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The smaller listening room during our visit sported three wall-mounted turntables, Canary Audio 300B monos, Kondo 211 monos, a Kondo M7 preamp and Resolution Audio's Opus 21 and new Cantata digital sources.
This wall shows a very small section of the Scotts' music library.
As the foyer suggested already, the folks at Living Voice enjoy very comfortable working conditions.
These turntables are not prone to foot-fall interference. From left to right, they were
an SME-30, a Kuzma XL both with IOM cartridges and an SME-10 all with Kondo silver-wired tone arms and power supplies.
Room N°.1 is a lovely auditorium.
Living Voice Avatar OBX-RW speakers are also what the Scotts listen to in their home - albeit driven from a Kondo Ongaku integrated with a top-line C.E.C. belt-drive player.

The bigger room housed the first exploratory pair of Vox Olympians whose crossover until a day prior to our visit was a deliberately clip-lead infested breadboard affair rather than hard-wired enclosure. Since photographing an open crossover would have given away secrets, the speakers' brains had now been hidden in closed boxes with access lids. The production speaker of course seals its crossovers in two discrete sub enclosures inside the bass cabinet. More on this in the listening impressions.
Kevin Scott on the couch for a bit of perspective.
These speakers were driven from Kondo Gaku-Oh push/pull 300B amps,
a Kondo M-77 linestage and Resolution Audio Opus 21 CD player.
An angled side view.
From behind, with a Living Voice G8 equipment rack between the speakers, temporary subwoofers to the outsides.
That back wall is jam-packed with LPs.
As shown on a previous page, production has completely tidied up the rear view with bronze end caps.
The nested super tweeter with exposed worm drive wheel.
The 45° outwards rotation of the super tweeter is locked and optimized for widest dispersion.
Unlike the production pair, the wood finish on this first pair was open grain.
The Italian cloth for this grill was specially commissioned and knitted.

On what music he uses to fine-tune a speaker design once he's nominally happy with its performance, Kevin pulled out a few quick samples from his stack. He's particularly fond of the Vivaldi's Gloria, Händel's Utrecht Te Deum & Jubilate disc.


"What I look for are many many musicians at the top of their game in a stupendous performance. The whole of that is very difficult for any hifi system to reproduce. This particular recording has masses of voices covering the full range. It’s got female vocal duos, oboe bassoon duos, counterpoint, unison playing, boys' chorus, nice natural acoustics with period instruments, an extremely difficult score and unusual string tone.


"I love mezzo soprano, soprano in general and Schubert's Lieder. That Mahler is a little bit rich and dark but a great musical performance and as such very insightful. I really like Christina Schäfer's Winterreise. But I use a broad range of albums. I wouldn’t want to rely on just one recording. The recordings are as individual in their character as any items of hifi equipment."


As should be clear by now, Kevin & Lynn Scott are very serious music lovers as well as successful hifi retailers well removed from the high street paradigm. They are also entrepreneurial and highly resourceful developers of unusual loudspeakers whose ambitions were groomed by their longstanding ownership of the Kondo franchise. This all pooled quite inevitably into the Vox Olympian project. It explains why this speaker couldn't possibly feature a fixed sub-bass system—that will be built from a menu of options to suit the owner's room—and why it had to incorporate very extensive adjustments that go well beyond the expected on both facility and the effects on the playback experience.