Qualio in the public eye. LAiV Audio's social media pages show their Singapore show system with Qualio's original IQ run off their 120W/4Ω Chorus monos which I had just reviewed and awarded. When a popular electronics brands picks your speakers for public demonstrations, it's not only free publicity. It's a lovely endorsement. Here is how that fact settled down reader Arnold.

Quanteen delivery by wooden crate strapped to a half palette was uneventful and transpired by regular white FedEx van, no oversized lorry required. The cloth-bagged monitors slipped out of thick foam cradles, the open baffles from their own protectors whilst 8 long bolts and one hex key in a small drawstring pouch asked for minimal assembly. Even though I should have known from the dimensions already published, Quanteen was smaller than expected to slot into my home office to perfection. The gloss grey lacquer was a stylish surprise.

The rear port is of relatively small diameter. The single-wire terminals are elite WBT issue, the bottoms unmarred by rubber bumpers. The sleeved tweeter lead terminating in a top-quality XLR3 Oyaide plug is not a millimetre longer than it must be to make for a very tidy hookup. To move from these basics to smelling Quanteen's spirit requires picking up a thread still hanging from the prior page: the widebander aspect. To all the genre unfamiliars—sadly the vast majority—whatever one says about it remains pure conjecture. If wonky measurements accompanied a particular widebander review, it became excellent reason to never do actual listening. For every Herb Reichert then who is hip to and deeply enchanted by Voxativ's Alberich², ten other reviewers actively resist single-driver assignments. Enter the proverb "what we don't know can't hurt us". Remind the venomous snake you never heard of but disturbed on vacation. Convince the tax collector why not learning of changes to your obligations should exempt you from late fees or repossession. Getting hurt by things we're ignorant about happens all the time. How about being pleased by what we don't know? Pleasure is an experience. Experience becomes synonymous with knowing even without hard intel. A foreign song can thrill us whilst understanding neither the lyrics nor learning of the singer's or song's name. Our enjoyment needs none of it. We just must listen. Ditto widebanders. Without experiencing them, we can't know what they're about. But we can certainly collect copious counter propaganda to explain why they're a bad idea. Here Quanteen is a sneaky operator. It doesn't look like a widebander. Its supplier doesn't even market the main driver as such. Then the box is compact and ported, two things most widebanders aren't. There's no giveaway whizzer. There are two drivers in fact. They make this an obvious 2-way like thousands of others. One can look at and listen to Quanteen without one single-driver presumption muddying the waters or cancelling an audition. As I said—very sneaky.

Once we do lend ears to our 2-way untainted by specific expectations—the stand-off dipole tweeter obviously differs from the norm but we filed it neatly away as being one of its two ways—we get a full widebander hit without understanding it to be that; or what makes it so. The experience is self validating. Explaining it comes later; if we insist. As a reviewer I'm obliged to insist not just professionally. By temperament I can't help but attempt to correlate effect with probable cause. In this case, extensive prior exposure to the genre quickly turned probability to certainty. I heard the innate tell. But as always, descriptions are mere pointers. If we never experienced the absence of box talk with an open-baffle speaker and only know ported or sealed sound, the entire subject remains pure theory. Likewise for rare cardioid versus ubiquitous omni bass. These are alternate realities to mainstream sound. Ditto classic widebanders.