Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

One of audio's great legacy brands, Wharfedale got its start in 1932 when founder Gilbert Briggs built his first loudspeaker in the basement of his Ilkley, Yorkshire, home. The landscape in the valley of the River Wharfe lent the fledgling company its name, and Wharfedale Wireless Works was born.

It wasn't too many years ago that no audio perfectionist would even consider owning speakers having woofers of less than a 12" diameter. Everyone knew that it took a BIG speaker to reproduce real bass, and pointed at the size of a double bass and an organ bass pipe as proof that there was no way of circumventing that particular law of physics.

There was no limo, just a walk filled with Christmas-in-Chinatown sights from the F train east down East Broadway, past 169 Bar, under the Manhattan Bridge, to the Dim Sum Palace. I was having a dinner meetup with an artist-writer friend named Joe who invited me to hear the wide-range AER drivers that he has bolted onto clear acrylic AER baffles with big, round, clear horns on the front.

There's something inherently suspicious about most all-in-one solutions. The audiophile brain, trained over decades of mix-and-match rituals, recoils instinctively. Where's the fun in a speaker that arrives with amplification baked in? Where's the journey of pairing, the thrill of synergy discovered at 2am after your sixth cable swap?

It's difficult to put a positive spin on moving. A recent survey ranked it as life's most stressful event, ahead of divorce, losing a job, or becoming a parent. Forty-two percent of respondents said it brought them to tears. Thirteen percent said it was worse than a week in jail.

Although I have very much appreciated how the best floorstanding loudspeakers have performed in my various listening rooms over the decades, I have always been most comfortable with relatively small two-way standmounts. Back in the early 1980s, I got musically moving sound from a pair of Rogers LS3/5a's, which I still own . . .

On the first page of the Radiant Acoustics Clarity 4.2 Welcome Guide, Radiant Acoustics founder Peter Lyngdorf states, "The first thing you'll notice when listening to these speakers is the absence of distortion."