Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

It's not unusual for audiophiles to have fond childhood recollections of the old family stereo, but Eelco Grimm's memory of his dad's audio system probably stands alone. It's not just that Piet Grimm, a professional pilot for the Dutch air defense (footnote 1), had a pair of very fine Infinity speakers, a Pioneer receiver, and a Technics turntable. Others surely did, too. It's more that he purchased the system from a military PX shop at a US air force base in Germany, then happily flew the equipment home to the Netherlands on his Northrop F5 supersonic fighter plane. That's not run-of-the-mill cool, that's Top Gun cool.

Years later, Eelco, too, started taking stereo gear to new altitudes, becoming a designer of high-end speakers and electronics. After Grimm Audio, a 15-person enterprise, moved to a building near Eindhoven airport in the southern Netherlands, he realized that it stands in almost the exact spot where his dad used to park his fighter jet.

I learned this from a day of hanging out with Eelco and cofounder and Technical Director Guido Tent at High End Munich last year. Or maybe it was during one of our dozens of emails and Facetime calls. The communication intensified after I took delivery of a Grimm LS1c system in September. Grimm's passion and commitment are impossible to miss or misconstrue. In my experience, for every fly-by-night audio business—for every purveyor of audiophile tweaks that defy the laws of physics—there's at least one polar opposite. Grimm Audio is among the high-end companies where science, engineering, and the pursuit of perfection are sacrosanct, exceeded only by a seriously deep love of music, reproduced faithfully.

At AXPONA 2023, I got my first aural glimpse of the company's prowess when I happened upon the Grimm LS1be active speaker system, fed by the Grimm MU1 streamer/reclocker/upsampler (JA sang the latter's praises in 2021). The sound in the Grimm room was blow-me-away gorgeous. I heard exemplary coherence, speed, and musicality (thanks to clean, taut bass down to 20Hz, and precise, expansive treble). Purity reigned. As I wrote in my show report, "based on admittedly just 15 minutes of listening, I'd take Grimm's tweaked-out statement of excellence over almost any system I heard at AXPONA that costs up to six figures."

Alongside some PMC and Genelec offerings, the LS1c is the rare product that straddles the usually separate worlds of pro audio and the home market. The original LS1 was launched in 2010 with the professional user in mind. "In a studio, you need a monitor that is as linear as possible," Eelco Grimm told me. "It also has to be nonfatiguing to listen to for a whole day of work." After a while, audiophiles began taking note of the LS1 (footnote 2). Through audio shows and word of mouth, its reputation grew.

By the time a pair of the Grimm speakers could be dispatched to my home, the LS1be was no longer in production, so I received its identical-looking (and very similar-sounding) successor, the LS1c. The LS1c comes in a choice of cabinet materials: MDF or HIMACS, which is similar to Corian. I received the HIMACS version. The biggest visible change: The beryllium-dome tweeter has been replaced by a newly developed composite-carbon–dome tweeter from the same manufacturer, SEAS. (The Norwegian company ceased production of its beryllium HF drivers, which, though safe once assembled and mounted, were toxic during production.) After measuring and listening to the carbon iteration, the Grimm team didn't mind the swap. SEAS's thin-ply carbon diaphragm (TPCD) tweeters turned out to be almost equal in performance to their beryllium predecessors. Refining the LS1s' DSP erased audible differences further. Eelco Grimm says that the other changes to the LS1 came about because "we learned a lot from the development of the MU1 and MU2 (footnote 3), and we've applied that DSP knowledge to the electronics of the LS1. We essentially rebuilt the firmware and software from the ground up. The speakers also have slightly improved amplifiers now," courtesy of some smart tweaks to audio engineer Bruno Putzeys's Hypex NCORE design.

Boxing clever
The LS1c's were a whole new experience for me in several ways, starting with how they're shipped. I was nonplussed to learn that they're packed in eight boxes. For two shallow, monitor-style loudspeakers, that seemed ... excessive. Initially, DHL brought just five boxes and marked the delivery as complete. Happily, the remaining three showed up the next day.

Why so many boxes? Grimm encases each of the two heavy, stability-providing bottom plates in wood slabs for protection during shipping. (Picture two large cutting boards sawn in half horizontally, the two halves making a sandwich with the metal plate in the middle.) Then there are two cardboard boxes for the integrated SB1 subwoofers; a box for each LS1c tweeter/midrange cabinet; and one box with all four black metal speaker legs (two of which, one for each channel, contain the amps, DACs, crossovers, electronics, and input panels). Those legs are radically rounded; they integrate with both the left and right sides of each LS1c cabinet, minimizing edge diffraction.

The final box houses accessories including two more or less palm-sized hardware interfaces that let you connect extra sources and download firmware updates. The accessories box also contains an attractive-looking, 15'-long CAT5 cable sporting RJ45 connectors sheathed in the housing of an XLR plug. It's used to connect the left and right speakers. The connector is proprietary, and the CAT5 cable is used in a proprietary way: It's not doing its Ethernet thing.

The whole shebang used to ship in one big crate, but that girthy packaging wouldn't always fit through dealers' and customers' doors. Distributing the load across multiple boxes solves that issue and means that most end users can now carry each building block into the listening space without assistance.

It took me 20 minutes to unpack everything and perhaps another hour to put it all together. (Eelco Grimm likes that LS1 customers must perform some assembly. "Research by IKEA shows that people connect stronger to an object if they assembled it themselves. That's what Grimm Audio is about anyway: connecting people to their equipment and to the music.")

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Footnote 1: See youtube.com/watch?v=qqFE0QKF2i0.

Footnote 2: Sister publication Hi-Fi News noticed it right away. See the Hi-Fi News review of the original LS1 here.

Footnote 3: The MU2 has the same functionality as the MU1 but comes with a high-quality built-in DAC along with a basic analog "preamp" controller. See KR's review of the MU2 here.