Living with the Living Voice OBX-RW4 –

Or… the RW25 part deux!

By Roy Gregory

Certain facts come with almost guaranteed implications.

The Living Voice Auditorium speakers have been in continuous production for over quarter of a Century. (They must be doing something seriously right!)

Outwardly, they look almost identical to those original models. (Under the skin, there’s not a single component that hasn’t been changed or upgraded through choice or force majeur!)

That original model spawned a range of five, almost indistinguishable products, ranging from around £6,000 to over £15,000. (Living Voice clearly doesn’t listen to marketing advice!)

Okay, so it’s easy to be facetious, but let’s not for a moment underestimate just how impressive it is for any product to achieve a 25-year lifespan. Yes, pretty much everything has changed, from drive units and cross-over components to cabinet materials/construction and finishes. But the original concept – the speaker’s dimensions and topology – has remained identical, as has the rationale behind (and demonstrable steps in) the ascending ladder of performance delivered by the different models. Get the fundamentals right and a designer can build on them with better components and better drivers, or niceties like an external crossover.

What are those fundamentals? A D’Appolito driver array that combines a classic 29mm soft-dome tweeter with a pair of 170mm bass-mid units, using paper cones and the two-way topology to maintain sensitivity and an easy load (Although in reality, the term ‘efficiency’ better captures what these speakers are about.) The timelessly attractive dimensions of a box that was prescient in its adoption of a narrow baffle and greater depth. Enough bass to satisfy on a musical level – not enough to get the speakers into trouble in the solid but smallish rooms so typical of European housing. Originally intended as an affordable partner for the low-ish powered tube amps sold by the company’s retail arm, Definitive Audio, it soon became apparent that this particular ‘golden ratio’ of musical, physical and electrical characteristics worked in almost any scenario and with almost any partnering equipment. The original Auditorium was – and the current models still are – quite literally, a speaker for the ages…

A new dawn…

The arrival of the R25, a new base model in the range, was both a triumph and a challenge. The 25th anniversary speaker delivered a step-change in musical performance, largely associated with a completely revised crossover network that paid considerably more attention to out-of-band artefacts. Such was the extent of the R25’s new-found articulation and musical coherence that its communicative qualities eclipsed even the OBX-RW3. At twice the price, the RW3, with its outboard crossover and fancy bits and pieces certainly offered sonic advantages, but it simply wasn’t as engaging or nearly as much fun as the newly minted base model. Urgent revisions were clearly required.

When it comes to small companies in small industries, ‘urgent’ is a flexible term and, by Living Voice’s own admission, it took longer to update the OBX-RW with their newly acquired knowledge than planned. But that’s because the process involved more than simply bolting on a set solution. The OBX series open the musical window much wider than the Auditorium. That introduced a whole new series of insights, challenges and variables to the crossover mods. What looked, on the face of it, like a simple update, soon became more like a total re-design. It took longer than intended – but boy, was it worth the wait.