The Shelf Speaker

The shelf speaker is smaller than the floorstanding one; the term "shelf" is not justified because this type of speaker is not necessarily placed on a shelf. Shelf speakers should ideally be placed about 70 cm from the side wall and between 30 cm and 50 cm from the rear wall, so that a sound stage with width and depth develops. We stock shelf speaker kits from all major driver manufacturers.

Alcone by RCM

• Highly recommendable is the small all-round speaker Lagrange XT, featured by the magazine Klang+Ton in combination with subwoofer Sub 28 as Trio Ideale.
• More reasonably priced solutions are the kits Mini (picture above left), Mini 65 and with higher output Dirac Satellite
• Due to its ribbon tweeter the Nova is a speaker with brilliant three-dimensionality while the high-end project Lagrange 98 - equipped with ScanSpeak tweeter - shows an excellent attention to detail.
• If you are looking for a 3 way shelf speaker with bass than we recommend Cauchy.

Remo Cattaneo

Newtronics

The Magazine Hobby HiFi

• A big mover is the Minimon with Expolinear magnetostat.

The Magazine Klang+Ton

• for years a big seller, the small horn CT 193
• as well as the Monacor satellite CT 224
• equipped with a reasonably priced Tangband full range driver, the Mini CT 209 (picture right) is very popular with full range enthusiasts.
  

For absolute top reproduction of high frequencies many of our customers require an Air Motion Transformer (AMT) or a ceramic dome tweeter.

• the AMT is dealt with in High-End Workshop Duetta Top
• ceramic cones: oxidised aluminium cones by Accuton/Thiel in Ceram.

Seas, Excel, Peerless and Eton by Intertechnik

Especially interesting are the higher quality speakers starting off with a reasonable priced, neutral sounding Peerless speaker:

• MS Micro 2006 with Seas drivers, a popular speaker, especially for more demanding applications
• Talar with Seas and Excel drivers, a very popular speaker, especially for more demanding applications
• Etona 4, with Eton drivers, a highly recommended speaker for those who require an Air-Motion-Transformer for airy tops.
  

Jim Thiel and Bernhard Thiel - high fidelity at its best (especially for jazz, classical music)

Jim Thiel in the USA manufactures the high-end loudspeakers carrying his name. For his finished loudspeakers he is using a driver that surpasses all other drivers we know. This driver, called coincidentally mounted driver (coincident source array), is a special type of coax driver (where tweeter and midrange driver are mounted behind one another on the same horizontal axis). Jim Thiel goes one step further: he mounts tweeter and midrange not only on the same horizontal but also on the same vertical axis. This design produces a sound with a quality never heard before.

A kit suggested by Hobby HiFi: the Cumulus Satellite, an ideal point source and if more bass is needed: Cumulus Satellite/Centre

After Cumulus Satellite One Point Monitor was presented in HiFi World in Gelsenkirchen (exhibition) and tested in the journal Klang+Ton 6/2005.

For the HiFi-Music-World 2005 in Gelsenkirchen a small Cumulus with bass was needed: One Point Monitor was born.

Scan Speak Scan Speak is the manufacturer whose drivers are found most in finished loudspeakers costing more than 10.000 EUR. kits are available like the Studio 12 (picture left), according to our customers one of the best speakers in this size (incl. finished speakers). One of the ScanSpeak developer today produces his tweeters on his own. The brand is Hiquphon. Remo Cattaneo of Swizzerland developed with Hiquphon Sima la Piccola.

Visaton

Particularly recommendable kits by Visaton:

• Aria or Aria 2 (picture right), a small shelf speaker with high quality mid / bass driver
• the Couplet with more bass, also available with magnetostat tweeter or the slightly cheaper Couplet Light.
• the Alto 1, a popular, reasonably priced shelf speaker

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