Loudspeakers

Omnidirectional and horn-loaded to boost sensitivity, are these really the 'beautiful moon' of floorstanders?

When it comes to makers of true omnidirectional speakers, it seems that those with the highest profile currently hail from Germany. MBL's Radialstrahlers and the German Physiks models occupy the upper echelons of the market, while at the more affordable end it's the Duevel name that springs to mind most readily. Based in Osnabruck, the latter company is the brainchild of Markus and Annette Duevel, who founded the business in 1988.

High-end performance meets ease of use? This new active sibling of the Confidence 20 standmount leverages DSP and amplification from Dynaudio’s pro studio loudspeakers

Dynaudio’s collection of passive loudspeakers is substantial. You begin with the Emit series and move through its Evoke line, various Contour models [HFN May ’25], and the Heritage and Special Forty one-offs, before you get to the flagship Confidence range [HFN Jan ’25]. On the other hand, active options are more limited, with – until recently – just the three-strong Focus series appealing to cable-cutters. Now, though, the Danish brand has added the Confidence 20A, priced £17,000.

Forty years young, Dynaudio’s Contour series is raised to a new level in this ‘Black Edition’ standmount, featuring improvements to every component. Welcome to the dark side!

True to form, Dynaudio showed a slew of products at last year’s High End Show in Munich [HFN Jul ’24] – including a new loudspeaker styled by Tokyo’s Keiji Ashizawa Design studio, plus a turntable built by Thorens. Also shown was this Contour 20 Black Edition standmount, now finally in production. This is a range of one – an elegant two-way with no floorstanding partner – but it serves a useful purpose, offering Dynaudio fans an option to bridge the £4500 Contour 20i and the premium £9600 Confidence 20. Okay, at nearly £6000 a pair, it’s not exactly midway in price, but does represent a tempting step up.

The updates to this long running range have proved particularly effective Dynaudio’s Focus range was getting a bit long in the tooth so we weren’t surprised to learn when we requested the 140 for this test that it had just been replaced with this new model, the 160. Little has changed externally – if you’re the type who can distinguish Aston Martins at a glance then you’ll note a new light grey paint finish on the drivers and the use of Torx fasteners, only three of which now attach the tweeter – but internally there’s more that’s been breathed on. As before, the cabinet side walls taper a little towards the rear from the narrow bevels at the front baffle edges – a feature which helps tame internal standing waves – but the enclosure has been significantly stiffened. The 170mm bass-mid driver retains its magnesium silicate polymer (MSP) cone, and the voice coil is still aluminium to reduce moving mass.

With a coincident driver array and interport-coupled cavity bass, meet the company’s most radical floorstander in years

Out with the old and in with the new. ELAC is a German loudspeaker company of quite some repute and a great many years’ standing. Yet major changes have been afoot at the company, with its new VP of Engineering, Andrew Jones, indelibly stamping himself on the brand’s products. A former KEF man – there in what were arguably the company’s harvest years with Laurie Fincham, in the late 1980s – he went on to put Pioneer’s luxury brand TAD on the map with some great soundinghigh-end loudspeakers [HFN Jan ’15].

In time for its 99th anniversary, ELAC launches a new flagship speaker with room-friendly, ‘steerable’ sound

Only when I recently started driving a German-made car – a Mini built in Leipzig, actually – did I grasp the concept of that country’s approach to over-engineering: the thing has four ways of opening the boot, two of them remotely, for heaven’s sake, and three of putting it into its raciest engine/transmission/noise mode.

An aesthetically attractive and somically capable loudspeaker Surely the most impressive-looking speaker of this group, the Elac FS 189 is a five-driver three-and-a-half-way sporting three 175mm bass drivers, a 140mm midrange unit and Elac’s vaunted JET tweeter, whose pleated diaphragm identifies it as a development of Oskar Heil’s famous Air Motion Transformer. The lower two bass drivers are rolled off at 180Hz, leaving the upper bass unit to crossover to the midrange driver at 500Hz and it to the tweeter at 2. 8kHz. Like the FS 247 Sapphire [HFN July ’11], reflex bass loading is accomplished via two ports, one located near the top of the back panel and the other in the cabinet base, where it vents to the outside via the gap between the cabinet and integral plinth.