The Absolute Sound Ultimate Directory to High-Performance Loudspeakers

In this special Directory to Loudspeakers and Cables you’ll find lots of speakers—dynamics, electrostatic models, ribbons, planar-magnetic designs, horns, Air-Motion Transformer tweeters, bending-wave drivers, hybrid dynamic/electrostatics, hybrid dynamic/ribbons, concentric drivers, and diaphragms made from paper, ceramic, carbon-fiber, beryllium, and graphene, to name a few. And that’s just the driver technologies. Throw in woofer loading—sealed, ported, transmission-line, isobaric—along with box and boxless models and single-driver, two-way, three-way, four-way, point-source, bipolar, dipolar, and omnidirectional speakers—the variations go on and on. Despite their vast differences, all these technologies are viable in today’s marketplace. But which approach is right? And why should a component as mature as the loudspeaker be realized with so many wildly disparate materials and methodologies? With virtually all consumer products, a consensus emerges over time as to the best way to make that product.…

Rockport Orion The all-new Orion strikes an impeccable balance of elegance and raw performance. The enclosure is composed of just three components; the inner cast-aluminum housing, the outer carbon-fiber main housing, and the outer carbon-fiber baffle shell. The fabrication process completely eliminates the design constraints imposed by conventional construction methods, and owing to this design freedom, the Orion’s form has been fully optimized for ideal drive unit placement, reduction of internal standing waves, and minimum edge diffraction, ensuring an unhindered, coherent wave launch. Featured are three newly developed drive units; the custom, carbon-fiber-sandwich-cone 13” woofer, capable of delivering authoritative first-octave response with staggering headroom and grip, an all-new 7” carbon-fiber-sandwich composite midrange with densely saturated tonal colors and unmatched transparency, and a 1.25” waveguide-mounted beryllium tweeter with virtually perfect pistonic behavior,…

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, MY GOOD FRIEND RANDY told me that he was about to start designing his dream house and asked if I would help with the dedicated listening room’s acoustic design, as well as suggest some new equipment. Randy is a serious music lover and vinyl enthusiast, but he didn’t have a good place in his current home for music listening. As I had just finished researching listening-room building techniques for my own home (my third dedicated room), I was happy to share with Randy what I had learned. More than five years after that conversation, I finally had the chance to visit Randy’s listening room and hear the results of our efforts. Between a protracted and complicated build, construction delays, and the pandemic, it was a long gestation period.…

Excerpted and adapted from The Complete Guide to High-End Audio, Sixth Edition. © 1994–2022 by Robert Harley. Reprinted with permission. CORRECTLY POSITIONING YOUR LOUDSPEAKers is the single most important thing you can do to improve your system’s sound. It’s free and can make the difference between mediocre and spectacular sound with the same electronics and loudspeakers. Before spending money on upgrading components or acoustic treatments, be sure you’ve realized your system’s potential with correct loudspeaker placement. To hear the full magic of a high-quality audio system, you’ll need to arrange your listening room in a way that allows the system to perform at its best. All the effort you’ve put into choosing a system (along with the money you spent on it) can be wasted without a correct fundamental setup. Positioning the…

Excerpted and adapted from The Complete Guide to High-End Audio, sixth edition. © 1994–2022 by Robert Harley. Reprinted with permission. hifibooks.com. To order call (800) 841-4741. OVER THE PAST TEN YEARS OR SO, THE AUDIO world has learned much about the role AC power plays in the quality of an audio system’s sound. The industry offered AC power conditioners before that time, of course, but many of those early products—and, indeed, many of today’s models—took a hit-or-miss approach. Their designers attempted to address the problems of AC power without fully understanding the phenomena involved and, consequently, often created products that did as much harm as good. For example, many AC conditioners compress music’s dynamic range. But some of today’s power conditioners and cords are far more sophisticated and effective than those…

As Robert Harley just explained in his essay on power cords and power conditioners (see p. 33), because all the components are powered by the same AC line, noise from one component easily travels to all the other components via that line. Good AC power-cord and power-conditioner design minimizes this noise-coupling between components and ensures maximum instantaneous current delivery. Indeed, replacing all the stock AC cords and using a first-rate power conditioner are, in RH’s opinion, probably the single-most cost-effective sonic upgrades you can make to your system. To get an inside view of this rapidly growing product category, we have asked representatives of four of the leading power cord/conditioner manufacturers—John McDonald (Audience), Caelin Gabriel (Shunyata Research), Garth Powell (AudioQuest), and Keith Martin (IsoTek)—to share their insights.…