How high should our expectations be for a $279 speaker? Most of us would say, “Not very.” However, when it’s a ground-up redesign of the venerable PSB Alpha, one of the high-end’s featherweight darlings, expectations ...

The Ascendo M-S MKII loudspeaker from German y is one of the most unlikely sucess stories in high -end audio. When I first heard the M-S at last year’s CES I was impressed enough to ...

A friend recently complained that I get so excited about every new component to come along that it’s almost as if I’ve never heard a decent stereo before. My first thought was to suggest that ...

I’ve recently found a number of moderately priced loudspeakers that qualify as bargains—ones that allow you to grow a system around them, upgrading other components before you reach the speakers’ limits. The reference in my ...

In the months following my review of the Triangle Esprit Altea Es (Issue 156), Triangle Electroacoustique announced some key revisions to its popular mid-line offering. Given that the Altea was already very good, I seized ...

“Wow, those things realy sound rich. What are they?”—my wife Daniele upon hearing Stirling Broadcast’s revival of the clasic BBC LS3/5a minimonitor. Danielle’s no audiophile, but she knows what she likes. As her reaction to ...

Paradigm enjoys a solid reputation for building modestly priced loudspeakers that deliver strong performance for the money, but that fact raises an important question. What would happen if a traditionally value-oriented, price-conscious firm such as ...

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, the MartinLogan Curvilinear Line Source (CLS) full-range electrostatic was my reference loudspeaker, and although I’ve since gone on to other things, the CLS remains one of the purest ...

I first heard Alon Wolf ’s ground-breaking two-way standmounted loudspeaker, the Magico Mini, at the January 2006 CES, where it made a sensational impression on Robert Harley, Wayne Garica, Harry Pearson, and me. I rave-reviewed ...

Magico founder Alon Wolf made an off-hand comment to me that cut to the core of how he approaches loudspeaker design. We were setting up the V3 in my listening room when he remarked that ...

Epos M16 It’s hard to not be excited by the Epos M16. For fifteen-hundredninety- five bucks you get an English-designed, Chinese-built speaker possessing truly special performance qualities. The M16 can whisper yet still be clearly ...

Most reports of a great-sounding demonstration at CES or CEDIA are followed by the qualifier “… for a show,” as in: “The XYZ sounded fabulous… for a show.” That’s because it’s rare to hear truly ...

The Gem2 is Revel’s Ultima2 “flex” speaker. Whereas most loudspeakers are designed for a single use, the compact Revel Gem2 can play many roles. Like Transformers for audiophiles, just tell it what you want it ...

You may have noticed that I’ve been reviewing a lot of two-way loudspeakers lately—the stand-mounted Focal JMlab Electra 1007Be (Issue 176), the floorstanding planar-magnetic Magnepan MG12 and MMG (Issue 177), and, now, the stand-mounted GamuT ...

The NHT Xd’s are “digital” speakers; they do crossover functions using digital signal processing (DSP). The Xd’s are far from being the first speakers that are digital in this sense—models from Philips, Quadrature, and, on ...