Stereophile reviews the active Grimm LS1C

A day before I started a thread on active speakers Stereophile published a review on the fully active Grimm LS1C. Fully configured (upper and lower sections) you are looking at $30k for a pair or more depending on finish.

There’s a lot I like about the design here, except the price, of course:

• It’s aesthetically pleasing and doesn’t look like a monolith. It’s thin (front to back) and open.
• Wide baffle (I’d rather have a wide speaker than narrow)
• Woofer positioned very close to the ground.
• Excellent off-axis performance ( a rare thing in high end speakers ) both horizontally and vertically.
• Excellent recommendations for listening position and speaker angle given the tweeter used

I’m not sure I care about having a "perfect" response curve. Personally my choices have always been to apply EQ sparingly. There are systems like Dirac for instance that can hammer a speaker into measured frequency domain perfection but it’s the time domain performance that I find interesting.

The subwoofer is a bit of a mystery though. They make a big deal of the tweeter and midwoofer but the driver used in the sub is not listed. Given the size and claimed low end extension I suspect they are relying on the DSP to compensate for a cabinet that would otherwise be too small.

Would be really interesting to hear who has heard them and who would think this speaker was for them.