Spendor Classic 200 Speakers, EX-DEMO Cherry

Take a look at the way the Classic 200s are designed and the retro BBC-inspired engineering principles become obvious. The most obvious example is the thin-walled cabinet construction.

Most current speaker designs set out to have as rigid a cabinet as possible, based around the idea that if the cabinet is super-solid, it won’t vibrate and distort the output from the drive units. However, that isn’t quite what happens.

Making the cabinet rigid simply pushes up the frequency at which it vibrates, increasing the chance of this resonance falling high in the midrange where our hearing is at its most sensitive.

The BBC’s method is to use a heavily damped, thin-walled construction which accepts the cabinet will resonate and tries to move that vibration to the bass region where our ears are less bothered by it.

This is the largest loudspeaker that Spendor have ever made and it appears to be a throwback ... one wonders how it can be in the same $30K league as super techs like Dynaudio or artisinal beauties like Sonus faber. However this is designed as a unit and has a massive unfussy presentation that is smooth with deeply effortless bass.

Although the cabinet is made by hand using these original BBC design principles the drive units are absolutely state of art.