THE LARSEN (6 or 8) gets excellent reviews, and while I haven’t auditioned them I will. The mid and tweeter fire towards each other, and negate much of the first sidewall reflection problems. The woofer fires down (iirc) and makes placement near or against the wall ideal. I’ve spoken to people who have them and love them. The soundstaging they make is more a "wall of sound" with good specificity of location of the musicians, but not as specific and focused as typical front-firing speakers. The upside is that the sweet spot is very broad, and the reproduction is said to be much more like live music.
Reviews:
https://positive-feedback.com/Issue69/larsen8.htmhttps://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/larsen-model-8-loudspeaker/
"Not to maintain artificial suspense, the Larsen 8s are, like their ancestors, speakers that produce an unusually natural sound, a sound that bears a surprising resemblance to concert music. But, again like their ancestors, they are quite different from ordinary speakers—by intention. So to appreciate them, one needs to think for a moment about certain fundamental matters of speakers in rooms.
What Gives With Speakers
It is, of course, familiar stuff in audio that speakers can have various basic radiation patterns: omni, dipoles, or that intrinsically strange if most common hybrid, the “forward-radiating” box speaker designed to be out in the room, which is typically omni in the bass, shifts to radiating primarily forward (half-space radiation) somewhere around 300 to 700Hz, depending on the width of the front baffle, and then narrows its pattern yet more in the high frequencies. On the face of it, this most common kind of speaker seems, like the chimera, to be led from ill-matching parts, as far as radiation pattern goes.
Designers have, of course, become adept at making these transitions of pattern occur smoothly, and thus sound less troublesome to the ear. But the forward-radiating box out in the room remains an odd creature on the face of it.
Larsen Model 8
And then there is the question of “free space mounting,” the “out in the room” part. Since bass works better if the speaker is up against a room boundary (or two or three), how did it get to be a habit to put the speaker out in the room—and to have its woofer off the floor, usually? The answer is historically complex. But roughly speaking, you can blame it on the British. Free space mounting makes it easiest to avoid boundary-induced coloration of the midrange, and the midrange was most of what the British audio establishment of the 1960s and 1970s was interested in. Midrange and precision stereo imaging is also easiest with free space mounting, which delays reflections for a long time." ...
"So the natural thing to do was to eliminate the back-wall reflection by placing the speaker against the wall so that the sound off the wall formed in effect a unit with the forward sound. Room sound then arrives a long time after, especially if one puts the speakers on the long wall so that they are far from the sidewalls..." ,,
"If one forgets about audio categories, turns one’s mind away from a
checklist of what speakers are supposed to do, and turns one’s mind away
from what most speakers do do, and thinks instead of what music sounds
like in reality, these speakers are hugely intriguing. Once one gets
used to the fact that they are different from free-space floorstanders;
indeed, one can become positively addicted to their sound. In a certain
sense, the Model 8s are something of a road not taken in audio. But one
cannot help wondering if this is not perhaps because audio took a wrong
turn somewhere to some extent if the goal is to sound like real music,
especially in terms of reproducing the lower midrange on down.
Large-scaled
music, where the match between room sound and direct sound is a vital
matter, especially illustrates the virtues of the Model 8s. Orchestras
sound surprisingly like orchestras, with a transparency that goes not
just down into the midrange but all the way down. If you wanted to write
down the bass and cello parts of a symphonic composition from
listening, these speakers would make it easy.
At the same time,
the human voice is also very convincing. A good recording of a person
speaking sounds startlingly like a real person, something that often
escapes speakers that change directivity in the midrange on account of
the baffle step. And instruments with serious lower-midrange content
sound unusually convincing, as noted.
The Larsen Model 8 is to my
mind a speaker that everyone seriously interested in audio ought to
listen to and at as much length as possible, since one needs to adjust
to its quite different approach to reproducing sound in rooms. There are
things it does, and important things at that, that to my mind lie at
the heart of actually sounding like live music. The approach is entirely
different from the near-field, directional speakers that can also claim
a really accurate reproduction of what is on the recordings, albeit in a
different way. But the approach of the Larsen Model 8s has validity of
its own. How speakers should work in rooms is not a very standardized
matter. But the way of the Larsens is one of the ways that works. The
Larsens, most impressively, really sound the way music actually does
sound. The Model 8s are not just another try at making a speaker like
all the rest except better, as so many high-end speakers are. Rather,
the Larsen Model 8s are something special in their own right." ###
