Waterfall Niagara speakers
How does 25 grand's worth of speaker sound?
Review The UK is slowly trudging its way through an economic crisis and belts are being tightened across the country, so what better time to announce a new set of speakers with a price tag of £25,000?
Waterfall's Niagaras: cascade of sound?
Yes, that’s right, for a smidgen less than what many people earn in a year, you can pick up a set of Niagara speakers from French manufacturer Waterfall – the amp, CD player and luxury mansion to sit them in must all be purchased separately.
A little uneasy about sending out review samples, I was instead offered a trip down to retailer WiFi HiFi’s showroom located in sunny Eastbourne on the south coast. Of course, reviewing products on the basis of a demo in a showroom is never ideal, but given the subject matter an exception was made.
At this point, it’s probably also best that I stress I’m not your typical audiophile, but I really was curious as to exactly what 25 grand’s worth of speaker actually sounded like.
Philip Glass's favourite speakers?
Waterfall doesn’t have a warehouse full of these speakers awaiting purchasers. Instead, each set is built to order, with roughly a six-week wait. The cabinet is cut from a single slab of diamond crystal glass, and no expense is spared inside, with the mid-range drivers encased in Nappa leather - the colour of which can be specified upon order.
COMMENTS
Quad ESLs
http://www.quad-hifi.co.uk/downloads/ESLBrochurelow.pdf
The only hifi speaker worth the name, and a comparative snip at £7,000. Don't listen to them unless you've got the money, because nothing else will ever do - and don't bother if you just want a thumping bass - but for listening to piano or voice these are the :-
Owning Quads is like owning a Roller, if anything ever goes wrong (I broke a connector during a house move) you can take them back to Huntingdon and they will fix them for a very reasonable price.
An alternative
£25,000 = roughly 2000 concert tickets of a mixture of half decent jazz venues, chamber music in churches/church halls/ some half decent geezers down the pub, and one ticket somewhere near Dartford to see <name your choice of supergroup> at the O2.
And you still haven't bought any amplifiers, CD players or CDs.
Of course, the upside is that you will have spent a lot of time listening to..., what's it called again? ah yes, "live music".
Then, when you do listen to some recorded music, you'll work out that it wasn't created by the musicians but by the recording engineer: a couple of bars from this take, the phrase from that take, fake ambience and some autotuning for the hottie who can't actually, err, sing.
I wonder what the salesmen call their potential customers ?
If a customer and their money are soon parted, I'd guess ... Niagara Fools.
Nice, but
They won't fit on the desk next to my monitor, so how can I listen to Youtube clips of Anal Cunt on them?
