John Atkinson nudged my ribs with an elbow. "Did you bring your Cornelius CD with you?" he whispered.

It was the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, and JA and I were nearing the end of a dog-and-pony act expertly presented by Atlantic Technology's president, Peter Tribeman, touting a prototype of his company's new loudspeaker, the AT-1. JA and I had just heard about the finer points of the AT-1's new bass-venting technology, the Hybrid-Pressure Acceleration System (H-PAS), which was supposed to combine all the benefits and qualities of a transmission-line enclosure, horn loading, and sealed and ported designs. At the time, I didn't care if it combined all of the qualities of Kim Kardashian, Sacagawea, Joan of Arc, and Marie Curie—I was just thrilled that the AT-1s were sounding so good in a partitioned ballroom.

KEF and I go way back. As a very young man in the 1960s, I was obsessed with building speakers, and that was just about the time that KEF founder Raymond Cooke was revolutionizing driver design by using new synthetic materials for cones and surrounds, and experimenting with such innovations as transmission-line–loaded midrange drivers. I found it all very heady and, by direct import from the UK, obtained versions of the oval, flat-diaphragm B139 woofer, the Bextrene-coned B110 and B200 woofers, and the T-15 and T-22 dome tweeters. Fifty years ago, this was all cutting-edge speaker technology.