I've always liked geography and enjoy learning about the associations certain countries have with certain people, products and pastimes. Switzerland is known for its banks and timepieces. France has grapes: Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir, among many. Germany has Beethoven, Porsche and BMW. Canada has hockey, forests, tundra... and loudspeakers. It wasn't always so.It would take the cooperative efforts of several other audio firms and the Canadian National Research Council (NRC) to bring it and fellow concerns such as Energy, Mirage, Paradigm and PBS into the high-end mainstream. In 1977, the Canadian National Research Council (NRC) announced it would be hosting a study to determine the measurable parameters people associate with good-sounding speakers. The study ran to 1986, and several Canadian loudspeaker manufacturers, including Energy, participated. According to Energy, “flat frequency response, wide dispersion and low distortion consistently scored ...

It's hard to imagine an audio world without the name “Klipsch” in the vocabulary. By all accounts, Klipsch founder Paul Klipsch was a one-off – a man with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and discovery that resulted in speaker concepts and designs that still exist decades after inking the first blueprints. In high-end audio, few things last long enough to become buzzwords or achieve classic status. Audiophiles often speak in hushed tones of reverence for Marantz's 10B tuner, Dynaco's ST-70 amplifier and Acoustic Research's AR turntables. That list must certainly include the Klipschorn – Paul Klipsch's venerable loudspeaker design still capturing the imagination and ears of audio enthusiasts as we approach the year 2010. It's a remarkable accomplishment that spits in the face of such technological “upgrades” as Windows 7 and other patches to fix what was never whole to ...

As a kid I my family took a trip from my home in Beavercreek, Ohio, to Boulder, Colorado, for a visit with my mom's relatives. On the way we stopped in St. Louis, Missouri, for a day to take in a Cardinals baseball game and journey to the top of the St. Louis Arch. I was a huge baseball fan and any chance to catch a game outside my “home” Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati seemed as cosmopolitan an experience as a 10-year-old could imagine. Couple that with a story I had read about a guy who tried to catch a baseball dropped from the top of the arch, only to end up with a broken jaw, heightened the anticipation. It was a surreal ride, though, clumbering up the arch's 630 feet of curvature via an enclosed tram. The little cars ...

In 1972, the German speaker company known as Canton was first formed. From the outset, the engineers at Canton have been designing high-end speaker system that can replicate a ‘live’ performance from the London Philharmonic just as easily as it can reproduce the bombs and explosions emanating from an action-packed Blu-Ray DVD’s soundtrack for a truly electrifying home theater experience. The rest of the home audio industry took note of what Canton was doing, and in 1995 Canton was awarded the “European Audio Award” for best audio innovation when Canton manufactured their first digital speaker line earlier in that same year. Audio engineers the world over recognized that these new digital speakers would create true musical reproduction in home audio that most engineers could only dream about just a year before. And Canton would not stop there. Just three years ...

Germany is world-renowned for their contribution to the world when it comes to immaculate automobile design (BMW & Porsche), but Germany also contains an exceptional audio manufacturer that consistently hits the top ten with most audio critics when it comes to designing floor standing speakers, center channel speakers and their Digital Movie Series of loudspeakers which are specifically designed for home theater use. Even before the company was founded in 1972, the main four men who created Canton were working in the field of audio design for many years and each founding member was a huge enthusiast when it came to audio. The Canton name roughly translates to mean “To sing music” in English, so you can see how much passion for the musical element of audio design these founders were bringing to the world even in the nascent beginnings ...