In my 40 years as an avid audiophile, I have seen about everything there is regarding speaker design. From weirdly shaped enclosures that try to break the laws of physics that govern the rest of the speaker-designing community to simple one-driver designs that take on the full range of musical frequencies with one driver. All speaker designers take different approaches to yield the same result for the most part. They are trying to bring to life a recorded musical event like it is being played for you in your home, or even better, to transform your living room into the room where the event was being played!

The issue comes with the fact that we listeners are human. This means our ears are all sensitive to various frequencies and how our ear/brain processes these sounds. This complicates an already complex issue, namely, having a speaker that is true to the music but at the same time caters to our hearing and perception. That is all we can ask for in a speaker: to stay true to the music as much as possible while catering to our sensibilities and the type of system/room we put them in.

Atohm is a French speaker company that has been on the scene since 2000. Its founder, Thierry Comte, started the company after working as the technical director for Triangle, another French speaker company. They started out making OEM drivers for other companies, including Triangle. A few years later, Atohm entered the finished speaker market with various models at different price points. Now, they offer finished speakers and separate drivers to the public.

The GT HD series is their newest flagship speaker, and I have been spending some quality time getting to know the GT3-HD flagship tower speaker. GT, in this case, is cleverly named the “Grand Thrill” series Atohm says their speakers are for the Grand Thrill of the music.

While the GT3-HD looks like a simple tower speaker design at first glance, a lot is going on here that must be understood to see Atohm’s vision for a flagship speaker in this price class. Atohm is a company that is very transparent about the technologies and designs they use in the GT series speakers. And published what Atohm calls its Technical Book about the GT series speakers, which goes into much more detail than I have the space to do here. I recommend that anyone interested in speaker design or these speakers read it because it is thorough and intellectually written. But I will touch on the essential parts of the design.

I like it when companies are open about their design decisions and don’t try to hide behind big words or explanations that we non-engineers can understand. When a speaker company can explain its choices to the public, it creates transparency and gives a would-be owner a little more confidence in their purchase decision.

Read full Atohm GT3-HD Flagship Floorstanding Speaker detailed reviewed by Douglas Moore.