The audio industry has gone largely cookie cutter in the last few years. Company after company is hiring the same handful of Chinese OEM vendors to make gear for them. They’re doing it with speakers and electronics. The market has become FLOODED with badged mediocrity.
For not a lot more money, you can do much better.
But first, let’s analyze how we got here.
Speakers
It takes a lot of work to build your own facility and component parts. You’d have to pony up a bundle of money and then, come up with a mouse trap that’s better than what is coming from the far east. You’re risking your life’s savings, most likely, on a roll of the dice. Simply put, very few people are willing to do this.
If you hire a “speaker house” across the Pacific, all you have to do is choose parts from a menu, wire some money, and the speakers show up at your door- complete with your name on the box. It’s the same as making golf shirts with different company logos on them.
The drivers are generic. The cabinets are often hollow with ports not even glued into place. Cheap is cheap.
I see LINES of new speakers coming out every month in audio mags, that are clearly made by same handful of speaker houses. The brand names are different, but the speakers are so similar that you can’t miss it. They’re OK, because they’re cheap. Line after line of mid level efficiency speakers… that are literally interchangeable from their competitors- are mundane.
I’m tired of the build quality, the sound, and the fake pricing. They intro a speaker at $2500 per pair and a month later, hey, they’re on sale for $2k or whatever. Of course they were built to
sell for $2k and the whole marketing “soft shoe routine” is part of the plan.
We have moved on. Please join us.
Bryston
Bryston speakers are made in its own house in Canada to higher standards than the mass market. Bryston supports its line with a 20 year warranty. Bryston doesn’t just slap a 20 year warranty on speakers built like the Chinese- in attempts to snow you. Bryston actually makes better, more reliable speakers. Consistency, musicality and reliability are sincerely better with Bryston.
You can start at $2300 for full range sound. Start with Bryston Tiny A stand mount speakers, and add an AMERICAN BUILT powered subwoofer (D110) by JL Audio of Florida. This combo is called the Bryston A110 and will turn the similarly priced Asian imports into kindling.
Please audition this A110 in our shop. Yep, we still do demos the old fashioned way, in person!
You’ll hear in a minute that the Brystons have clarity and imaging galore. The bass provided by the D110 sub will pulverize the imports. The system is bi-amped because the sub has its own amp on board. All of your power is appropriately routed to the Brystons alone. The timbre of the bass is well defined by the sealed sub. It isn’t “one-note” muddy bass. You can appreciate the flavor of a unique drum kit or finely tuned Steinway. The sub can throw cinder blocks off your walls while the flimsy Chinese towers run out of octane in a split second.
Electronics
It’s obvious all cheap electronics come from China. Did you know that for barely a head higher on the totem pole, you can buy exquisite American electronics?!
Rogue Audio
Rogue of Pennsylvania makes wonderful, affordable integrated amplifiers. The Rogue Sphinx V3 in particular ($1700, 100×2) is among the best audio electronic values in our industry. You get a pair of 12AU7 tubes in the preamp section. The power amp section is a solid state design of 100×2 without mismatched output transistors. The phono section is serious in that it supports MM & MC. Sphinx even has pre-outs so you can add a sub or a larger power amp if you like. It even has a fine headphone amp on board that takes advantage of the tubes.
For this kind of money you’d expect to have a bucket of bolts from China. We want to point out, you don’t have to settle for a pile of generic chips marketed under a variety of brand names. You can attain superior transparency instead. This is most noticeable in the critical midrange region where human voices and acoustic instruments will be less congested and can breathe more dynamically.
Let’s Look Beyond Generic
Why settle for the traditional stock in trade gear that permeates the market? We have mentioned just two of our many options here. There is hi-fi gear that sounds better than what dot coms and big box offer- for not much more money.