The Watkins Stereo Gen Four are very good speakers, unknown by many.
most advanced speaker in a rectangular wooden box?
As you move up the scale of ingenuity and price, speakers take on different, sometimes fantastic, shapes and are made out of different, sometimes exotic, materials. So what would you nominate as the most advanced design that still houses its drivers in an essentially rectangular box made of some kind of wood product?
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If one is looking for what are *genuinely* the most technologically advanced speakers, ones without the flashy gewgaws and questionable designs often found in consumer speakers, I suggest one search among professional studio monitors. They are generally no nonsense products designed by professionals for professionals, and the technology is in the research, design, materials and electronics of the monitors. The more expensive monitors, especially, are bullet-proof, resolutely clean, coherent, transparent, almost ruler flat across their frequency range and offer pinpoint imaging. They usually aren’t fancy to look at, but are made to be absolutely true to the program material being played. Sonically, they will almost always disappear, and one will find one’s self "listening down the wire" to the source rather than the speaker. Many of the studio monitor brands do not sell to, support, or waste money advertising to, the consumer market. Thus, brands such as Amphion or Quested are unknown to most consumers. The big exception is Focal which has a very respected line of pro monitors, although again, one won’t see their pro series monitors advertised or reviewed in the likes of Stereophile. Nor is one going to be able to wile away the hours in some plush salon auditioning any number of them. Pro monitors are mostly sold by dealer and colleague recommendations, auditions within one’s own studio or the studios of others, and reviews in pro magazines or on websites like Gearslutz. Thus, less of their price is spent on promotion and markups and more goes into the making of a genuinely excellent speaker. In short, one gets significantly more bang for the buck. My personal experience and recommendation would be monitors by PSI Audio, which are designed and built in Switzerland. (PSI is an offshoot of Revox. Does THAT ring a bell? The Revox quality shines through.) They are expensive, but they are all "active" speakers so one needn’t be concerned with or pay for amplification. And PSI monitors are as technologically advanced as any fully analog speaker made. No DSP trickery. They should work VERY well in an average sized room, even the small ones, and I would presume that they would offer an excellent WAF as well, especially the A-215M. See: http://www.zenproaudio.com/brands/PSI-Audio.html |
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