Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to spend a couple of afternoons listening to a system built around the late David Wilson's magnum opus, the Wilson Audio WAMM Master Chronosonic loudspeaker ($685,000/pair), which Jason Victor Serinus reported on in December 2016. In addition to the joy of simply listening to music on such exotic speakers, the experience provided insight into just how well the Master Chronosonics would work in a relatively normal-sized listening room—in this case, one measuring 21.5 feet long by a little over 18 feet wide, with a ceiling height of a little over 9.5 feet: not small in an absolute sense, but a lot smaller than the sort of space usually associated with speakers this large.

Wilson Audio Specialties considers the Yvette ($25,500/pair) to be the replacement model for the Sophia Series 3. I would argue that the Yvette is an entirely different animal. There are obvious similarities between the Yvette and Sophia. Each is a floorstanding, three-driver, three-way design. Each comprises a single box with a separate internal chamber for each driver. The Sophia's woofer and midrange chambers are ported; the Yvette's are respectively ported and vented. The two models are about the same size and, from the back, look a lot alike.

Visit any consumer audio show these days and you'll see rooms full of systems costing from six to seven figures. Manufacturers like to put their best foot forward, and demoing systems with loudspeakers designed to sell for $50,000/pair and up (often up) seems an obvious way to go.

It's also common for an audio company to launch its flagship models first, and only later release more affordable products, for a wider range of buyers. The hope is that the promotional shine of the dream products will be reflected onto the budget models.

Ask anyone in the street what they think of when they hear the word "loudspeaker" and odds are they'll describe a wooden box with moving-coil drivers sitting in its front. But ask a Stereophile reader and it's quite possible that he or she'll describe a large, flat panel reminiscent of a room divider: in our 1989 reader survey, the most widely represented brand of loudspeaker was Magnepan, with a significant lead over Infinity and Vandersteen, the second and third most common speaker brands. This represents considerable commercial success in a generally conservative marketplace for a company whose products are so different from the norm.

As Stereophile's lone New York City bachelor, I sometimes search for amore on Internet dating sites. One such encounter led me to Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I met a woman who, I soon learned, was at the top of the food chain of Manhattan's gold-encrusted arts community.

The single child of an upper-Westchester family, Jane So (not her real name) assists her employer in curating fine art for the city's premier galleries and museums. Her job also includes gifting her employer's millions to charitable organizations and the like. But in her off hours, when the boss isn't watching, Jane enjoys a bit of kink. As she told me over dinner, "Ken, I'm not looking for anything serious. I have several men who visit me during the week."

It dawned on me: I had stumbled into New York's subterranean sex world.

In 2008, a pair of DeVore Fidelity's Gibbon Nine loudspeakers arrived at my home for a Follow-Up review. Within weeks, I wrote a check for them. That put me in good company: Several other reviewers who reviewed the Nines also bought their review pairs.

Ten years later, the Gibbon Nines are still my main speakers. That's the longest I've ever kept a pair of speakers in my main system, not counting the Polk Audio 7Bs I bought in 1980, when I was 16.

I had a moment of revelation in 2000, when I first set up a pair of Revel's original Ultima Studio loudspeakers in my living room. It wasn't just my awareness that Revel's next-to-top-of-the-line loudspeaker was outstandingly good—it seemed to perfectly match my space and my ears. From the first day, I knew these would be keepers and I purchased the review samples.

Revel's Ultima Studio2 arrived in 2008, and though it performed even better than the original, the impression it made on me wasn't quite revelatory, and my praise was somewhat restrained—something for which Fred Kaplan justly chided me in his enthusiastic Follow-Up review in December 2009. To this day, the Ultima Studio2 and Revel's top model, the Salon2, remain Revel's standard bearers. Meanwhile, I wonder when there will be a Studio3.