CORINIUM by Acoustic Energy is the latest addition to our award-winning line up of loudspeakers. The culmination of a three-year project for our in-house design team, this brand-new, next-generation floor-standing model is set to establish further new standards in performance, design and value.
We sat down with Managing Director and Chief Design Engineer Mat Spandl to discuss the CORINIUM from conception, through design and production.
What’s the background story to Acoustic Energy Loudspeakers?
Mat Spandl Acoustic Energy MD and Chief Designer
“The company was founded in London, England in 1987 with the creation of the now-legendary AE1 loudspeaker. The AE1 redefined what was possible from a compact enclosure by setting new audio performance standards for dynamics, power handling and clarity previously unheard of outside larger, high-end speakers. These design principals have remained enshrined in the company ethos to this day…
What made you want to elevate the brand from mid-fi into the high-end specialist audio sector?
“Born from our desire to establish new standards in sound, design and value, the Corinium is the result of a three-year project by our in-house design team and myself. The brief was simple – to create the most dynamic, live sounding and musically involving loudspeaker we’ve ever created.”
… and what type of speaker did you have in mind to help the brand move upmarket?
“We often consider questions such as “What should the ideal loudspeaker look like? Is it a point source approximation? Is it a linear array? What speaker is right for most people most of the time?” Now refine the question and ask, “What’s the point of the cost vs performance curve that offers true high-end performance, just at the point where the law of diminishing returns starts to rapidly accelerate the cost?
So what influenced your design decisions?
“We are Acoustic Energy so our speakers must be musically engaging, have great timing and deliver a sense of dynamics and scale. So what about the configuration? A stand-mount speaker, due to its simplicity can be very musically involving, image nicely and have decent bandwidth. However, such a speaker is limited dynamically and won’t drive a large room. If you consider the footprint of a decent stand-mount speaker plus its matching high quality supporting stand, it’s not so different from a small floor-standing speaker. So we created the optimum middle sized floor-standing speakers by combining large-scale dynamics, with light-footed musicality, an open expressive midrange and excellent rhythm. The result is a fusion of the best characteristics of both stand-mount and floor-standing loudspeakers.”