I know that close to no-one here would know anything about my main speakers, Ino Audio pi60s-s, so I think they deserve a little presentation.
Ino Audio is a cellar company in Stockholm, Sweden, that has been making speakers in small scale for a long time. It was started as a private psycho-acoustic research institute, but the participating listeners started bringing their own music along for the breaks to play on the research speakers and then they started asking to buy a pair for home... and it slowly evolved into a small company in 1984.
1977 pre-test version
But it already had the cabinet shape in place in 1978:
Only physical shape change done since, as far as I know, is that the port placement was moved. Speaker elements have been changed and improved since, for a long time now Ino Audio has been designing their own speakers, sourcing useful parts from different places and having them made for them when nothing appropriate could be aquired. Ino Audio was as far as I know the first brand to use titanium voicecoil formers, which at that time had to be acquired in the Soviet union... Today all assembly of Ino Audio elements is made by Scanspeak, Denmark.
Given the extremely limited production capacity, there's never been done anything to please customers that goes against how Ingvar Öhman wants them himself, therefore all models are voiced as closely to each other as possible, with pi60s as the reference. Reasons for going for other models are purely based on other parameters such as size, placement possibilities, capacity limits and cost. But you never need to worry about the sonic character when changing models, but of course the smaller they are, the more limitations they have.
Enough "2nd hand marketing"...
pi denotes it being fullrange, 60 is the cabinet volume and s is for signature.
Mine are pi60s-s with the last suffix was the meaning "stone". There are two such speakers in existence, the one I have and a different model i68es-s, both having the cabinet made by stone "artist" Mikael Sjölund aka "Komorok". The model did not exist prior as the cabinet was privately made to go with the official DIY-kit (where you get a pre-built but not necessarily finished, laminated, MDF-cabinet normally ), but was adopted into the model line and christened once they were completed and officially tested. I'd be quite surprised if another pair will ever be made, though.
The stone they are built in are Madagascar Green, which is a Labradorite, and Nero Assoluto which is granite. They are sandwiched internally- laminated with the same dampening glue as the regular signature model is.
Some pics from the construction, taken by Komorok himself:
Murphy won't let a project like this go unpunished, so it turned out that the measurements for the port had become wrong, exactly how I don't know. But Komorok isn't one to give up, so pieces of the right size was taken out and turned - yielding a design feature that most likely won't even be repeated in the process.
Personally I think it just lends extra character breaking the surface up a bit.
Here's the amazing stone artist celebrating them back in 2009:
He later went on to sell them and embark on building the largest model in the Ino series...
Looks may be deceiving, but this model is just a "top", not a full range speaker... for use above an 80-Hz crossover. They weigh in at a quarter ton, while mine just an eighth of a ton.
Myself, I still run mine part of the time as tops too, but it's an easy flip of a switch on the active crossover to run them full range.
Another thing to mention... they are (I say "of course") neither on spikes nor standing on the floor - they are on weight-matched soft feet for an extremely low resonance point. So while they can easily be moved by a pinky, but you can hardly register any vibration in them while playing music - have had my iPhone on top of them running a seismography app while playing really loud - still flat-lined.