Veterans of this website will know that high end loudspeakers are by far the most difficult component to design because of their propensity to contribute a very large amount of colouration and inaccuracy into the sound; there are simply so many junctures where mistakes can be made, from driver choice, crossover electronics, structural stability, cabinet and driver resonances to more esoteric principles like sound dispersion, diffraction and time alignment. Engineering all the colouration and noise out of a transducer, so that it has no inherent character, so that it does not introduce any sound of its own, so that it acts only as a perfectly transparent and almost indetectable window back to the music, is nothing short of a design and manufacturing miracle. A well setup high end system does not need extra excitement, extra bass or extra sharpness from the speaker and it does not need the speaker to smooth the system out, to add warmth or occlude imperfections; it should simply reveal the incoming signal as faithfully and as inconspicously as possible.

Even many of the so called best designs – often the well known brands which are the subject of the largest degree of marketing – somehow give an end result which is too clinical, sterile and over-precise, even if the resident technology and measurements are fundamentally admirable. Your attention is then drawn to this character, and you are lisetning to a speaker rather than the actual music, the complete antithesis of high end audio.

After all of those criteria, a loudspeaker also needs to enmesh symbiotically with your system, your musical choices and your room acoustics. And they must finally fit in optically into your living space and be granted an unambiguous green light by the other human beings living in that same space too. A tall order indeed then and probably the most vexatious purchase you will make when trying to assemble a superlative high end audio system.

Tidal Audio and Rockport today represent our flagship offerings here with a very high starting price but because of our unfaltering standards, any speaker below this in price really has to offer equivalent levels of performance and overall sound philosophy. Little wonder that we have had such a limited selection all these years and I have been persistently on the hunt for something exceptional to bring to customers with a smaller budget, bolstering our very fine sub £20,000 loudspeaker offerings from Thrax Audio.

We first encountered Joseph Audio at the Munich hifi show of 2019 when Vitus Audio used a set of Perspectives to superb effect. Many people remembered that sound from that year. Soon after that there was a potential deal in place to bring them to the UK but then Covid happened and the chain of action was lost … until that is the middle of 2024 when we sat down with our staunch friends, UK importers Kog Audio, to devise a plan to resurrect proceedings and finally bring the brand to these shores

Joseph Audio is one of the industry’s true hidden gifts, a loveable artisan treasure, the kind of which only appears a few times in a decade. Jeff Joseph’s small quiet company, formed in 1992, is well established and very highly respected in the USA, but unavailable in much of Europe. Supremely open, liquid and emotionally expressive, Josephs are a seductive loudspeaker that are so very easy to fall in love with. They represent a welcome antidote to the current fashion of forensically detailed and precise sounding speakers, yet at the same time possessing equivalent performance statistics; you will hear absolutely everything and will miss nothing, but in a fashion that speaks more to the mythical subconscious than to the analytical brain.

In the compact and handsome Pulsar 2 we have a wonderful bookshelf which can only be viewed as a fully fledged high end loudspeaker solution befitting of a very high level system. The tiny Perspective 2 floorstander represents the sweet spot. The sound on offer for the relatively keen price of £16,995 is something really quite extraordinary; it will genuinely mix it with speakers in the £30,000-£40,000 region. The latest Pearl Ultra now also with Graphene drivers is their flagship product and with its compact form represents a fabulous alternative to our Rockport Atria II and Tidal Piano G3 models. State of the art sonics in an unobtrusive, UK home friendly size. We also eagerly anticipate a 4th model in 2026 to sit between Pearl and Perspective.

Josephs totally disappear from the room, not a single trace of cabinet, emanating out an incredibly wide and deep holographic panorama of sound which tingles with realism and presence. A touch sweet, a touch warm, with a comforting sense of ease, their sonic fingerprint is subtle and expertly judged. They will delight and charm you from the first few tracks, and that will be on all genres of music, with the good recordings and the bad ones too. A loudspeaker that will enthuse you and reinvigorate the hobby, with the elite level of ability to do full justice to our electronics from Thrax, Vitus, Soulnote and JMF, but in addition, possessing the kind of ‘everyman’ visual and sonic appeal to fit into almost any mainstream system, from the likes of Linn and Naim up through to hybrid systems transitioning into High End.