Bryston Middle T Speakers, $8600 Per Pair
(39.5h, 10.5w, 18.4d, 82 lbs, 88 dB SPL, 4 ohms)
Walnut, Walnut Expresso, Black Ash or Boston Cherry
The Middles
Bryston created quite a splash in the industry when it brought out its Model T over a decade ago. Model T is a great, large, powerful speaker. It’s a big boy to have in your living room. About ten minutes after it walked in the door, customers were asking if we had something close to as good that didn’t take up so much space.
As Bryston fans know, right behind Model T came Middle T. The Middles are just under 40” tall and much more domestic than their bigger brothers. While the Middles don’t have quite the impact, they’ve been impressing our customers with immense octane from the outset!
If we have Model T and Middle T standing next to each other, and play the Middles, you would swear, due to the prodigious size and power of the sound, that you’re listening to the bigger tower. And that… is precisely the point of the Middles.
Smooth Tonal Balance & Muscle
From day one Bryston has produced among the smoothest sounding speakers in our business. I call it Steinway Smooth. It is definitely less bright and biting, than innumerable competitors who are trying to impress you on the sales floor with a splashy sound. The same way that a Steinway sounds more mellow and harmonious than almost any other piano, Bryston achieves the same tonal balance in the loudspeaker world.
Achieving a transparent and accurate timbrel balance is a great start. It’s tough to do. But to do it with such weight and impact, in a modestly sized enclosure is what separates the Middles from the other guys. Oh, and nobody else has Bryston’s reliability and a 20 year warranty to boot.
Driver Array
Each Middle runs two 8” cast frame, pure contiguous aluminum woofers. Each woofer weighs 15 pounds. When you consider what is used in the priciest towers in our biz, the most common woofer weighs 8 pounds from a Scandinavian vendor. Each Middle has a 5 1/4” cast frame, pure contiguous aluminum midrange driver. Each Middle has a 1” Titanium dome tweeter. These drivers and the entire speaker are made in Bryston’s own house in Canada with intense QC on every driver.
Let’s contrast the Middles with a formidable competitor, B&W’s 702 S3. They’re $7k per pair and made in China with a 5 year warranty. They use three 6.5” woofers made of Styrofoam sandwiched by paper sheets. They use a woven fabric midrange and an aluminum tweeter with carbon particles sprinkled on.
Bryston prefers CONTIGUOUS aluminum drivers, as opposed to a sandwich of this glued to that, or something sprinkled on to something else. Each chef is entitled to cook with his own ingredients. Yet I’ll take Bryston all the way. They’re smoother and pulverizingly more powerful.
I much prefer the way Bryston allocates its money. They’re putting more in drivers than the other guys and not spending CRAZY on 250 pound cabinets. They make their cabinets from thick, dense, Canadian Rangerwood with a matrix of internal supporting struts. They’re not spending cuckoo on epoxy resin or aluminum cabinets.
Bryston’s Middle T is an easy speaker to place in your living room. You’d never infer by the aesthetics that it could roar like a lion and sound mellifluous- but that’s exactly what it does.