Listening is cool again. Now let’s make it sound good.

Q: What is “speaker slop”?

A term used by the thing Magazine for loudspeakers used as fashion or interior props, where the look of good sound matters more than the sound itself.

A view from the establishment

Michael Kraske
Credo Audio Switzerland

Loudspeakers are visible again. Valentino opened a listening room on Madison Avenue, Louis Vuitton and Celine built their shows around custom sound systems, Spotify opened a listening lounge in London, and listening bars from Seoul to Berlin to New York are designed around their speakers. As the thing Magazine put it: listening has become cool.

The same article also named the downside: “speaker slop”, loudspeakers used as props, where the look of good sound matters more than the sound itself. It is worth reading.

I would like to add a view from the other side of the room. I am the second generation at Credo. I grew up with this industry, have worked in it for three decades, and carry my parents’ experience along with my own. In other words: we are the establishment. And our industry is not in great shape.

01 · The mirror

Our industry did this to itself.

Before we say anything about the new scene, we owe an honest look at our own.

For decades, the established high-end world tried to communicate superiority through specifications, materials, components and ever more elaborate constructions. At the same time, it damaged itself with dubious claims, questionable accessories, a certain self-absorption, and more than a few mediocre products with six-figure price tags. Many of its leading figures are well past seventy, and the industry has made itself remote and hard to approach.

So if the establishment now looks at the new speaker scene with a mix of irritation and envy, it should at least be honest about the envy. Put sharply: one side may have forgotten how to create excitement. The other has not yet learned how to build good loudspeakers.

02 · The new scene

Why it wins hearts.

For decades, audio moved in one direction: smaller, more invisible, more interchangeable. Now designers, artists and music lovers, many of them my age or a little younger, are discovering loudspeakers as objects worth looking at. Devon Turnbull’s OJAS horn systems have been shown in galleries and built for Supreme. In Paris, Matéo Garcia designs sound systems for Celine’s shows and for artists like James Blake. In Berlin, H.A.N.D. HiFi builds horn installations for listening bars such as Trader HiFi. In New York, Friendly Pressure built speakers for Stone Island; in Seoul, Evening Audio built a speaker wall for Post Archive Faction.

They are not selling frequency responses. They are selling a place, a community, visible craft and an object you want to be near. We should not judge anyone for that. Curiosity is how all of us began.

And for some new listeners, it may genuinely not matter whether a system meets our idea of accurate reproduction. They buy an object, a story, a sense of belonging, a certain way of experiencing music. That is legitimate. We should just not pretend that it is automatically a new technical achievement.

Why do some technically mediocre loudspeaker projects spark an excitement that many technically excellent makers have not reached in years?

03 · Where it goes wrong

Enthusiasm is not competence.

A new enthusiasm for loudspeakers is not the same as a new competence in building them. Some in this scene take the engineering seriously. Behind them follows a wave of would-be developers who copy the look rather than the thinking: a horn here, a DSP module there, a 3D-printed shape, a good photograph, and a price tag. Once an experiment becomes a product, it is fair to expect that the acoustic function is taken as seriously as the design. I have heard a number of these systems. Some have obvious flaws.

Horns. Adopting a historic design principle does not mean understanding the work behind it. The classic horn systems were created when amplifier power was scarce, so efficiency often mattered more than linear reproduction, controlled dispersion or a compact build. Some of their problems were known even then, and even some of the revered classics, multicellular horns among them, never convinced us. Reverence is not a measurement. Reproducing the same problems today, with better drivers, simulation and measurement at hand, can simply mean skipping decades of learning.

DSP. Done well, digital signal processing is a legitimate tool. But in a great many of the new horn systems, there is simply an off-the-shelf class-D DSP module inside. That is the exact opposite of what the original horn systems stood for, and what later reference designs refined: an acoustic solution so efficient and so well controlled that a few clean watts are enough. Putting a generic DSP module behind a historic horn is, frankly, absurd. And no filter drawn on a screen can remove poor dispersion, diffraction or non-linear distortion.

3D printing. That a complex shape can be made easily does not mean it makes acoustic sense. Manufacturing possibilities are not development goals.

04 · What we take from it

Excitement and competence, together.

The answer to that question matters more for the future of a company like ours than how bad some of these horn systems really sound.

The opportunity lies between the two poles. Not in suddenly building retro horns or printed sculptures, but in understanding what moves this new generation, emotionally and culturally, without giving up a single technical standard.

Our own answer, for now, is the one we have always given: a loudspeaker should be quiet in appearance, precise when you look closely, and moving when you listen. Measured honestly, so you know why it sounds the way it does. And made to be lived with, not only looked at.

If listening has become cool, then let’s make it sound good.

Michael Kraske, Credo Audio Switzerland

Questions and answers

Questions people ask.

What is “speaker slop”?

A term used by the thing Magazine for loudspeakers used as fashion or interior props, where the look of good sound matters more than the sound itself.

What do established loudspeaker makers think of the designer speaker trend?

Speaking for Credo: we welcome the new visibility of loudspeakers and the places built around listening. We are critical of products that copy the look without the engineering. And we think our own industry has to ask itself why it lost so many listeners.

Are horn speakers bad?

No. Horns can sound excellent when they are carefully engineered. Copying a historic horn shape without that engineering, however, often brings back its known weaknesses: colouration and uneven dispersion.

Can DSP fix a flawed loudspeaker?

Only partly. DSP can correct a great deal, but not poor dispersion into the room, cabinet diffraction or non-linear distortion. Those have to be solved in the acoustic design.