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Over the years I’ve had the good fortune to listen to and own, some of the best audio equipment in the world. My first truly “high-end” speakers were Infinity Servo-Statik 1 speakers. This was a 3-piece system that consisted of a pair of electrostatic “panels” paired with a 15” servo-controlled powered subwoofer, maybe the first powered subwoofer ever built. They were designed and built in a garage in California by Arnie Nudell, one of the early geniuses in high-end speakers and, for the time, they were revolutionary. And expensive! In 1971 they were $2100! And I was lucky to own a set.

A few years later, I started working at a local hi-fi store, where we introduced the Dahlquist DQ-10 speakers. Jon Dahlquist was the chief engineer and his business partner was the legendary Saul Marantz. I had the good fortune of spending several days with Mr. Marantz and learned that he was truly dedicated to building products that delivered exceptional quality AND value. For the better part of a decade the DQ-10’s were the best value in audio at about $1,000 for a pair. They didn’t reproduce deep bass, the highs were OK, but they sounded like music more so than almost any other speaker at the time. 

In the mid 1980’s I had the good fortune to spend time with the chief engineer behind the KEF Reference series, Mr. Laurie Fincham. Laurie refused to accept the conventional wisdom and through breakthrough research raised the bar on speaker performance culminating in the legendary KEF Reference series model 107. The 107’s may have been the first speaker to truly reproduce the full range of music, in terms of frequency range, dynamics and realistic stereo image. With careful placement and setup, a pair of KEF 107’s was something special. They were around $4500 a pair in 1990

Fast-forward to 2015 and my latest chapter in high-performance speakers. For those of you who don’t already know, PSB is a Canadian speaker company founded by Paul Barton. Some of you have met Paul at events at Gramophone, but may not know his story. Paul combines a love of music (he’s a violinist) with a deep scientific knowledge of speaker design and acoustics. Paul has focused his efforts for years on building incredible value into all of his speakers but has been reluctant to market a “no-holds barred” speaker. After much pushing and prodding Paul was convinced to put everything he knew into a speaker without regards for price. The result is my latest discovery, the PSB Imagine T3.

The new Imagine T3 does things so effortlessly and seems to work well almost wherever it’s placed. The Imagine T3 is a tower speaker standing 48” tall with 5 drivers, each of them in a separate enclosure inside the slender cabinet. The three lower drivers cover the low bass region with a unique design Paul developed. Each one covers an ascending range of frequencies as you move closer to the tweeter and midrange. The position of the woofers and their crossover has been carefully designed to minimize floor reflections. Paul notes that this is a serious problem for almost all speaker designs that do not account for it. By using 3 smaller drivers to get the same surface area as one large driver, Paul is able to have faster bass that is also more even. By positioning the woofers at three different spots in the vertical plane, he’s able to reduce room interaction that can lead to a one note bass sound rather than the crisp, extended bass that these speakers deliver. 

The result in a word is . . . amazing. We demonstrated these in November at both Gramophone showrooms and the reaction was so good that we have been unable to keep up with the demand. At $7500 for a pair they’re not cheap, but they offer a level of performance that I believe cannot be matched for less than $25,000! I’m making a place for them at my house as soon as we fill our wait list. You owe it to yourself to take a listen. (And if the T3 is a little too much, good news, there’s a T2 for less than ½ the price!)

-Brian