Estelon X Diamond Mk II

Taste is a funny thing. Love cilantro? Millions swear it tastes like soap.

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LOUDSPEAKER

Similarly, design cognoscenti will gush over a minimalist Scandinavian sofa that others dismiss as just a pricey plank with delusions of grandeur.

There's no accounting for taste, or so the truism goes. But arguing over preferences is exactly what many audiophiles do. Similarly, Stereophile reviewers are all about parsing and evaluating sound, and how a product looks isn't usually a big part of the equation. But I'll buck that convention and say that the radically shaped Estelon X Diamond Mk IIs aren't just the most visually sublime speakers I've laid eyes on; they ought to be part of the Cooper Hewitt Museum's permanent collection. Or MOMA's.

Got to be good looking

If the Estelons looked instead like upright coffins but sounded the same, I'd still praise them without reservation. But the sculpted shape-Brancusi meets Botero-is a big part of why I'm so smitten.

Now, I like shiny things, but I've heard and seen a hundred speakers with glossy automotive paint jobs that made them look merely attractive. Part of what puts the Estelon X Diamonds in a different category is in how the glasslike finish combines with its curves. A third component, light, makes the whole thing very nearly magical. Watch as both window light and floor lighting throw elongated vertical reflections along the floorstander's sloping, rounded flanks. When you move (or as the sun does), those lines change too, subtly and beautifully. There's also just something right about this design, in the way that a dolphin or a Fibonacci spiral is pleasing to look at. Modern technology has imposed an environment on all of us that's built from angles and other geometric shapes. The Estelons, by contrast, look organic, as if they weren't just engineered and constructed, but live-born at the same time.