“If the T200A is aimed at the professional/studio market it sure doesn’t look it. In contrast to the non-descript looking black boxes one often finds in studio environments, the T200A is a rather bold looking speaker. It features a triangular front baffle faced with a silver coloured aluminum plate. Two more triangular sections finished in shiny black piano lacquer slope back from the baffle and then stop about a third of the way into the speaker’s 27 cm depth. The rear section of the speaker consists of a more traditionally shaped box which is ported at rear…”

“The HT 208 is a two-way design featuring an 8″ mid/woofer (which, although the material is not specified, seems to be made of polypropylene) and a 1″ metal dome tweeter. The tweeter is mounted in what Genelec calls a Directivity Control Waveguide�. It’s basically metal plate which sets the tweeter a little deeper into the cabinet, creating a slight horn-loading effect. This not only squeezes more efficiency from the tweeter, the Genelec website notes that “the improved directivity control reduces the reflected sound at the listening position…”

“More than just a headphone jack (the Indigo actually has two 1/8″ gold plated mini jacks) the Echo Audio card is a D to A converter as well as a high quality analog output stage. It supports up to 24 bit, 96 kHz signals, uses a 100 Mhz Motorola DSP chip and has a nice, chunky analog volume control knob right on top. For those looking to use their notebook as a recorder, Echo also makes an Indigo with an analog input as well as a model aimed at DJs, featuring two independent stereo outputs.”

“Every speaker maker is excited to introduce a new flagship model, and PSB’s Paul Barton is certainly no exception, since all he and his engineering staff know about speaker design has gone into this project. The M2 is the bookshelf model in the Platinum series, which now rests above the Stratus line in the PSB pantheon. The new S10 subwoofer is the biggest and most powerful low frequency reproducer that PSB makes…”

“The C5 is a slim tower with outrigger spiked feet to support its slim profile, with a very handsome silver front baffle containing 3 custom designed and integrated drivers and a flared port at bottom. “The silver front baffle is also the woofer’s basket section, and integral part of the speaker enclosure and the speaker system. Comprised of Energy’s proprietary Spherex®, the baffle is computer designed to enhance dispersion and strengthen the cabinet structure…”

“Even with a new sleek box shape, the Signature S4 looks unmistakably Paradigm. I guess it’s the drivers, designed and made in house. The tweeter is, like all the other drivers, a totally new design especially for this top-of-the-line series. It’s a 1″ “G-PAL gold-anodized pure aluminum dome” with “dual super neodymium ring magnets. Ferro-fluid damped/cooled”, its rear wave feeds into a chamber with finned heat sinks, and the die-cast basket is shock-mounted to eliminate any vibration beyond that of the dome itself…”

“A company best known for its pro monitors, PMC (short for Professional Monitor Company) has been more recently seriously addressing the consumer market. The OB1 is the latest model in this evolution, a 3-way floorstanding design using a transmission line for bass loading with an effective length of 3.3 metres (11 feet). The drivers, according to the literature, are a low-frequency driver that is “doped [paper] with cast alloy chassis”, a “doped, 75mm fabric soft dome” midrange, and a “27mm, silk soft dome, ferrofluid cooled” tweeter…”

“I first heard this system, Totem’s first dedicated home theater system, at a CEDIA show a couple of years ago. And it wasn’t just that designer Vince Bruzzese was playing Ray Montford’s music through it that impressed me so much. The sound was clean, dynamic, spacious, and very involving musically. I don’t know whether it was a case of demand, but it wasn’t until this spring that I could coerce a review sample out of Totem…”

“When Anthem sent me their AVM-20 and PVA-7 home theater separates for review awhile back, Paradigm, Anthem’s parent company, followed up by sending a set of home theater speakers to go with them. And what did they send to complement over $6,000 worth of home theater front end? Paradigm’s entry level Cinema series, as it turned out; the five speakers and sub costing a small fraction of the gear driving them…”

“This new model from Canada’s ribbon specialist, combines an 8″ ribbon driver with a pair of 5″ Vifa mid/woofers in a moderately sized sealed box. The ribbon, which could be called a “quasi-ribbon”, is a unipolar mylar diaphragm with voice coil imprinted on it, large magnets on either side, and absorptive material behind. It provides, wide, even dispersion, something I’ll expand on in discussing the measurements, and crosses over to the lower-frequency drivers at 1000 Hz…”

“The Monitor Audio Silver 6S has its work cut out for it. Any slim, floor standing speaker with a price hovering in the sweet spot of the mid-market (around US $1000) does. While not as cluttered as the home theatre in a box segment, this is a very crowded part of the market and a speaker had better do more than look pretty if it expects a ride home from the shop…”

“So much for entry level. With a combined price approaching seven grand, not to mention 7.1 surround channels on tap, “small” was no longer part of the equation. Now I needed speakers. Lots of speakers, as it turned out. Ever since hearing that Edge Audio was one of the first adopters of the Diaural crossover developed by Kimber Kable I’d wanted to review their speakers. A trip to their website revealed two things: First, that they had changed their name to Aperion Audio, and second that they had packaged systems ranging up to 7.1 channels: Just what the doctor ordered…”

“Amphion is a speaker line from Finland that has now entered the Canadian market, with some stylish models that claim to be “phase linear throughout the whole hearing range”, with “perfectly aligned voice coils”. They also are designed for “controlled directivity for minimizing room reflections. The Athene is a D’Appolito-configured 2-way system in a tall slim cabinet using a 4″ polypropylene woofer/midrange driver pair and a titanium tweeter, which is contained within a circular lens in the front baffle which helps even and control dispersion…”

“North Carolina based Soliloquy, which has been gaining attention for impressive sound and luxurious build quality over the past several years, has recently capped off the top of their range with a new speaker. A heavyweight in the literal sense, clocking in at 130 lbs per channel, the new 6.5 is Soliloquy’s attempt at taking their high value approach significantly up-market, creating a speaker they hope will duke it out successfully with established contenders costing far more. Glancing across the spec sheet quickly reveals that the folks at Soliloquy, most notably designer Phil Jones (formerly of Acoustic Energy, Boston Acoustics and Platinum Audio), are taking their assault on high-end speakerdom most seriously indeed…”

“Klipsch has a new baby in the RB-3, their newest and smallest model in the Reference range. It’s a two-way, with their “Titanium dome compression driver tweeter with a 5″ (12.7cm) square 90 x 60 degree Tractrix Horn and one 6.5″ (16.5cm) magnetically shielded, aluminum cone woofer” (this comes from their excellent, if slow loading, website, with its socko animated GIF graphics). The woofer has a “Cerametallic” cone and cast polymer frame…”

“There are a lot of excellent speakers in the price area below $1500, but few that qualify as high end reproducers. But here I think we’ve definitely got a contender. The Reference 1 is a small tower speaker finished in a nice blonde veneer, using a SEAS silk dome tweeter, the pair mirror offset arrayed on the baffle, and a surprising 4 1/2″ Peerless woofer midrange…”

“There’s a lot more to this compact speaker than meets the eye, especially if you look at it only from the front. The AML1 is not only a powered loudspeaker, it is bi-amped, with a sophisticated electronic crossover built in. In fact, it’s a truly hybrid Bryston/PMC product, with the all the circuitry of a 3B ST driving the woofer/midrange (140 watts rms), a 2B ST driving the tweeter (70 watts rms), and a modified 10B providing the driver integration after the balanced XLR input (pin 2 hot)…”

“Since coming under new ownership and management in recent years, Monitor Audio has embarked upon an extensive program of research that has resulted in redesign of all of their speaker models. The newest in the Silver series is the 8i, which pretty much sums up their design brief, which was outlined in a recent white paper: “to combine knockout dynamics, loudness capability and power handling with superb subtlety and finesse…”

“Having updated its Reference series of speakers, Paradigm has now turned to the Monitor series, and the Monitor 7 v2 is perhaps the most popular result. It’s a floorstanding slim tower featuring a pair of 6 1/2″ poly-coned woofers with an improved aluminum alloy dome tweeter. The grey baffle remains, but finish around it in our review pair was an attractive cherry laminate that is very veneer-like, and much nicer than most vinyls in its softer sheen…”

“The latest CDM iteration adds tweeters from the Nautilus series, and the 9NT is a completely new top of the range, using 2 paper/Kevlar bass drivers, a woven Kevlar FST (Fixed Surround Technology) midrange, and the aforementioned NT alloy dome tweeter. The cabinet is front ported, and a plug for the port of cylindrical foam is supplied. In the manual this plug is described as a “bung”, so I guess we’d have to describe the port as a ‘bunghole’….”