Brent Butterworth

Two years ago, SVS changed ownership, and you could say it’s simultaneously a remarkably unchanged yet very different firm. It’s unchanged in that many old hands are still with the company, and the concentration on high-performance home theater products remains.

Did you know they stopped making speakers? Sure, you can still buy things that make sound when connected to an amplifier, but now they;re called "solutions." The idea here is to solve problems that emerge from the public's simultaneous love of good sound and hatred of the traditional speaker form factor. Solutions have been the mantra of late at Triad Speakers. In fact, some of the company's recent creations would have been considered downright crazy back in the days when the opinions of enthusiasts dictated speaker designs.

It seemed that audio companies had surrendered the home-theater-in-a-box concept to the TV manufacturers.

If I were forced to choose between the $20K worth of audio test gear I own or the demo CD that cost me probably 20 cents to make, I’d take the latter without hesitation. Test gear is great for telling me how well an audio product is engineered. But when I want to find out what an audio product does — i.e., how a listener will perceive its sound — the demo CD is a much better tool.