Unconventional speaker designs

Just for fun, what is the most unconventional speaker design you have seen?

For me it was the B&W Nautilus until I spotted a pair of Neat Acoustic MFS Ultimatums for sale last week with super-tweeters lodged in the top. It made me wonder, what other interesting designs have you seen that are a bit out of the ordinary?

Nautilus

MFS Ultimatums


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Love the Nautilus design, though I suspect they would now be outperformed by more recent models.

The B&W Emphasis speakers were a fascinating concept too; as seen on the cover of The Art of Noise’s Below the Waste (1989):
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There are claims that Madonna bought a pair…

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MBL Radialstrahler, high WAF

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Guy Lamotte’s FL1 that Naim almost launched…

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Boenicke W8: CNC’d from solid wood with a suspension isolation system that includes ball bearings and steel cable.

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They almost made it to the market but then Guy demanded that the must be called Guylottines.

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The MBLs might top this one, though I came across these a while ago when considering alternatives to my NBLs, which I expected not to work in my current, and I hope Final room, that suffers from plasterboard walls.

Avantage Audio Césars, there are paired and opposed full rangers aimed at deflectors and a sealed enclosure 10” downfiring bass drive at the bottom. They were around €12, I’ve actually heard these and was planning a home demo until I got the NBLs to work in my room.

Another one I found intriguing but didn’t get to hear is the German Physiks Unicorn.

Another omni but using horn loading for the bass. Their borderland model uses the same omni driver but adds a separate bass driver and sealed loading.

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Maybe first you have to define conventional in this context! E.g., though horns these days are not mainstream, and often don’t fit a box enclosure, if you go back 50 years or more you’ll find a lot of horn designs, including concrete horns built underground with huge mouths opening into room corners, and commercial designs including complex folded horns such as the Klipshorn. One I find interesting today, certainly unusual, is the Ferguson-Hill Jetstream - large but hardly imposing:


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I think the fact that the FL1 prototypes were a fire hazard had something to do with it too.

Avantgarde Acoustic Zero 1 Pro.

Active three-way speakers with a spherical-horn-loaded tweeter and midrange, and a direct-radiating cone woofer. All housed in an arty enclosure made of a sandwich of polyurethane foams.

Each of the Zero 1’s three drivers is powered by its own built-in amplifier, the tweeter and the midrange use 50W, zero-negative-feedback, Class A solid-state amps and a 400W Class D amplifier is used to power the woofer.

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A new local dealer has a pair of these traded in and was ready to offer them to me at a steal of a price. I don’t however think they’ll fit in my room without building an extension and he suggested I didn’t listen to them otherwise I’d want to find a way to take them home :joy:

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I’ve heard that they were to expensive to produce ,with the extreme small tolerances involved.
Maybe possible now when prices on speakers have gone mad…

One of the earliest oddballs and one I will always be fond of: the Bose 901. 8 rear facing drivers, one front, with the cabinet internally bisected into two folded transmission lines.

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From a similar era, the JBL Paragon. I saw one for sale in a department store in Tokyo a while back. Lovingly restored. Cost as much as a small house or expensive sports car.

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Not the strangest but definitely different and I have at least heard them. They were a fascinating listen. Shahinian Larcs. Tiny boxes.

Bruce

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Dude that bottom one beats DBLs for ugly lol.

DBLs aren’t ugly, it’s wardrobe chic.

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Haha, well thats wardrobe chic with a bootie.

They axed it at that point ? Must have been a real pain in the neck!

Now, that’s what I call a woofer!

Larsons.

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Look like an office shredder!

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