Review: Mark Craven

Leveraging its 30 years of innovative speaker design, the Orion features Rockport’s ‘next generation’ cabinet

Named after the Maine town where it started in 1984, although now based down the coast in South Thomaston, Rockport Technologies has been known by audiophiles since the 1990s as a manufacturer of high-end – and heavyweight – loudspeakers. The Orion floorstander tested here is no exception, weighing 163kg per piece and selling for £165,000. Suffice to say, it’s a far cry from the early sub/sat systems of chief designer Andy Payor...

Inspired by its long-running Studio series, born in the 1980s, this modern-day D’Appolito standmount also illustrates Monitor Audio’s long-term use of metal-coned drivers

As anyone who tried to buy tickets for Oasis’s 2025 reunion tour will have discovered, nostalgia is big business. The hi-fi industry knows it too, and in recent years has been scouring the 1970s for speaker and amplifier designs to either leverage into new models or directly resurrect. Monitor Audio, however, has now jumped a decade ahead, launching a new speaker ‘inspired by the 1980s’. Seeing as Hollywood has been tapping into that decade with revisits to the Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun and Ghostbusters franchises, the British manufacturer might be onto something.

With uprated tweeter, internal wiring, crossover and terminals, the Diamond edition Parker Trio is a jewel in Marten’s crown

Marten Parker Trio is not, of course, the name of a new jazz act. Marten is the Swedish loudspeaker manufacturer, established as a family business by Leif Mårten Olofsson in 1998, and Parker Trio one of its floorstanding options. Yet the jazz angle still applies, as the company's other speaker ranges are Coltrane, Mingus, and Oscar. Perhaps Olofsson, who heads up the company as its chief designer, has Monk or Davis in mind for the future...

Relaunched in mk2 guise, ELAC’s most compact two-way gets a boost from the latest generation of its iconic ‘JET’ tweeter. We fuel up the afterburners and listen at Mach 2

In the last few years audiophiles have witnessed a spate of companies celebrating 50th anniversaries, a reminder that the early 1970s were a hotbed of hi-fi development. ELAC, however, can claim a much longer heritage, having been founded in Kiel in Germany in 1926, originally as a specialist in sonar technology before expanding to consumer audio. No doubt it is working on a 100th anniversary product launch – having previously marked 90 years with the Miracord 90 turntable [HFN Jul ’17] – but in the meantime it has delivered an update to its Vela series of loudspeakers.