As part of our 50th anniversary, we’ve been spending quite a lot of time in the What Hi-Fi? archives, poring over back issues of the magazine. We have been reliving good times and the bad and revisiting some of the most memorable audio innovations from the past half-century.
But let’s return, for a moment, to the present. Recently, we’ve had a bulky, impressive-looking pair of PMC M2B SE speakers in our test rooms for review. You can read all about them on our hi-fi and audio editor, Kashfia Kabir’s, most recent Substack post.
Those speakers got us thinking: of all the eye-catching models that have come through the What Hi-Fi? test rooms over the years, which are the weirdest-looking pairs of speakers we have ever laid eyes upon? As it happens, there have been a few strong contenders, many of which arrived around the dawn of the new millennium.
As the year 2000 rolled around, a unique hysteria swept the globe. Fearing the effects of the so-called ‘millennium bug’, many people refrained from booking flights while others stockpiled supplies in case of an apocalypse. Speaker manufacturers, it seems, also went slightly off-piste.
We highlight here five pairs of speakers which we think fit the bill. What do you think? What are the strangest-looking speakers you've ever laid eyes on? Let us know in the comments!
NOTE: To read the full-size text of the magazine images below, click on the arrow sign on the bottom-left corner.
Beauhorn Virtuoso Reference (2000)
Is it a wardrobe? Is it a door? Nope. Somewhat unbelievably, it's a speaker.
Designed by British manufacturer Beauhorn, the Virtuoso Reference showcased the company’s affection for the art of cabinet making – perhaps a little too blatantly for some tastes.
With a 20cm Lowther DX4 driver taking care of the speaker’s entire frequency range, and a sensitivity of 106dB/W/m, this speaker packed some unusual but hefty punches. The doorknob at its centre, we should clarify, is actually an outsize phase plug, designed to improve high-frequency dispersion for a more even and natural sound.
The driver alone cost £540 at the time of writing, and the speakers would have set you back £4946. Not an inconsiderable price even now.
In our review, we said the Beauhorn Virtuoso Reference were capable of producing “wall-shaking levels of volume”, even while connected to an amplifier with a power rating of just seven Watts per channel.
Sonically, we thought these speakers were “fantastically fast and direct”, their lack of a crossover paying dividends, “with sky-high levels of detail and wide-ranging dynamics”, when listening to classical music.
Their gifts don’t come in a small package, however, with the speakers measuring more than a metre tall and 70cm deep.
While playing pop music, as you might have guessed from their gaudy aesthetics, their performance wasn’t “quite as flawless” and they lacked a “certain degree of weight and drive”.
Still, it’s hard not to admire that, as humanity faced a new horizon, Beauhorn stuck to its guns and built these retro wooden giants.
Artifice Audio A1 (1997)
There is always a bit of preamble before you can get your speakers sounding their best. Conventionally, we would anticipate needing to spend time nailing the positioning and a few days of running them in. Less often does spending five minutes exhaling into a blue PVC bag come to mind.
But that’s exactly what you had to do to get the inflatable Artifice Audio A1 up and running. Of course, you also needed to spend about the same amount of time balancing the pressure between the speakers.
Their materials, or lack thereof, meant that these speakers could be released at a bargain price of just £85. For those savings, however, you would have to negotiate a particularly idiosyncratic quality of the speakers.
Namely, we said that, given a loud signal, the Artifice A1 started “jerking in time with the music like a demented weeble”. But that was part of the plan. By dissipating resonances in the air, the speaker operated under something closer to an ‘infinite baffle’ principle.
Their heavy bases also meant that, despite their grooving tendencies, they stayed put on speaker stands – but if they did fall, they could bounce away unharmed.
In our review we said, “The bouncing speaker performs especially well with high-impact dance music, which benefits from the ever-changing direction of the 15cm doped-paper drive units.”
It wasn’t all good news. We thought the Artifice A1 were “about as attractive as swimming pool armbands”, and found the movement of the drive units caused serious trouble in terms of sound-staging.
B&W Emphasis (1997)
Pushing the concept of a horn speaker close to its visual limit, the B&W Emphasis was the brainchild of Morten Villiers Warren, a furniture designer who approached the company to see if his design fantasy could be made into a functioning reality.
The Emphasis used the same metal dome tweeter as B&W’s Silver Signature Series, mounted on a metal tube growing out of the body next to the main driver, which was a 16.5cm gold Kevlar unit. The more astute hi-fi heads among you will recognise that it was the main driver from B&W’s 600 Series of the time.
Behind the main driver, the horn technology came into play, using the folded fibreglass body as a quarter-wave loading device. In practice, this meant that the body used the rear-firing energy from the mid/bass driver and tuned it for low frequency extension.
But, as Christopher Nolan’s version of J. Robert Oppenheimer once said (repeatedly), “Theory will take you only so far.”
At a price of £6500 in 1997 – an eye-watering £13,200 in today’s money – it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect these speakers to deliver truly top-tier sound. Despite a “good degree of treble clarity”, however, we thought that the Emphasis’s “bass extension [was] hardly reasonable” for the price.
We also found that the speakers “lacked some of the dynamic appeal” that other speakers could deliver, struggling to keep pace with hacking rock and roll test tracks.
Nonetheless, the speakers received a solid overall rating of four stars.
CarfraeHorn (1999)
A seriously premium offering, the CarfraeHorn loudspeakers cost £12,000 in 1999, which would equate to £23,600 today.
Standing at 2.2m tall, these door-sized horn speakers based their design around a tractrix contour – a mathematically derived shape that gives sound waves a clear path through the horn.
The horn itself was made from curved sections of birch ply, while everything else was built from solid maple, a material chosen for its sonic character and good looks.
As the price tag foretells, no expense was spared in the design of the CarfraeHorn. The speakers’ Lowther DX3 drive units, which cost £600 each, were mounted directly into 4cm thick tubes of solid hardwood.
Thankfully, all those premium materials resulted in a listening experience that we described as a “real treat”.
In our March 1999 review, we said that “the detail these speakers produce is breathtaking”. With “a wonderfully evocative soundstage” and “tremendous presence”, the only real issue we could see with the CarfraeHorn loudspeakers was their unwieldy proportions.
KEF KHT 2005 (2001)
Picking up What Hi-Fi? in the early 2000s, you would have been hard pressed to find a magazine that didn’t include several surround speaker systems. As DVD continued to take the world by storm, many of our readers were on the hunt for their first home cinema sound system.
But, as we noted in this June 2001 review of the KEF KHT2005, not everybody wanted to pack their living room with audio hardware. Indeed, many who did may have had partners, or flatmates, who didn’t… some things never change.
As such, we thought this KEF system was one of “the most attractive” subwoofer/satellite combinations we had ever come across, replacing as it did dull rectangular boxes with something curvier and different. Then, as now, a balance between looks and sound was crucial to earn the five-star review that these speakers gained.
So how much tech did £800 get you at the start of the century?
In this case, five egg-like, cast aluminium satellites each used a 10cm KEF Uni-Q driver and featured rotatable, wall-mountable stands, while the 150W subwoofer employed a single, downward-firing 20cm bass driver, and included a healthy variety of connections. The subwoofer even featured a phase-invert control, for easier positioning within a room.
Sonically, we found that the KEF KHT2005 delivered a “quite sensational performance for a package of its type”. At the time, many such speaker systems lacked in midrange performance, whereas the KEFs shone in this regard, making vocal nuances and inflections all the more audible.
They performed equally well with movies and music, and we found these speakers capable of a “meaty sense of cinematic scale”. Closing emphatically, our review said: “It's superb, we can’t really put it more clearly than that.”
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