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Efficiency effects. My personal widebander experience sits eye to eye with Eist's claims for transistorized happiness. The Dubh is rated like my Swiss soundkaos Wave 40; or the conceptually related TuneAudio Prime from Greece. Those 92/93dB designs loved my FirstWatt and Crayon amps. By the time I hit on 100dB like my former Voxativ Ampeggio or various Rethms however, valves did seem distinctly preferable. It appears that such high sensitivity from single drivers not generated by Avantgarde-style front horns nets exaggerated dynamic contrast for the presence region. In tandem with what might be steeper rise times from transistor amps, this can make for a spicier needlier presentation that's a bit too incisive and sharp in the critical upper midrange. Whatever the exact tech reasons for this observation, it seems quite predictable and shared by makers of such speakers (both Voxativ and Rethm also make electronics and not surprisingly with tubes). More normal efficiency for a widebander opens the doors to transistor amps. In general those suffer less or no self noise. This compounds into a very real advantage over the more exotic 100dB brigade which favours tubes but acts like a magnifying glass on their noise particularly on no-feedback triodes with AC heaters. As the wise men keep telling us, there is sanity in moderation. Excess is imbalanced. Here sanity applies to size and cost too. Time to take a closer look.*
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* Given that we can't look inside the Dubh box, the above view on Strad Audio's Lemda cab nicely shows the principle of a rear horn albeit executed with unusually fluid rather than angular folds.


At left we see a stacked construction also with rounded transitions and exhibiting the gradual flare common to all rear horns.


At right we see the most common form of execution. It uses straight braces arrayed in various angles. This achieves a similar progression of a constantly expanding line behind the driver whose overall length is disguised by multiple folds. This naturally tends to leave certain small sections of the cabinet empty or unused. The Dubh horn sports a single bend we're told.


Whilst Eist's shipping cartons wouldn't survive the - er, rigours of US transportation, they did just fine in less destructive Europe. As this photo shows, the boxes are very compact and as such barely bigger than the goods inside.

Unpeeling them netted the first surprise. "Filthy!" They were dusty as hell. Some Windex and chamois cloth took care of it but first impressions do count. Whilst no piano finish—having owned the Voxativ Ampeggios made by Schimmel Piano I know the difference—the high-gloss black baffle did buff out nicely. The corpus did not. It remained a bit mottled and streaky as in the next photo. The partial top-down view shows a T-type cross section with a wider rectangular baffle mounted to a narrower box finished at the bottom with a protruding rounded-off plinth. Just above it is the slot terminus, about halfway up sit the terminals with the company sticker and serial number above it. Overall height? If you're 6.1" or 186cm with standard arms, the Dubh's top will about rest under your open hand held horizontally with a straight arm.

With a different driver mount ring to obscure maker and model number, our aluminium 4-incher with the trademark inverted rubber surround and bullish center 'knob' did look exactly like the Mark Audio Alpair7 our reader identified. So we'll stick with that (it's actually called Alpair 7.3 now). As you can see, it mounts flush with the baffle but into a bigger recess that leaves an about 5mm gap all around. The square grills mount with tiny magnets.

The plinths sport 3 spike receptacles though I didn't get any included hardware. Without spikes—or spikes used at equal lengths—the Dubh naturally leans back by about 5°, i.e. its box isn't a conventional right-angle affair but a minor trapezoid with horizontal top and bottom and slanted front and back. "We don't supply spikes. There are such a multitude of them out there, from my own favourites (ceraballs) to the cheapo threaded rods on eBay. We could have gone and bought and included some as a token but it would be just that - a token."


Wrapping up my visual inspection, I'd call the DIY-turned-pro Eist Audio Dubh rather better finished than Ed Schilling's The Hornshoppe horn but not up to the standards yet of say a China-sourced also gloss-black Sonus faber Venere. And that's perfectly fair and expected given this origin story.