At times, even those firmly committed to the curmudgeonly lifestyle
—those crusty few who stand stoically aloof from lust and surprise by imagining themselves as having seen and heard it all before; and many times over at that—encounter designs that stoke the embers of wicked desire. Consider the Ensis loudspeakers by new Dutch Aequo Audio brand. Everything about them exudes smarts. There's a narrow 14cm mineral-filled polymer baffle raked back to afford physical time alignment between its two drivers. There's an oval tweeter waveguide machined from aluminium or composite with a phase plug fixed by carbon rod to avoid deformation of the tweeter's centre. There's a 500-watt nCore-powered 10-inch active subwoofer to ease drive requirements on the main amplifier. That now merely sees two small drivers at 90dB sensitivity. There's a sealed alignment to avoid room-boom issues and placement challenges from ports; and to improve the time-domain performance. There are boat hull curvatures and flared panels to eliminate parallel walls. There are compact dimensions to work in actual living rooms. There are ambitious specs to promise complete bandwidth.


Reading up on their web presentation, one further learns that the company are headquartered in Eindhoven which hosted Philips during the company's 1974 heydays of 412'000 employees. Today this area is still described as a hi-tech campus with over 10'000 researchers, developers and entrepreneurs to make the town's Brainport the "smartest square mile in the world". The mention creates virtue by assocation; as though a business in that district guaranteed anything. Whilst hearing remains believing when it comes to hifi, even curmudgeons, however reluctant, should feel compelled to grant this Ensis a very high chance at success; and all purely based on their present marketing materials. Which perhaps only means that their marketeers are doing their job well. For a first sampling in the flesh, there's the HighEnd Munich 2016 show launch next month. I predict this could become quite a head turner...