John
Glastonbury. Fields and festivities. Cows and chords. Mud and music. For the UK’s iFi Audio, the iconic UK music festival is synonymous with epically wide soundstaging. A quality that, according to company CEO and founder Thorsten Loesch, can be found at the core of his company’s forthcoming loudspeaker-in-a-box.
Giving us widescreen performance are a pair of side-firing drivers, a pair of front-firing drivers and – added since the unit’s Munich High-End debut – a pair of downward-facing passive radiators. Feed it music via Bluetooth, WiFi, Ethernet, USB stick, microSD card, a raft of digital inputs or an analogue input.
However, until its development is fully completed and the product formally named, this bamboo-wrapped loudspeaker goes (internally) by the codename of Glastonbury.
As with many other products of this type, Loesch has included proximity sensors so that the iFi loudspeaker can automatically adjust its sound profile according to how close it is placed to rear- and side-walls. Unusually for many other products of this type, these sonic adjustments – like the Glastonbury speaker’s crossover – aren’t executed via DSP but with entirely analogue components.
In this seven-minute video interview, Loesch expands upon the Glastonbury speaker’s numerous technical smarts and explains why we’re now seeing iFi Audio considerably up its industrial design game:
Off camera, our Jacobean German cowboy says that he’s aiming to bring his new speaker to market for approximately US$1200. That would put it right next to the Naim mu-so and Devialet Phantom to provide another option for the music-loving but design-conscious apartment dweller.
Further information: iFi Audio
