I just got back from AES in NY and saw a lot of great new gear. One of the best new offerings was offsite at Quad Studios on Times Square where I had the chance to critically listen to the new Guzauski-Swist 3-way active mid/near field speakers. I’ve had the pleasure of working with both Mick and Larry in studio on a lot of mixes and these guys are both consummate pros who know their gear down to the design level. So it was no surprise that these speakers were among of the best I’ve heard. They had them mounted on the meter bridge of an SSL J 9080 and they rocked the room.

The system features a 12″ low resonance, long excursion driver in a sealed cabinet, a 3″ Dome ATC Midrange and a 1″ Morel Softdome Tweeter (the same used by DynAudio). 1500 Watts of class D amplification is included in a separate rack chassis. One of the more innovative design elements is an acoustically decoupled midrange/tweeter enclosure that is “hungâ€? from the woofer cabinet and isolated down to 6 Hz using a military grade isolation system Larry found in the UK. The decoupled enclosure design allows both vertical and horizontal driver alignments. Inputs can be analog or digital using state-of-the-art AD/DA converters and analog components. There is also integrated DSP with user definable room compensation equalization and delay adjustments. The system goes for $12k and is available directly from the manufacturer.