Everything was bigger in the old days: Wispas, mobile phones, hi-fi speakers... Now one company is taking it back to the old school with a new speaker inspired by the behemoths of days gone by. Say hello to the Stratton Acoustics Elypsis1512.
They're beasts, standing a shade under 40 inches (over three feet) tall. They hark back to classic speakers like the JBL 4350, Tannoy Buckingham and the Urei 815a, and claim to combine their sense of musical involvement and communication with modern driver technology and manufacturing techniques.
The three-way passive speakers are built around a complement of twin 380mm bass drivers, a single 300mm midrange driver and a mechanically decoupled, 29mm soft dome tweeter with a precision waveguide. Its twin 350mm (15-inch) reinforced paper diaphragm drivers feature a 113mm (4.5-inch) voice coil, an aluminium demodulation ring and a twin spider suspension system.
On midrange duties is a driver with a 300mm (12-inch) reinforced paper diaphragm with a 75.6 mm (3-inch) voice-coil, a neodymium-iron-boron magnet system and a copper-sleeved pole-piece. And the tweeter has a 29mm diameter soft dome device fitted with a CNC-machined aluminium waveguide.
The enclosure is manufactured from a combination of 24mm and 18mm precision CNC-routed birch ply panels, with a 46mm front baffle.
Stratton claims these all give the speakers high efficiency and wide bandwidth, and low colouration and distortion.
A relative newcomer to the world of hi-fi the UK-based company wants its speakers to be "stunning pieces of fine furniture", as much as hi-fi separates, according to Amy Richards, one of Stratton's founding partners. A bold claim, but then these are definitely bold speakers. And at £69,000 a pair, they're not for shy, retiring types.
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