The story of how many years they spent just working on the physical interface between the coaxial tweeter and midrange is fascinating. They were working on that since before KEF’s patent expired apparently.Great reply! I suspect the Chinese will move more into the loudspeaker space more over the next few years. They have been electronics for a while now, and IAG Group (which makes Mission, Wharfedale, Quad) is headquartered in China. At the moment they are making mass market speakers with a few high end brands, but have yet (to my knowledge) moved into speakers that we would consider to be objectively good, like KEF's, Kii's, Dutch&Dutch, and so on. I hope they make speakers that are priced like Toppings and SMSL but perform like Genelecs. If anybody can do it, they can.
Designing this stuff is not child’s play.
Funny thing is that performance and quality don’t really sell. IAG would be perfectly happy just selling their brand name products and change up the looks every so often.
Looks sell more than performance sadly.
It’s the new disruptive companies making quality stuff now. Nobody has even heard of them. Kii audio? What’s that? Dutch and Dutch? Is that a hot chocolate?
Only Genelec has both history and cutting edge technology. Neumann too.
Consumer audio had always been a joke. Probably only KEF and Revel are the only ones that do quality. I wouldn’t have even known that without this site.
All the real innovation is in the studio monitor scene. These new products are targeted at producers. Not consumers.