Premiere Design

Canada-based Verity Audio has been making high-end speakers for 25 years, culminating in the flagship Lohengrin. Now in its second generation, this impressive speaker tops the company's eXR (extended-range) lineup.

The Lohengrin II includes two asymmetrically braced cabinets separated by a suspended platform, isolating their vibrations from each other. The upper cabinet houses a 2-inch, pure-aluminum ribbon tweeter designed and built entirely in-house, a 5-inch doped-polypropylene midrange, and a 9-inch mid-bass driver of the same material. At the bottom is a ported enclosure with a 15-inch doped-polypropylene, rear-firing woofer, which, I would guess, requires careful placement in a relatively large room to be most effective. The frequency range is spec'd from 15Hz to 60kHz (±3dB) with a sensitivity of 95dB/W/m—no wonder it carries the eXR designation!

As you probably expect, the Lohengrin II commands a premium price—$90,000/pair to be exact (exotic finishes extra). Fred Kaplan recently reviewed the Sarastro II, one step down from the Lohengrin II, for Stereophile, concluding "After hearing these speakers in John Atkinson's room (much wider and a bit less warm than mine), I would reemphasize the point: The Sarastros won't show all their stuff unless your room is at least 15 feet wide, and even then you need a trained dealer to help with set-up. That said, even at John's place, there was a ripeness—bass tones got a bit bigger and more reverberant—around the crossover point between the woofer and the midrange. It's a minor thing; if it hadn't been more obvious in my own room (and even there it wasn't anything close to prominent), I wouldn't be making so much of it. But it's there. If you can live with that touch of character, definitely give Verity's Sarastro II a listen: it's musically involving and punctiliously precise."

I can only assume that the Lohengrin II offers even more involving performance, though I suspect you'd need an even larger room to get the most out of it.