I think I just found the perfect Herb speaker. It uses a hand-crafted 5" wide-range driver with a cone made from Japanese calligraphy paper. It rolls off around 50Hz at the bottom and 30kHz at the top. It has no crossover. Its cabinet is made of MDF that responds loudly when I tap it with my fingernails. Inside is what its designer calls a "short horn," which appears to harmlessly disperse back-cone energy while adding energy below the driver's cutoff frequency. Mainly, though, it's a perfect Herb speaker because it is naturally phase coherent. And sparkplug fast. And completely unmuffled.

This speaker I'm describing is Voxativ's new Hagen2 Monitor. To say it is a "Herb speaker" is to distinguish it from a John, Jason, or Kal speaker, or even a Ken or Alex speaker. If you want to know what kind of sound an audio reviewer values, notice which speakers they embrace, how well they understand them, and how long they stick with them.

Let's get this out of the way: The BMR Monitor may be a monitor, but it isn't a bookshelf or desktop speaker any more than a yacht is a dinghy. Heave a slick-surfaced, 32lb BMR from its shipping carton, then wrap your arms around its svelte figure, with its fancy array of drivers and rich-colored piano-lacquer finish, and you'll understand this speaker deserves better than to be tucked away amid books or flanking a computer screen.

I was so enamored by the look of the BMR Monitor, I initially thought its name didn't do it justice. It sounded too nondescript. But with time and growing familiarity, I came to find the BMR moniker fitting—dare I say sleekly masculine sounding, like a phonetic cross between "Bimmer" and a wolf growl. The BMR Monitor—there's also a BMR Tower—is so named for its midrange driver—a Balanced Mode Radiator. We don't come across many of these in our hobby, but it's not new: The technology was invented in 1925.