Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

I had intended that my recent exploration of what was available in the world of high-performance minimonitors—the Era">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/107era">Era Acoustics Design 4 ($600/pair) in January, the Stirling">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/361/index12.html">Stirling LS3/5a V2 ($1695/pair) and Harbeth">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/1293harbeth/index5.html">H… HL-P3ES2 ($1850/pair) in April, the PSB">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/507psb">PSB Alpha B1 ($279/pair) in May—was to end in July, with my review of the American">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/707aad">American Acoustic Development Reference Silver-1 ($1550/pair). But there was one more real-world–priced, stand-mounted model that piqued my interest before I return to cost-no-object floorstanders in the substantial form of Sonus Faber's new Cremona Elipsa ($20,000/pair): the Gold Signature GS10 from Monitor Audio ($1495/pair).

When folks visit from out of town, they frequently remark that my Brooklyn neighborhood reminds them of "a real neighborhood" from their neck of the woods. "Except that we know all our neighbors and talk to them when we're cutting the grass, watering the lawn, and walking the dog. You probably don't even know the names of any of yours."

Audiophile eyes usually roll when a manufacturer describes a loudspeaker as a "genuine musical instrument." Musical instruments have specific characteristics of pitch and timbre. Ideally, a loudspeaker should be a portal to the music; the speaker itself should be neutral in pitch and timbre—in other words, the opposite of a musical instrument. That the sound produced should be "musical" is a different argument.

Bookshelf loudspeaker. The phrase may be common usage, but I really dislike describing small speakers as "bookshelf" models. Place a pair of high-performance minis on a bookshelf against the wall and you destroy much of the sound quality for which you've paid. Yet place the same speakers on good stands well away from room boundaries, and while it could be argued that their footprint is no smaller than a conventional tower speaker, with the best designs you'll get true high-end sound, particularly regarding the accuracy of midrange reproduction and the stability of stereo imaging.

When audiophiles speak of the "Golden Age" of audio components, they almost always are talking about amplifiers and preamplifiers, not loudspeakers. While a very few speaker models have stood the test of time—among them the BBC">http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/361">BBC LS3/5a, the Vandersteen">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/914">Vandersteen 2, the original">http://www.stereophile.com/artdudleylistening/706listening">original Quad electrostatic and the Quad">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/416">Quad ESL-63, some of the Magnepans, and the Klipschorn—almost no one would disagree that, taken en masse, the speakers of today outperform not just those of the 1960s and 1970s but even those of the 1980s and 1990s. The advent of low-cost, computerized test equipment, high-quality, inexpensive measuring microphones, and persuasive research into what measured parameters matter most to listeners who are listening for a neutral-sounding, uncolored loudspeaker (footnote 1), has led to an almost across-the-board improvement in speaker sound quality (footnote 2).

All right, it's time for a pop quiz in Loudspeaker Design 101. Answer the following, and justify your answer.

The first time I attended the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, in January 1986, I didn't get there until the second day of the Show. Still, by the beginning of the fourth and final day I'd managed to visit every high-end audio exhibit, and still had time to go back for seconds to the rooms that had sounded the best. Twenty years later, CES has grown so much that it's impossible for a single writer to visit even a quarter of the exhibits in which he might be interested. And even with the sort of team">http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2007/">team reporting Stereophile now practices, covering the Show has become an exercise in applied logistics for the busy journalist: "Should I wait for the free shuttle bus? Should I get a taxi—though I might get caught in Las Vegas's increasing traffic jams, or even just get stuck at the city's interminable traffic lights? Or should I take the new monorail—though that goes nowhere near the hotel in which [insert name of hot company] is demming its products?"