Unusual-looking speaker
makes beautiful music

Back in the day — way before DVDs, CD, cassettes, MP3s, HDTV, video games or even home computers — geeks had to channel their energy into experimenting with the gadgets available at that time. For many that meant ham radio, and stereos. Amateur radio was a tough sell for some, but everyone of a certain age had to have a stereo system.  It was a rite of passage in college dorms for years.

I love modern day gadgets, but I’ve come to realize that one of my great passions in life is listening to music in my home. What that means in real terms is that I spend way too much time trying to find the perfect stereo equipment. (This will not come as a shock to any of my regular readers.)

Which brings me to a pair of Cain & Cain speakers that have been sitting in my living room the past few months.  How they got there is an interesting story. I had heard about an amplifier that controls loudspeakers in an unusual way and only works with the few speakers that have a single driver (not separate woofers and tweeters and other circuitry).

In bed one night, I was studying a single-driver speaker Web site when my wife looked over my shoulder and exclaimed “What are those speakers? They’re beautiful. Buy them.” 

My wife has put up with every imaginable piece of electronic gear you can think of over the years (including lime green speakers that were 6 feet high and 20 feet long), not to mention all the boxes which they come in. She has never said anything like that to me. Ever! If these speakers had a WAF (wife acceptance factor) of one million, I had to hear them.

So, the next morning, I was on the phone with amplifier guru Nelson Pass and speaker designer Terry Cain to see what all the fuss was about. Cain lives in Walla Walla, Wash., and is a cabinet maker by trade and a music lover by heart. That is a dangerous combination. In addition to other woodworking tasks, Terry makes a number of speakers systems. The ones under discussion here today are the least expensive in the line. They’re called Abbys. 

Abbys are a few inches short of 6 feet tall. The wooden base is 14 inches square, with the speaker itself about 9 inches square at the bottom, then tapering up to 9 by 2 inches or so at the top. They actually have less visual impact on a room than you might imagine from my measurements.

The enclosure is made of real wood, not particle board. Up close, it’s beautiful. The two speakers (finished in sunburst blue) and their wooden shipping crate weighed about 120 pounds when they arrived at my door.

The Abby’s only driver is a 6-inch Fostex FE166E. It reproduces everything: bass, midrange and treble. The speaker enclosure is shaped the way it is to help reproduce sound from that single driver. Known as a Voigt pipe, the design was created in the 1930s to reinforce the sound coming from the back of the speaker driver, helping create the illusion of deep bass.  Terry Cain has improved on that idea.

The design is very basic: one ported box, one speaker driver and wire leading from the driver to the speaker jacks on the back. Terry created an oversized round mount for the driver — and a special way to put everything together. That seems to make all the difference in the world.

Abbys sell for $1,500 a pair. In this world of people listening on portable devices to compressed digital music files — and thinking that it sounds good — $1,500 may seem like a lot of money. But in the 2005 world of price-is-no-object hi-fi equipment the Abbys are a veritable bargain.

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