Scam Alert… $150,000 Spherical Speakers
Yes, you read that correctly… French speaker maker Cabasse is shipping its “big-ball” La Sphere speakers by the pair at $150,000. Yes, that’s not a typo. $150 THOUSAND dollars. In our experience you simply cannot make a speaker cost that much. Now, the price also includes delivery and complete setup and room calibration by Cabasse engineers, but I think Gerry Lamay from the HAA would fly out to your house for a lot less…
The speaker pair features a 22-inch woofer, an 8-inch low-midrange driver, a 5-inch midrange and a 1.2-inch dome tweeter. A four-way digital active crossover network included in the price provides “perfect time alignment and frequency response both on and off axis,†the company added. The speakers, marketed in North America by St. John Group, use a spherical 27.6-inch enclosure to “enhance rigidity, eliminate internal standing waves and eliminate diffraction effects.” They’re also said to be the world’s first coaxial point-source speaker that uses four coaxially mounted drivers to deliver smooth off-axis response over a wide area. Personally, I think they’re just jealous that CAT charges so much.
From the website:
The spherical shape of the cabinet loading the woofer presents numerous advantages like:
- rigidity inherent to the shape: this is essential to avoid any low frequency vibration that might create noises or a fuzzy sound scene. Thanks to the resulting extremely good pressure resistance, the shape allows to use a very small volume for a 22″ woofer and thus provide 96 dB efficiency and a linear response down to 20 Hz in anechoic room conditions. Any other reference system announcing equivalent characteristics in the low frequencies range needs minimum 4 to 6 times more volume for the woofer(s).
- no standing waves. There are no parallel surfaces, so it is not necessary to fill the enclosure with a lot of damping material and internal bracing. The use of those items reduces the internal volume of air available to load the driver, thus requires the use of a larger volume, thus lager panels that require more bracing and damping…
- perfect symmetry in every direction and no diffraction effects from 20 to 20 000 Hz: the very essence of the spatial coherency.
Yeah, this qualifies as a product that has every right to be priced this high – but I’d wager the buyers who go in for this are likely individuals who are more concerned about bragging rights than audio performance.
Check this. And they DO cost that much. They’re made out of real ivory and baby seals. Plus the tweeters are cooled by stem cells and you KNOW how hard those are to come by.