Putting Curtains in the Man-Cave

Vivid Audio Giya ... Horton hears a Who ... or just some fantastic sounding speakers? We both are suckers for unusual design, and organic shapes.  As we continue our tortuous path towards new speakers, this desire keeps cropping up again and again.  We find in recent years, while manufacturing improvements have allowed more curving shapes, most speaker designs are still quite conservative, sometimes even a bit phallic - and it does not have to be so!  In fact, we think audio manufacturers have become less adventurous as volumes sank and prices rose - making solid looking speakers, but perhaps a shade or two more boring looking than they would have to be... but of course, not all of them! Shahinian Acoustics founded in the 1970s' - still made today, but a different more adventurous approach to sound dispersion than a regular box - using the walls and ceiling to recreate the feel of a concert hall - the midrange and tweeters are all angled towards the ceiling!...

Duevel speakers are not the first, and certainly won't be the last omnidirectional speakers ever designed.  But they just may be the prettiest.  You can read about them here. The are currently distributed by a Canadian company, Duevel having dropped their US distributor and consolidated in Canada under the umbrella of the very interesting and self described "Zendo" as company Mutine . Look!  That's how they do it! Omnidirectional speakers tend to be radially symmetrical - which isn't surprising.  And the first popular success was the Ohm Walsh F.  Bose (yes that Bose) spent a lot of the 1960's trying to figure out how to do one - and eventually settled on the Bose 901's as a poly-directional speaker - 9 drivers firing to the rear, and 1 towards the listener.  I have to say, as an owner of a pair, you will not find a bigger illusion of a soundstage (but diffuse) and a convincing illusion of being at a rock concert when playing live music loudly any...

Psst ... I have a problem .  I suffer from a condition called audiophilia nervosa which has me checking out various and assorted gear, and dreaming.  As an engineer, though, it just can't be "pretty" it has to be technologically interesting in some way to catch my eye.  It also has to be unusual in some way.  My budget rarely allows me to indulge in them, but I end up annoying people around me playing "what if"  Kathy tells me this is 100% accurate - because she regularly gets annoyed by this.  And she is refusing to a comment directly since it just might feed this a bit too much. So, here goes with one that has piqued my interest: The Quad ESL The Quad ESL was the first electrostatic speaker commercially produced (the technology was a lab curiosity since about 1930).  Read about the general principles here , and about the ESL itself here . Released in 1957, it was a mono speaker made for the mono era.  It was difficult to drive ...