Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

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The Fifth Element #57

Ah me, another year gone by. The rest of my holiday-gift suggestions are at the end of this column, but I wanted to kick off with a hearty recommendation of Aja, a book by Don Breithaupt. You may recall Breithaupt as a co-author (with his brother, Jeff) of the survey Precious and Few: Pop Music in the Early '70s, which cracked me up in my October">http://www.stereophile.com/thefifthelement/the_fifth_element_56">October column.

ATC SCM 11 loudspeaker

The venerable British company ATC Loudspeaker Technology was founded in 1974 by Billy Woodman, and is famous within the professional community for developing the first soft-dome midrange driver, and for their well-regarded line of active (powered) studio monitors, the user list of which is a veritable Who's Who of mastering engineers. ATC loudspeakers are all still made in the UK, and were a favorite of the late J">http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/j_gordon_holt_19301502009">J. Gordon Holt.

Aerial Model 5B loudspeaker

In October 2005's "The">http://www.stereophile.com/thefifthelement/1005fifth">The Fifth Element." I said of the Harbeth HL-3P-ES2, a descendant of the BBC">http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/361">BBC LS3/5A, "Gloriosky, these little speakers are just great to listen to!" Later, in April">http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/1293harbeth/index5.html">A… 2007, John Atkinson endorsed that remark.

Chario Premium 1000 loudspeaker

In my reviewing career, except for fleeting listening sessions at the occasional audio show, I've had little contact with products from the Italian loudspeaker maker Chario. When asked if I'd be interested in reviewing an affordable bookshelf speaker from them, I did some research and discovered that Chario is distributed in the US by Koetsu USA. Well, with that kind of pedigree—I'm a loyal owner of two Koetsu">http://www.stereophile.com/phonocartridges/1098koetsu">Koetsu Urushi cartridges—I thought I'd better give the Premium 1000 ($1015/pair) a careful listen. A few months later, I was tucking in to a pair of review samples.

Acoustic Energy AE1 Mk.III Reference Special Edition loudspeaker

One of the great divides in high-end audio concerns the question of how much bass is enough bass? The decision facing a speaker designer about how much low-frequency extension is appropriate is a fundamental one, so to speak: every extra 5Hz of bass will dramatically increase the retail price, as the speaker must be correspondingly bigger. Furthermore, the larger the speaker, the larger its problems, which in turn requires throwing more money at the design to solve those problems.

Yamaha NS-1000 Loudspeaker

Every engineer has known for years that, while beryllium has excellent physical qualities for use as a speaker radiator—light weight, rigidity, and a remarkable degree of internal damping—it is not usable as such because it cannot be stamped out like most other materials. It will not stretch, and any attempt to shape it simply causes it to split.

Spendor SA1 loudspeaker

Two years ago, I embarked on a series of reviews of mostly state-of-the-art, mostly full-range floorstanding speakers: the Sonus">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/1207sonus">Sonus Faber Cremona Elipsa (December 2007), KEF">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/208kef">KEF Reference 207/2 (February 2008), PSB">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/408psb">PSB Synchrony One (April 2008), Magico">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/508mag">Magico V3 (May 2008), Avalon">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/708ava">Avalon NP Evolution 2.0 and Epos">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/708ava/index1.html">Epos M16i (July 2008), Esoteric">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/808eso">Esoteric MG-20 (August 2008), Dynaudio">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/dynaudio_sapphire_loudspea… Sapphire (January 2009), and Revel">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/608revel/index6.html">Revel Ultima Salon2 (March 2009). I had intended to intersperse those reports with coverage of some high-performance minispeakers, but for various reasons that never happened, so in the next few issues I'll be making up that lost ground, beginning with a promising contender from the UK, the Spendor SA1.

The Fifth Element #54

Back when there were bricks-and-mortar retail record stores to speak of in tenses other than past, I used to participate in new-release conferences. Retail-store buyers—the people who decided whether consumers would see your CDs as they browsed in the stores—would gather at a nice destination, such as Lake George, New York. The various labels would then make presentations about their upcoming new releases.

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