Philosophy
A loudspeaker should make itself heard as little as possible. The music, as much as possible.
We make loudspeakers that tell the music. It is a difference that changes everything: the figures we choose to publish, the models we build, and the reason none of them is the best one.
The sound
The cabinet must keep quiet.
A wooden cabinet vibrates, and every vibration is music nobody played: it arrives after the signal, dirties it, and the ear reads it as warmth or as confusion depending on how good the box is.
Stone is too dense and too heavy to do that. It is not an elegant facing laid over a box: it is the way to obtain a cabinet that stays still. What you hear comes out of the cones, and nothing else.
The light
A loudspeaker is silent twenty-three hours a day.
For almost all of the time it is a mute object in a room. Light is what gives it a life then too, and that is why it is not decorative lighting added on top: it is cut into the design, powered separately, drawn the way a mark is drawn.
Its grammar changes from one model to the next. On Vox Lucis it is a sign — a ring and a line, incised in the front face. On Stele Lucis it is a revelation: it rises from the base and passes through the marble, showing that the stone is thin enough to let it through.
The range
Not a ladder. Different ways of listening.
Anyone who writes a price list as a ladder — good, better, best — is telling the customer that the model they can afford is the wrong one. There is no better model. There is the one closest to the way you listen.
Point-source listening
Stele Lucis
What it gives All the sound is born at a single point. No crossover between two drivers in the middle of the human voice, no filter shifting the phase of what it lets through. The image is precise and it stays put: a voice comes from one place, and stays there.
What it costs An eight-centimetre cone does not go below 81 hertz and does not play loud. Asking it for deep bass as well means making it do both badly.
Who it is for Voice, strings, piano, chamber music. Those who listen inside the music, not those who use it as background.
Two ways
Vox Lucis
What it gives Real extension at the bottom and the ability to turn it up without the object sitting down. An orchestra has a floor, and here it is.
What it costs A crossing between two sources, and a filter between amplifier and cones. Decades of work have gone into making it transparent, and it never entirely becomes so.
Who it is for Symphonic, rock, electronic. Music that has a floor, and that now and then should be played properly loud.
Three ways
In design
What it gives A driver dedicated to the midrange, and the crossover moved out of the voice band — the place where the ear is most demanding and least forgiving.
What it costs A more complex filter and a larger object. It is not a dearer model because it has one more driver: it is a third way.
Who it is for Those who want the control of a dedicated midrange, without asking the design to be simpler.
The subwoofer
It is not there to make more bass.
It is there to take the bass away from those who should not be making it. The octaves below eighty hertz demand area and excursion: air to move, a lot of it. Those demands are incompatible with a small, coherent driver, and a cone asked to do deep bass and the voice at once does both badly — it moves too much to stay clean where it is brilliant.
Separating the deep bass protects the purity of the main loudspeaker, which stops chasing something it cannot give. And there is a second, more practical reason: below eighty hertz the ear can barely locate the source. The subwoofer can therefore go where the room wants it — which is almost never where it would look right.
The models
Now the question is a different one.
Not which is best, but which resembles the way you listen.