If you had to choose only ONE pair of speakers for rest of your life ...

Honestly, I could live happily ever after with a mint pair of Acoustat 2+2s....

Make sure you try the Acoustat DD OTL tube amps with these before you die. Those make the Acoustats sing like no other amp can. Those transformers veils the sound tremendously.
 
I had Acoustats many years ago.....one of them caught fire and nearly burned the house down. I understand that was a common complaint.
 
You mean when they work? :)

I sold two used pair back in the early 80's. Last year one of those people had a breakdown on one of the amps and asked me for help. He found me on Facebook. He sent the amp to Roy Esposito and had it fixed. After 32 years of constantly using them, one breakdown. The other person still uses his everyday and never has had a problem.

There is a good reason you never see them used. Nobody wants to sell them. There is a guy in OKC that will modify the amps and make them very reliable and sound even better.
 
I sold two used pair back in the early 80's. Last year one of those people had a breakdown on one of the amps and asked me for help. He found me on Facebook. He sent the amp to Roy Esposito and had it fixed. After 32 years of constantly using them, one breakdown. The other person still uses his everyday and never has had a problem.

There is a good reason you never see them used. Nobody wants to sell them. There is a guy in OKC that will modify the amps and make them very reliable and sound even better.

I think if you go back and read the reviews of the day, the DD amps were noxiously unreliable and broke down all the time. :( There's a reason Accoustat abandoned the DD amps. And their later ss amplifier sounded dreadful on their speakers
 
I think if you go back and read the reviews of the day, the DD amps were noxiously unreliable and broke down all the time. :( There's a reason Accoustat abandoned the DD amps. And their later ss amplifier sounded dreadful on their speakers

I am very aware of what went wrong with Acoustat, I was the fifth largest dealer in the USA back then. Sure, in the early years of the servo amps Acoustat had problems, but by 1982, Roy Esposito, Acouststs top engineer had figured out the problems and was modding the amps for $300 for the pair if you sent them to Acoustat. The mod made them very reliable.

Acoustats Jim Strickland flew up to my place one time for a visit. He walked in my shop and I had the pair of the used Acoustat Monitor III's I told you about earlier. It looked like he had seen a ghost when he saw those. He looked at me and told me point blank, get rid of them. Acoustat and Strickland knew they had sold out to the devil with those transformers. It was all about the big bucks and nothing else. Acoustat deserved to go out of business.

Roger Modjeski still uses the Acoustats, but uses his own personally designed amp. RM can design it for the Quads also, that will bypass their transformers and make them sound much more open and quicker.
 
When I was 20 years younger, the Martin Logan Statement driven by a complete Cello system left unforgetable print in my musical memory. It was in Paris - Presence Audio Conseil at that time.
I even bought a pair of Cello Encore 150 mono amps to get a little taste of that 'magic'. But not with the same speakers, unfortunately...
 
For me, it was Apogee Diva speakers with Krell monos back in 1992 that were demonstrated by Jason Bloom at a store event. Memory is a funny thing but it may have been the most lifelike sounding music I ever heard. Jason was a great audiophile and a really nice man who left us way too early.

Ken
 
Honestly, I could live happily ever after with a mint pair of Acoustat 2+2s....

I have a loaner pair of 2+2s in the system and i'm always struck by how close they come to super 'stats like the sound labs - but these are easier to drive. they will give you a huge slice of today's best 'stats at a paltry price.
 
So far, the only pair of mega-buck loudspeakers that (I think) I could jump into a monogamous relationship with are the Rosso Fiorentino Sienas.
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Voxativ makes their own drive, in Berlin. They are made of wood, of all matters.

This speaker is actually a flat-ish horn, as you may have guessed from the transparent one. There's only one, fullrange, active drive, with very high sensitivity. When I asked last spring in Munich, the price of the black unit was a low low 192k€ :disbelief:. Stil, to me it was the best sound in the show, if not the best value (they used their own electronics and TOTALDAC digital sources).

This drive unit is active, i.e. the magnet is replaced by a coil, with a battery power supply, and an engine made of permadur...

Dimensions: 47 x 55 x 7.5", i.e. 120 x 140 X 19 cmn, 70kg/155lbs

A really good fullrange speaker is interesting because you can dispense with crossovers altogether. We at ICOS only make a 5 way active system because no fullrange speaker would properly reproduce both treble and bass, and we don't like crossovers and capacitors, but this one feels like a possible game changer. One of these days we'll try their OEM drives see if we can do something good and expensive.

Check out their website:
Loudspeakers - Voxativ Loudspeakers

Really ????? $100.000 ?????

Voxativ Ampeggio Due - hand crafted in Germany | Full range | Apple Valley, California 92307 | AudiogoN - The High-end Audio Community
 
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