Coaxially Cool

The most common type of speaker design has a tweeter towards the top of the speaker and a woofer below it. Some speakers mix it up with a woofer above too, or maybe a mid-range in there somewhere.

The XQ40 from KEF, like most of their speakers, does something a little different. The tweeter is inside the woofer.

RocknRolla

Sonus faber may be a small Italian speaker company, but you can literally see its influence in the curvy look of various B&W, KEF, Magico, Tannoy, Wharfedale and countless other speakers.

Thanks to Sonus faber, the box is out and round is in.

Clearly Different

If that pun made you roll your eyes, they only get worse from here.

There are cool speaker designs, and then there are cool speaker designs. Most of the designs we audiophiles drool over include words like "ribbon," "ultra-tweeter" or maybe "plasmawoofer." Drivers and crossovers with specs to make a techy salivate wrapped in a swoopy MDF and veneered cabinet.

Or maybe not so swoopy.

Worth the Effort

Being a serious beer connoisseur is a lot of work. Different styles of ales, for example, like to be cellared at different temperatures and all would rather be cellared upright, making the usual storage solutions available for wines unsuitable for us beer geeks. Then there’s all the shelf space required for glassware—because who would ever think to drink a Christmas Ale from a Weizen glass or an American lager from anything other than a plastic Dixie cup?

Rock Outside...without rocks

It seems like your only choices for outside speakers are bland white boxes, rocks, and tree stumps. Now I'm not dendrophobic, but even the best of these don't really look like tree stumps.

With the Sat30 and Sub10, Polk has made some speakers designed to blend a little more naturally, if less "organically."

To Power or Not to Power

Active, otherwise known as powered, speakers are a tiny sub-set of the speaker market. They offer pros and cons compared to traditional "passive" speakers.

Audioengine offers a look at two different sides of the active/passive argument. With the A5 and P4, the company claims to have voiced them similarly, which makes things very interesting.

When Digital Met Analog

Ditch the transistors and go tubing with old-fashioned, oh-so-analog vacuum tube audio gear from Peachtree Audio and Fatman.

Bass, Perfected

It has to be stressful for hardware manufacturers to send their products out for review. They don’t know the environment in which their gear will be evaluated.

They have no way of knowing if the reviewer will grok the product. It has to feel a bit like sending your kid off to school for the first time.

Twin Peaks

The beauty of owning a pair of floor-standing speakers that clock in at just under five-feet tall can be conveyed with just one word: POWERFUL.

However, just because a pair of speakers inspires awe when someone first glances upon them, it does not mean that the speakers can deliver that same feeling of raw power during an audio demonstration.

Skip the new sedan—the new Wisdom Audio Sage L75 Floorstanding Speakers are a better way to spend $31,000.

Setting the Stage

The L75 speaker system is part of Wisdom Audio's Sage Series, which has 20 in-wall, on-wall and floorstanding speakers. They are all hybrid speakers, so they incorporate newly designed, proprietary, thin-film planar magnetic drivers for mid and high frequencies and conventional drivers for bass.