact, they displaced the B&W 801 Matrix 2 as my reference loudspeaker, and have become a fixture in my listening room. Over the past seven months, my impressions of the Signatures have been largely confirmed: transparent and uncolored midrange, resolution of fine detail, precise imaging, superb transient abilities, and, most importantly, an ability to thoroughly involve the listener in the music. These qualities earned the Signature a Class A recommendation in Stereophile's "Recommended Components." I've greatly enjoyed the many hours spent with the Signatures.

Hales Audio makes another loudspeaker—the System Two reviewed here—that is very similar to the Signature, but much less expensive (footnote 1). Because the System Two is such a close relation to the Signature—it uses identical drivers, a nearly identical crossover, and similar cabinet construction—and costs nearly 2 kilobucks less, I was eager to hear what the smaller system had to offer. Because the Signature was recommendable at $4850, the System Two just might be a bargain at $3000 if it even came close to the Signature's musicality.

I've always enjoyed the time I've spent with NHT loudspeakers. The two bookshelf models I've reviewed—the SB-3 (Stereophile, November 2002) and its successor, the Classic Three (November 2006)—shared NHT's "house sound": liquid, balanced, and dynamic, with little coloration, and a slightly forward and lively midrange. The newer Classic Three, still in production, sounded more refined, natural, and detailed than the SB-3. I like to see speaker designers whose work improves over time.

So when NHT approached me about reviewing a new floorstanding model with a small footprint, the Classic Absolute Tower—their first new speaker design of the next decade, they say—I jumped at the chance. Not only had I not reviewed an NHT in a while, but I'm increasingly intrigued with—and applaud—the trend of manufacturers to add small-footprint tower speakers to their lines of affordable speakers. As most speakers costing under $1000/pair tend to be bookshelf models, shoppers need to worry about buying good-quality stands of the appropriate height, and about optimizing the speaker positions with respect to the front and side walls.