The Top Ten Most Influential Speakers of the Last 50 Years

This will not be a purely factual article, based only on historical sales figures or specific inventions/patents issued, or the number of 5-star reviews or Product of the Year awards received or my personal favorites as far as sound is concerned. It is purely subjective, based on my having been intimately involved in the speaker market—both as a fanatical enthusiast and as a speaker industry professional—since the early 1960s. To my way of thinking, 50+ years entitles me to toss out some opinions and at least have them considered semi-seriously. Not necessarily agreed with, but at least considered.

One other thing up front: This is an American-centric article. This is an article that deals with the 10 most influential speakers to have appeared on the scene in the last half-century in the American hi-fi market. Foreign speakers have been evaluated and included with an eye to how they influenced the direction of the U.S. speaker industry. So for example, if you’re looking for the Rogers LS3/5a on this list, save yourself some time and stop reading now. A great little speaker? Yes. An influence? Yes. A Top 10 Influence All-Time in the American speaker market? Move along; nothing to see here.

With that as a backdrop, here are my top 10 picks for the most influential speakers in the Consumer American hi-fi market over the last 50 years.

No. 1: The Original Acoustic Research models, AR-1 through AR-7, 1954-1973

OK, this is kind of a fudge right off the bat because it encompasses at least 6 major product “platforms” and many, many individual models: 

• AR-1, AR-1w, AR-1x
• AR-2, 2a, 2x, 2ax, “New” 2ax, 5
• AR-3
• AR-3a (separate from 3 because both achieved such huge individual sales/acclaim notoriety)
• AR-4, 4x, 4xa, 6, 7
• AR-LST, AR-LST/2
  

All the AR models over this 19-year span could really be considered as embodying the same design philosophy, the same manufacturing approach, the same marketing approach and the same cutting-edge engineering breakthroughs and industry firsts.

The Acoustic Research AR-3a

AR introduced the sealed “acoustic suspension” bass-alignment system to the high-fidelity world, making possible deep, clean, distortion-free bass an order of magnitude better than anything else that existed at the time, in an enclosure 1/8 the size or smaller of the then-best Klipschs and Bozaks of that era.

With AR’s acoustic suspension design, the bookshelf-sized speaker as we still know it today became a reality, paving the way for the commercial success and popularity of two-channel stereo (which was invented in 1958). Two Bozak Concert Grands could hardly have fit in the normal living room of a typical 1962-era suburban home. Two AR-3s? No sweat. And they went deeper in the bass and did it more cleanly than the Bozaks did.

In 1958, AR did something else that all modern speaker manufacturers still owe them for: They introduced the AR-3, a major revamping of the original AR-1 sealed system. Using the same woofer in the same-sized compact enclosure (well under 1.8 cu. ft.), the AR-3 brought forward yet another AR “first”: the industry’s first dome tweeter and dome midrange drivers. How many speakers today use a dome tweeter? The AR-3 was the first.

In terms of smooth, level frequency response, deep bass extension (-3dB @ 35Hz, passive—on its own, not an equalized powered subwoofer), low bass THD (under 1% at a 1-watt drive level, a reasonably loud listening level in the home, all the way down under 30Hz), wide dispersion and unobtrusive size, the AR-3 enjoyed a margin of ascendancy over its competitors that is not only unrivaled in the annals of hi-fi, but may be unequaled in any technical consumer field, ever. Did any camera or ski or television or car ever outperform its competitors by that wide a margin for so long a period of time? The AR-3 was introduced in 1958; it was finally replaced by the even-better AR-3a a decade later, having been widely acclaimed as the best speaker in the industry for all that time. Ten years—a feat absolutely unequalled.

However, the basic AR theme of great bass in compact enclosures probably reached its zenith with the 1964 introduction of the small AR-4, an 8” version of the AR-1 and AR-3’s twelve-inch system, but in an enclosure barely 1/3 the size of the AR-1 and AR-3. 1965 saw the debut of the famous AR-4x with its vastly improved new 2 ½-inch tweeter, resulting in a system that spanned from 55-15kHz at ± 3dB on axis! These smaller AR speakers brought true hi-fidelity sound to hundreds of thousands of people, yet they sounded very similar to their bigger brethren. Like the AR-3 at the high end of the scale, the budget-priced 4x had no real, true competition for years.

AR’s market share in the mid-1960s was an almost unbelievable 32%! One company—AR—had one-third of the entire American speaker market.

In 1971 AR introduced the AR-LST (“Laboratory Standard Transducer”), a 9-driver multi-paneled speaker whose mission was to deliver the widest, flattest frequency response over the broadest possible forward-facing area. Marketed as a professional monitor speaker with precisely-known, extremely-high performance attributes (thus qualifying it, in AR’s view, as a reliable scientific instrument for research and studio applications), the LST nonetheless found its greatest success among well-heeled audiophiles of the day. It is included in this group because it utilized the exact same drive units and crossover componentry as the AR-3a, so it can be considered a logical extension of the basic technology and design approach with which AR dominated the market for those 19 years.

No. 2: The Advents

Henry Kloss was quite the figure in the American speaker business in the 1950s–1960s. After he left KLH, he went on to found Advent Corporation because he wanted to manufacture and market large-screen two-piece television projection systems. In order to produce the cash flow needed for that undertaking, however, he decided to make and sell speakers under the Advent name. This virtual “afterthought” went on to become perhaps the most successful speaker brand of the early-mid 1970s, during the very height of the huge Baby Boom generation college population explosion.

The Large Advent

With typical Kloss directness of purpose, he came out with just two models, simply called the Advent Loudspeaker and the Smaller Advent Loudspeaker. Both were 10” 2-way sealed speakers, using in-house designed and built drivers. They differed mainly in size (the “Large” Advent was a full-sized bookshelf speaker, like the AR-3 or KLH Five); the Smaller Advent was a bit larger and more expensive than the AR-4x, but still much trimmer than the larger Advent. Kloss took the “dealer-as-partner” marketing strategy that he initiated when he was at KLH (he was the “K”) to new heights with Advent. Advent dealers presented and sold their speakers with an almost fanatical, religious zeal. The Advents themselves were certainly worthy of their success, great-sounding speakers that had extraordinary bass response—especially considering their modest price—and represented terrific performance-to-price values. The Advents could be said to have spearheaded the explosion of stereo’s popular jump from the hobbyist-only market of the middle-aged “GE engineer living in Suburbia” during the mid-1960s to the 10-fold market increase of the Baby Boomer college kid/dorm room experience of the 1970s.

As a bonus to the amazing role Advent played in transforming stereo from a 1960s Dad-only hobby to its 1970s mainstream popularity, somehow the idea of two speakers per channel “stacked Large Advents” as a tower, driven as if they were one speaker—achieved legendary audiophile status in the 1970s as well. All the high-end magazines accorded Stacked Advents some kind of mythical quality that couldn’t be explained by “the numbers” or even by Advent’s design personnel. This only added to the Advent lore of the 1970s, a brand reputation and story exceeded by few, if any, products in any field.

No. 3: The Bose Acoustimass AM-5

We’re talking about influence here, not personal sound preference or whether you like a company’s advertising. Please hold all those comments about, “They don’t produce real bass below 60Hz,” or “There’s an acoustic hole between 120-200Hz so big you could drive a Mack Truck through it, because the sats and the sub never meet up,” or, “The sats aren’t a real tweeter and they give up the ghost by 13kHz.”

All of that may be true, but one thing is for sure: It’s all irrelevant.

The Bose Acoustimass AM5

As far as influence is concerned, the Bose AM-5 is tough to top. Recognizing the way people wanted (and didn’t want!) speakers to look in their homes in the 1980s and building upon well-known and well-understood acoustic principles of frequency-dependent directionality, localizability and masking behavior, Bose correctly identified and predicted a fundamental change in the way people wanted to use and interact with speakers in their homes. The dorm room Baby Boomers were all grown up now. They were buying homes. They were starting families.  Large Advents on cinder-block stands in a dorm wouldn’t suffice any longer. Now, all of a sudden, appearance mattered as much as, if not more than, great sound. The sub-sat system solved this dilemma and introduced an element of “cool” to the equation: All the sound, including the bass, seemed to come from those diminutive twisty little sat cubes. That became the new “Look at this” factor.

AM-5 sales took off, and the old wooden coffin boxes of yesteryear were left standing in the dust. The age of dominance for the traditional box speaker was over for good. That’s influence for you.

The AM-5 did something else of extraordinary importance: It showed the speaker industry the way to do subwoofer-satellite systems. So-called “good” manufacturers introduced many really excellent-sounding systems, like the Boston Acoustics Sub Sat 6 and 7, and the Cambridge SoundWorks Ensemble systems (Kloss, again!) But even more important than this, the AM-5 showed the industry how a subwoofer-satellite system could make a home theater system feasible and workable in a normal living room. When Dolby Pro Logic multi-channel receivers became available in 1990, home theater would not have been anywhere near as successful and widely accepted by the mainstream buyer if the consumer had to somehow convince his wife to allow five big wooden boxes to be strewn around the living room in a visually-objectionable manner. But a hideaway subwoofer and five small, easy-to-place, barely-visible sats? No problem. The AM-5—for all its acoustic shortcomings—showed the industry how to do it.

At one point in the early 1990s an audio industry research firm reported that the AM-5 held some 30% of the US speaker market. Not Bose as a company. Just the AM-5. That’s the dictionary definition of “influence.”

No. 4: The Bose 901

Again, this article has far less to do with personal taste and audiophile quality and far more to do with influence—speakers that paved new directions, pointed out new possibilities, broke old conventions and made the industry sit up and take notice, knowing that things had changed a bit forever from this point forward.

The Bose 901s.

Considered in that light, the 901 qualifies on all counts. Agree or disagree as you will with Dr. Bose’s premise of so-called “direct vs. reflected sound,” or his use of nine full-range drivers (equalized to reach the low and high frequency extremes) instead of conventional band-limited woofers and tweeters, or even his debatable math that eight rear-facing drivers out of nine meant that exactly 89% of the sound reaching the listeners’ ears was therefore reflected energy (none from the front was?). Did Dr. Bose mean to imply that speakers with all forward-facing drivers delivered 100% direct and therefore no reflected energy? Even extremely wide-dispersion forward-facing speakers like the AR-3a with its domed midrange and tweeter?

No matter. That’s exactly the kind of overly detailed analysis of the 901 that misses the forest for the trees. The 901 was totally unlike anything that preceded it. It was the result of fresh thinking, an entirely new way of conceptualizing the home speaker’s role in delivering a credible illusion of the performance venue into the living room. Prior to the 901, all efforts at improving a speaker’s performance involved technical driver improvements or new bass alignment techniques. The Bose 901 made an attempt to involve the speaker’s actual radiation pattern and its resultant interaction with the domestic listening room into the final equation of lifelike sound in the home. It may or may not have been a valid approach. Some people love the 901; most audiophiles will recite a litany of reasons why they do not like it.

But love it or hate it, the 901 deserves substantial respect for being bold and different, and as a result of Bose’s impressive marketing, for being a commercial success as well. Its success emboldened other companies to try new designs and approaches because the 901 proved that success could come from an unconventional—even controversial—design. Pick your favorite unusual or off-the-beaten-track speaker from the last 30 or 40 years or so. That speaker owes at least part of its start in life to the vision and flat-out nerve that Dr. Bose demonstrated when he produced the 901.

No. 5: The KLH Six, Seventeen, and Five

When Henry Kloss parted ways with AR founder Edgar Villchur in 1957, he founded KLH Corporation, becoming the “K” of the famous tri-lettered name. KLH also utilized the new acoustic suspension bass system in its models, but Henry was a more astute businessperson than was AR’s Villchur and Kloss soon learned how to turn his dealers into true advocates for the company. Kloss arguably pioneered the “dealer-as-partner” business approach in the hi-fi industry and his strategy of controlled/limited distribution among only high quality dealers was a winning approach, as it cemented his dealers’ profitability (and thus their loyalty to KLH) by restricting the cannibalistic “dealer on every corner” technique followed by AR.

The KLH Five

The KLH Six was one of the industry’s all-time best sellers: a mid-sized 10-inch 2-way with an excellent 1 5/8” cone tweeter, both designed and built by KLH in-house. Pleasingly adaptable to all kinds of music, it was neither too forward and mid-rangy, nor too laid back and polite. It was the rough direct competitor to the AR-2 series. The Seventeen was a 10-inch 2-way in a smaller cabinet, the approximate competitor to AR’s 4 series, although the Seventeen was somewhat larger and more expensive. The Five was a 12-inch 3-way with dual cone midrange drivers, a very solid speaker that served as KLH’s answer to the AR-3 and AR-3a. Together, these three speakers were the heart and backbone of KLH’s very successful 1960s decade and KLH was clearly a major speaker force to be reckoned with because of these models.

Most Influential Loudspeaker Picks #6 - 10 and Conclusion

No. 6: The Klipschorn

The high-efficiency horn-loaded loudspeaker is a major design category, and no speaker embodies it better than the Klipschorn. Originally designed in mid-1940s, the Klipschorn is still available today (by special order), an absolutely unprecedented continuous production run of over 60 years! No other hi-fidelity product—never mind just a loudspeaker—even comes close.

The Klipschorn

The Klipschorn is unique in that both the low-frequency and high-frequency sections are horn-loaded. Horn-loading increases efficiency, which proponents say leads to vastly improved clarity and detail resolution, because the drive units aren’t being pushed by the amplifier anywhere near hard enough to be stressed into distortion. Therefore, they have an incredible amount of headroom, which gives the system an effortless, unstrained quality, akin to the feel of live music.

And the Klipschorns are certainly efficient, no question about it. The typical AR-KLH-Advent acoustic suspension bookshelf speaker had a system sensitivity of about 87dB 1W/1m on axis. Compare that to the Klipschorn’s 105dB 1W/1m rating. For an Advent to play at 105dB it would require an input of well over 100 watts, which could be far beyond the undistorted instantaneous capability of the typical 50 watt/channel receiver with which 1970’s bookshelf speakers were usually paired. Klipsch speakers played clean and loud with minimal power input, and neither the speaker nor the amp was being pushed into distortion. The downside of course was their huge size, since they were subject—like all speakers—to the “Iron Law” of acoustics, which stipulates that when considering Enclosure Size, Bass Extension, and Efficiency, you may have any two at the expense of the third. AR-KLH-Advent chose bass extension and a small enclosure at the expense of efficiency; Klipsch chose bass extension and efficiency at the expense of enclosure size. That is somewhat of an over-simplification, of course, but the general rule does apply.

Today, high-efficiency is not a major consideration for home listening situations, since good, clean dependable amplifier power is no longer the expensive commodity it was in the 1950s-1970s. Therefore most modern home speakers are designed without specific regard to minimum power requirements. The same is not true in professional applications such as PA use and concert sound, applications where virtually all speakers are horn-loaded in some manner to maximize their efficiency and thus reduce the required weight, bulk and cost of the associated driving electronics. Klipsch certainly was the high-efficiency/horn leader in the hi-fi industry before technology made higher-power amplifiers economically feasible. Today, the few remaining home high-efficiency designs and virtually all professional speakers owe a debt of gratitude to Paul Klipsch and his remarkable Klipschorn.

No. 7: The JBL L100 Century

There’s nothing like a great historic rivalry to stoke peoples’ emotions. Red Sox-Yankees. Frazier-Ali. Bush-Gore. Borg-McEnroe. Beatles-Stones. You get the idea.

The JBL L100 Century

In the 1970s, the speaker business had a great rivalry also. We’ll go there in a minute. But first, younger readers need to keep in mind that in the 1970s, the biggest demographic group of the post-WWII era—the Baby Boomers—was going to college in droves. They were going to lots of concerts. They were buying lots of records. Also keep in mind that in the 1970s there were none of these things to occupy the typical 19-year old college kid’s time and attention:

No Internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest or Shutterfly. No Smartphones. No texting. No iPod, iTunes, tablets or notebooks. No DVR. Heck, there weren’t even any Walkmans or Discmans. In the early 1970s there weren’t even any boomboxes! What’s a 19-year old to do?

They bought stereo. Lots and lots of stereo. In big college cities like Boston there were audio stores on virtually every other corner, or so it seemed. And they all did great business, they all had their particular marketing/merchandising strategy, they all flourished. Kids argued about speakers while having dinner in the dorm cafeteria. Stereo was king, and except for a few other popular college-aged activities, buying and listening to stereo equipment was just about the most important leisure-time activity there was.

The rivalry that developed in the 1970s came to be known as “East Coast Sound” vs. “West Coast Sound.” The East Coast Sound was exemplified by the polite, refined, supposedly accurate sound of the AR-KLH-Advent group—speaker companies all based in Cambridge MA. All were sealed systems with non-boomy bass and unexaggerated mids and highs.

West Coast Sound was a brasher, more exciting, in-your-face kind of presentation. Absolute scientific accuracy wasn’t the goal; rather, these speakers aimed to sound dramatic and be more attention-grabbing, especially on popular music. Brands like JBL, Infinity and Cerwin-Vega were all California-based, hence the West Coast identifier. Ported enclosures with fatter bass ends, less dry-sounding, and a far punchier, livelier mid to high end. This is also where the terms “Classical Music Speaker” and “Rock Speaker” came from.

One speaker was the poster child for West Coast Sound: The JBL L100 Century. Essentially a dressed-up consumer version of their 4310 Studio Monitor, the L100 became one of the best-selling and most instantly-identifiable speakers of all time. A large 12” 3-way speaker of roughly the same dimensions as the Large Advent, the Century was best known for its distinctive foam grille divided into a surface of small squares. The grille itself was available in many colors, including royal blue, brown and a truly outlandish burnt orange.

Its sound was just as intentionally dramatic and attention-getting as its appearance. Thumping, pounding bass. Detailed, forward mids. Every Allman Brothers or ELP album was a powerful, emotionally-striking event of the highest order.

A 1972 test report in High Fidelity Magazine told the story: Although the speaker performed generally quite well, its on-axis frequency response showed a pronounced upper-midrange peak of about 5-8 dB centered around 9kHz. This was obviously quite intentional, since JBL’s engineering capability was second to none and this response characteristic wouldn’t have just escaped by accident. Whether it was done to give the 4310 professional monitor more near-field sonic “detail” to the recording engineer or whether it was done to give the L-100 more retail showroom flash, it was there and it was real.

To this day, everyone knows and remembers the JBL L100 Century.

No. 8: The British are coming! The British are coming! The B&W 800 series speakers

While the Americans were busy fighting a West Coast-East Coast civil speaker war, the British were cleverly plotting to have their say on our turf. The 1970s saw the big-time emergence in the U.S. market of several notable British speaker companies. Although in the 1960s British companies like Wharfedale and Goodmans had a reasonable presence on these shores, it really wasn’t until the 1970s that the British influence hit hard in the U.S. market. Three brands lead the effort: Celestion, KEF and B&W.

The B&W 800D

British speakers were all pretty much known—and respected—for splitting the difference quite nicely between the brash California JBL sound and the polite accuracy of the Massachusetts AR camp. The Brits’ sound was accurate but not too distant and self-effacing. Lively, but not too forward or exaggerated. Superb drive units, extraordinary in-house research and design efforts and beautiful appearance were the order of the day.

Over a span of several decades, B&W has come to represent the quintessential British approach to loudspeaker design and manufacturing. As a company boilerplate once described them:

About B&W

Named for founders John Bowers and Roy Wilkins, B&W is one of the world’s largest and most highly-acclaimed audio companies. From their first loudspeaker—the P1 of 1966—the company has consistently been at the very forefront of audio innovation with a long string of notable achievements such as their Matrix™ enclosure, their stunning Nautilus technology and their exclusive use in the renowned Abbey Road Studios as recording monitors.

The B&W 800 series is a perfect example of all that they represent themselves to be as a speaker company (and by extension, the best of the KEF and other British speakers as well). The various 801 Matrix models in the 1990s evolved into the 800 Diamond series in the 2000s, but every version has presented to critical listeners of the time an almost ideal blend of tonal neutrality, detail resolution, deep, controlled bass extension, and crystal-clear highs without a trace of edge or hardness. Add to those sonic attributes an unwaveringly high build quality and elegant, modern looks and the result is a speaker family with an almost unequalled lineage and pedigree.

Many audiophiles (if they’re honest and have a sense of humor) say that the British (and their post-1985 Canadian cousins) have won the speaker war that America fought amongst itself in the 1970s. The most highly-regarded speakers of today embody the neutral tonal balance and measured accuracy that the Brits first showed in the 1970s-1980s. They may have lost to the fledgling Colonies in 1776, but they’ve won now. West Coast/East Coast has been shown to be a discredited design approach for serious loudspeakers. Accurate, neutral, musical sound is the correct way to go. After the 1970s, the mainstream British speakers did that first, best and most consistently. It’s not as if the British speakers’ presence forced the American West Coast/East Coast factions to change (independent technological advances and marketing changes-of-heart were largely responsible), but nonetheless, the British influence is unmistakable and indisputable.

No. 9: The Magnepan Magneplanar

All the speakers we’ve discussed so far have had one thing—a big thing—in common: they all use conventional cones and domes to move the air and produce sound. Regardless of how the woofer is loaded into the cabinet, whether or not all the drivers face forward or in some other direction, whether the designers favored first-arrival on-axis performance or used far-field energy response as a performance goal, they all got there by utilizing some variation of a round diaphragm mounted in a metal frame, with some kind of suspension from that frame, a round voice coil attached to the rear side of that diaphragm at either its apex or periphery, residing in a magnetic field provided by a ceramic, alnico or neodymium magnet.

The Magnepan MG 1.6

Welcome to the conventional, familiar dynamic loudspeaker. It has served us well for close to 100 years and will no doubt continue to do so for quite a while longer.  And they’re not just your music system speakers, either: they’re in your iPhone. They’re in your headphones. They’re in your TV. The dynamic speaker with a voice coil and a magnet is everywhere.

Some people feel that there’s a better way. Conventional dynamic drivers, they say, simply have too much mass-induced inertia and can’t start and stop quickly enough to convincingly mimic the immediacy and airiness of real music. Traditional steady-state frequency-response measurements will not reveal a dynamic speaker’s limitations in this area, nor will conventional impulse or tone burst tests.

There is also a feeling among some audio designers that a pinpoint sound source (such as a 5” cone midrange driver or 1” dome tweeter) simply can’t convey the large-dimensioned spatial qualities of real voices and instruments, nor can a forward-facing speaker impart the requisite 3-dimensionality of an actual sonic event.

Considered together—the inertial mass problem, the pinpoint source issue and the radiation pattern limitations—there is simply no way that an ordinary dynamic cone/dome speaker will ever produce a convincingly realistic approximation of a real musical event in a domestic listening space, according to that faction.

Enter the flat panel loudspeaker to the rescue. Whether they’re electrostatics, ribbons or some other technology, the entire genre of large flat panel loudspeakers—those big, ugly, décor-ruining, “look like room dividers” flat panel speakers—are all taking slightly different routes to solve the three main issues we’ve just presented. Solve those, and realistic reproduction in the home is possible. Don’t solve them, and regardless of what the frequency response curves supposedly “prove” and no matter how low the THD measurements are, a conventional box speaker with cone/dome drivers will at best only sound very good—but never like the real thing.

Of the myriad flat panel speakers that have come and gone over the years, using various design approaches to accomplish their goal, one company’s products have been uniquely successful over the long term and have established a solid commercially-viable alternative to the conventional box speaker.

That company is Magnepan and their famous Magneplanar loudspeaker. There have been many versions and models over the years since the company’s first significant commercial products in the mid-1970s, but they’ve all utilized a similar design/form factor: an approximately 6 ft-tall by 2 ft-wide flat panel that radiates sound from that entire surface area in true dipole fashion: equally from the front and rear sides of the panel.

They’re inefficient, requiring a lot of power to produce reasonable loudness levels. Paradoxically, their power-handling capability is very limited, because the planar drivers have very restricted excursion, so if pushed too hard with excessive input power, they’ll distort badly. Their dipole radiation makes them extremely placement-dependent and -sensitive, because the reflected acoustic properties of the surface behind them will influence—for good or bad—half the sound they produce. They tend to be beamy, with an almost flashlight-like restricted sweet spot for listening. Move your head the wrong way out of that sweet spot and the sound dissolves into a total sonic wasteland.

But……properly set up, in the right room, with the correct speaker/listener positioning, driven by good-sounding amplification, flat-panel proponents swear that nothing else even comes close to their realism.

The Magneplanar proudly carries the flat panel flag into battle.

No. 10: The Thiel 3.6

Just prior to the height of the home theater revolution in the mid-late 1990s, expensive, stylish, high-performance two-channel audio reached something of a high water mark. Speakers in this realm, especially, seemed to be notably popular and numerous. Vandersteen, Legacy, NHT 3.3s and 2.9s, the big KEFs and B&Ws, Aerial, Vienna Acoustics, Sonus Faber, Revel and dozens of others made their appearances and enjoyed the limelight for a time. Regrettably, many have since faded away.

The Thiel CS3.6

However, there is one brand of high end speakers whose products have enjoyed both critical acclaim and pretty solid commercial success over a span of more than 20 years: Thiel Audio.

Thiel’s 3.x series of speakers has always been the product family that has offered the greatest high-end performance–to-cost ratio in their lineup. 1993’s Model 3.6 is perhaps the best example of that. Utilizing President/Founder Jim Thiel’s proprietary driver designs, thick-baffled, heavily-braced cabinets, 1st-order crossovers and a choice of beautiful wood veneer finishes, the 3.6 set a standard of performance and looks that truly defined what high end was all about.

Incredibly, they cost under $4,000/pr., an amazingly low price considering the build quality, performance level and expensive, no-compromise componentry.  Many enthusiasts considered Thiel’s beautiful, great-sounding speakers as an attainable next step up into the world of legitimate high end, up from excellent mainstream speakers like top of the line Bostons, Definitives and Polks. The 3.6 was perhaps the very best example of such a speaker, living and thriving in a two-channel market before the multi-channel 5.1/7.1 HT craze took over and permanently relegated serious two-channel music listening to niche status.

Conclusion

There you have it — the 10 Most Influential Speakers of the Last 50 Years. It was very tough to whittle this list down to size and as is always the case with “Best of” or “Most Influential” lists, the omissions will likely produce greater controversy than the inclusions. I changed my mind about the Final 10 more than once, and I had to cut, copy and paste several times as I re-ordered the sequence from 1 to 10.

But I’m very satisfied that this list accurately represents my best thinking on the subject. For now, anyway.  Tell us what you think the top 10 most influential speakers of all time are in our dedicated forum thread.