Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

It's always tough to follow an award-winning act. Wes Phillips raved about the original">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/237/">original EgglestonWorks Andra back in October 1997, and it was subsequently dubbed Stereophile's Speaker of the Year for 1997. The Andra won many other plaudits, and found its way into a number of top-shelf recording studios as the monitor of choice. Such a reputation for excellence is the stuff most speaker designers dream of. It also imposes the burden of expectation—the "new and improved" version of such a knockout product had better be good, or else.

Rarely has the debut of a new loudspeaker company and its inaugural model created as big a buzz as did Lumen White and their Whitelight speaker at the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show. Driven by Vaic tube amplifiers in one of the larger corner rooms at the Alexis Park Hotel, the big Whitelights had a look and a sound that attracted continuous crowds. Of the questions among audio cognoscenti that I overheard at the end of each day, two of the most common were "Hey, did you hear those Lumen Whites?" and "What? Can you speak louder?"

When it was suggested that I call in on speaker manufacturer RBH Sound during a planned trip">http://www.stereophile.com//asweseeit/470/">trip to Utah in the fall of 2001, my response was "Who is RBH?" To my embarrassment, the speaker company had not popped up on my radar screen since it was formed in Los Angeles in 1976. However, I had certainly heard some of the speakers they had manufactured for other companies, most notably the McIntosh models of the early 1980s, with their line arrays of dome tweeters.

In the past year, Stereophile has reviewed a number of cost-no-object flagship loudspeakers. B&W's">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/600/">B&W's Signature 800, MartinLogan's">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/390/">MartinLogan's Prodigy, Burmester's">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/601/">Burmester's B-99, Snell's">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/556/">Snell's XA Reference Tower, Krell's">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/382/">Krell's LAT-1, Linn's">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/555/">Linn's Komri, Dynaudio's">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/501/">Dynaudio's Evidence Temptation, Sony's">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/391/">Sony's ES SS-M9ED, and Rockport's">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/644/">Rockport's Antares have all passed through the review mill. Manufacturers like to submit their flagships for review for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the pride they take in showing what their engineers can do when given a blank check. However, while all these models do indeed provide great (if different) sound for the tens of thousands of dollars they demand from their owners, they are out of reach of the majority of audiophiles. It is important, therefore, for reviewers to spend time with real-world designs; when I heard the $1990/pair CS1.6 from Kentucky's Thiel at the 2002 CES last January, I requested a pair for review.

I have always had an affection for speakers designed and manufactured by the Canadian conglomerate Audio Products International Corp. (API), which markets speaker designs under the names Mirage, Energy, Sound Dynamics, and Athena. In fact, it was 20 years ago that API created the first budget speaker that caught my attention, the Mirage 350. At the time, the 350 was the only speaker I'd heard that cost less than $300/pair. It sounded open, musical, and detailed without seeming bass-shy. (A larger successor, the 460, was for many years my reference home-theater speaker.) Although I've been impressed with many other API designs I've heard over the years at friends' houses, press events, and hi-fi shows, it had been more than a decade since I'd formally reviewed an API product.

It was almost five years ago that I first spent some serious auditioning time with an omnidirectional two-piece speaker from German manufacturer MBL: the four-way MBL 111. When I reviewed the 111 in the April 1998 Stereophile, I had been extremely impressed with the speaker's stereo imaging, which was superbly stable and well-defined, with images that floated completely free of the speaker positions. The tonal balance was also excellent, with a rich midrange, superbly clean highs, and extended lows. "This Radialstrahler is one of the best tweeters I have experienced," I wrote. In fact, the 111 was let down only by bass frequencies that tended to lag behind the music slightly.

Of the small number of times I have been totally swept away by listening to recorded music, a significant proportion have involved loudspeakers from Wilson Audio Specialties. It was my experience of their X-1/Grand SLAMM in the listening rooms of reviewer Martin Colloms, then-retailer Peter McGrath, designer Dan D'Agostino of Krell, and manufacturer Madrigal Audio Labs, that led me to name it my "Editor's Choice" for 1995 and join my vote with those of the Stereophile scribes to make it the magazine's "Loudspeaker of the Year." I wrote in my">http://www.stereophile.com//asweseeit/470/">my December 2001 "As We See It" about how a cross-country road trip had begun with a listen to the Cantus">http://www.stereophile.com//features/465/">Cantus CD on the Wilson WAMMs in their">http://www.stereophile.com//interviews/478/">their designer's Utah listening room. And, as I wrote in my">http://www.stereophile.com//asweseeit/557/">my April column, auditioning Peter McGrath's 24-bit Nagra-Dhttp://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/461/">Nagra-D; master tapes on Wilson MAXXes in the Halcro room was, for me, the highlight of the 2002 CES.