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, 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.

Paul Hales does things differently. "I set out to build a true reference speaker," he asserted when I asked him about the, er, concept behind his Concept Five loudspeaker. For a mere six grand? The other guys don't even blink at $20k, $30k, even $70k statement speakers.

What's in a name? One of my favorite Rodrigues cartoons (footnote 1) shows a meeting of a loudspeaker manufacturer's marketing people, trying to come up with a name for the company's latest product:

No matter how well you think you know the specialized world of high-end audio, there are always new companies, new technologies, and new products you just haven't gotten around to knowing yet.

Dr. Alan Hill, president of Plasmatronics Inc., was previously employed by the US Government in laser research. His assignment: To increase the efficiency of lasers so that they could do something more impressive than produce holograms, mend leaky retinal blood vessels, and punch pinholes in steel blocks. Dr. Hill earned his keep, thus advancing laser technology a giant step closer to Star Wars, and then retired from government service to design. . . a loudspeaker?!!!?

"My vision for the future is one where all manufacturers sell their products directly to the end user. In this way, even the audiophiles in Dead Horse, Alaska can have access to all the audio manufacturing community has to offer." Thus wrote loudspeaker designer David Fokos in a letter introducing his new company Icon Acoustics to the press at Stereophile's High End Hi-Fi show in San Mateo, CA last April (footnote 1). Mr. Fokos, a Cornell graduate who for some years worked for Conrad-Johnson Design and designed that company's well-regarded Synthesis and Sonographe loudspeaker models, feels very strongly that the traditional retailing setup is inefficient when it comes to exposing audiophiles to a wide enough choice of product, particularly when it comes to loudspeakers. With 300 speaker manufacturers listed in the Audio directory issue but even a major retailer restricted to probably six brands, even big-city audiophiles will only be able to audition a fraction of the total number of brands. "Our industry is suffering from product saturation of its retail distribution network."