Estelon Forza LOUDSPEAKER

EQUIPMENT REPORT

- MICHAEL FREMER

You’ve got your 2001: A Space Odyssey speaker, which of course is a tall, black, featureless mono-lith. Then there’s your wooden “Who’s buried inside?” speaker, your “R-I-C-O-L-A” speaker,1 your enema bag or double-inverted enema bag speaker, your menacing hooded-Klansman speaker, your “looks like a robot, praying mantis, or Transformer” speaker (mine), and your “Does it leave a slime trail?” speaker (looks like a snail). You’ve got your “Is that a room divider?” speaker, your “looks like you stepped on a duck’s head” speaker, and your “whipped cream dollop suspended in time” speaker.

That’s just a few of the many loudspeaker “looks” on display at your typical large hi-fi show. Some are imaginative, some are farfetched, some are just weird, and some are deadly boring. Brand names available upon request.

Some speaker designs—the drivers-in-a-rectangular box configuration, for example, especially the ones made of wood or MDF—choose not to take advantage of many design and construction innovations developed over the past few decades, happy to defiantly shout “retro!” Some combine interesting new tech with whimsical industrial design.

And then there are the unusually graceful, sculpted designs from Estonia-based Estelon, which for me were not make-funnable until my local Stop & Shop supermarket began tailing me with a creepy, green-light–blinking security robot, which looked to me like a much-less-graceful Estelon.2