Loudspeakers

It’s funny how certain things make a big splash when they first come out, but then fade into obscurity once they’ve been phased out. The Gale GS401 speaker is an example of this, having earned the CES Design and Engineering Excellence Award in 1978, only to fade into obscurity a decade later. The 401 was […]

The AE1 is one of the most legendary hi-fi loudspeakers of the 1980s, with the Celestion SL6 and the Wharfedale Diamond, in the pantheon of boxes that changed the game. Aside from the BBC LS3/5a and the Spendor SA1, tiny speakers in the 1970s were few. Indeed, the breed had not been treated seriously at

ATC is the loudspeaker firm with the most passion and soul in the professional audio market. Billy Woodman founded the company in 1974 to make drive units for broadcast and recording studios. Its first design was a strong twelve-inch woofer, which clearly indicated where his focus lay. By the mid-1980s, the firm was selling to

Loudspeaker design isn’t the dark art that some consider it to be. Speakers aren’t immune to physics’ laws; in fact, it’s the principles of physics that decide the sound of any particular product. Simply put, there are the cabinets to get right, the drive units to get right, and the interplay between the two to

There have been a plethora of compact hi-fi loudspeakers on the market since the original Goodmans Maxim of the 1960s, but very few miniature ones. How many professional hi-fi firms do you know that have created significant speakers that fit in the palm of your hand? Of course, if there was ever a country that

Why can’t man develop an accurate loudspeaker if he can put cars on Mars and perfect open heart surgery? Modern speakers are severely hampered even under the best of circumstances, and the chance of getting one to perform correctly from 20Hz to 20kHz is still a long way off. Given that moving coil drivers are

The world of loudspeakers in the 1980s was strange, but rarely great. With its clangy, first-generation metal dome tweeter, Celestion’s SL6 was considered cutting-edge. Linn’s bizarre Isobarik, with its slew of forward-facing and upward-firing motors, was cited as a model. Many people dismissed Quad’s ESL-63 electrostatic, which had been twenty years in the making. What

In a world of hard, harsh, and spitty budget boxes, the Mission 752 was one of the loveliest and most fascinating economical floorstanding loudspeakers of the nineties, with a beautifully smooth, open, and easy sound. One of the reasons for this was its (at the time) cutting-edge HDA (High Definition Aerogel) mid/bass driver, which provided

Mission loudspeakers are well-known. For a long period in the 1990s, the brand was ubiquitous, omnipresent, and nearly synonymous with speakers in the same way that Wharfedale was in the 1970s. Some people are also familiar with Mission amplifiers, as its Cyrus line of electronics (which is now an entirely independent company) was a huge

In some ways, the decade of the 1980s was a difficult one for loudspeaker design. Despite the appearance of a handful of ‘milestone’ products, such as Celestion’s SL6 and Acoustic Energy’s AE-1, it’s difficult to say that these were entirely successful designs in and of themselves. Rather than being remembered for what they did, they