Zu Audio's Essence speaker breaks almost every high-end design rule and sounds all the better for it!

A great speaker should make you feel like you're there, with the music. That's the idea, but it almost never happens, even with some of the very best speakers money can buy.

They can sound great, but they rarely sound like the real thing.

Hi-fi at 190

Bang & Olufsen finds space in the Aston Martin DB9 for 13 speakers and 1,000 watts.

Geoff finds happiness.

Everything's a Speaker

The tiny Tunebug Vibe turns any flat surface into a speaker.

No, really.

And it works much better than you'd expect.

Russound’s Collage Powerline Media and Intercom System sets a new standard for retrofit multiroom audio systems.

If Twitter-synched pet collars and Wi-Fi at 30,000 feet aren’t enough to convince you that we’re living in the future, consider this: I just installed two zones of distributed audio at opposite ends of the house in one fairly laid back Saturday afternoon.

Tannoy's Prestige Kensington SE doesn't sound like any other high-end speaker; it's something else again.

I may have written hundreds and hundreds of speaker reviews, but I can pretty much guarantee that if someone asks me about the Tannoy Prestige Kensington SE speaker in 10 years I won't have a problem recounting this review.

Coaxially Cool

The most common type of speaker design has a tweeter towards the top of the speaker and a woofer below it. Some speakers mix it up with a woofer above too, or maybe a mid-range in there somewhere.

The XQ40 from KEF, like most of their speakers, does something a little different. The tweeter is inside the woofer.

RocknRolla

Sonus faber may be a small Italian speaker company, but you can literally see its influence in the curvy look of various B&W, KEF, Magico, Tannoy, Wharfedale and countless other speakers.

Thanks to Sonus faber, the box is out and round is in.

Clearly Different

If that pun made you roll your eyes, they only get worse from here.

There are cool speaker designs, and then there are cool speaker designs. Most of the designs we audiophiles drool over include words like "ribbon," "ultra-tweeter" or maybe "plasmawoofer." Drivers and crossovers with specs to make a techy salivate wrapped in a swoopy MDF and veneered cabinet.

Or maybe not so swoopy.

Worth the Effort

Being a serious beer connoisseur is a lot of work. Different styles of ales, for example, like to be cellared at different temperatures and all would rather be cellared upright, making the usual storage solutions available for wines unsuitable for us beer geeks. Then there’s all the shelf space required for glassware—because who would ever think to drink a Christmas Ale from a Weizen glass or an American lager from anything other than a plastic Dixie cup?

Rock Outside...without rocks

It seems like your only choices for outside speakers are bland white boxes, rocks, and tree stumps. Now I'm not dendrophobic, but even the best of these don't really look like tree stumps.

With the Sat30 and Sub10, Polk has made some speakers designed to blend a little more naturally, if less "organically."