Rethm Maarga
Hi-fi is like cake. Most people enjoy listening to music, and most people like cake.
People who like cake tend to like different things about it. Some people like a flourless cake, some people like a fluffy angel food cake, and some like a cake loaded up with little pieces of carrot and God-knows-what-else. People who like hi-fi also tend to like different things. Some like punchy, forceful sounds, some like realistic, natural tones, some like texture and color, some like “air,” and some like to hear things go whooshing from one speaker to the other. It’s all okay.
If hi-fi is like cake, amplifier power is like sugar. It has its place. But when people thought it was abundant, cheap, and harmless, they went whole hog on it, minimizing and even throwing out other ingredients because, hey, sugar is cheap. And fun. And harmless.
But there exists an entire movement devoted to low-power amplifiers, the idea being: A low power amp, with its lower parts count and simpler architecture, stands a chance of being faster, more nimble, and more transparent to the source—ie, more capable of getting out of the way of the music. And with that movement comes a complementary interest in loudspeakers of greater-than-average sensitivity and efficiency—a genre that, to some hobbyists, reaches its pinnacle with the full-range (or at least quasi-full-range) driver: crossoverless, fast, and typically sensitive, not to mention elegant.
Images of instruments and voices were more distinct from one another than I usually hear at home.
A somewhat early participant in the modern high-efficiency speaker movement—their first commercial speaker, which I wrote about in , debuted in 2000—was Rethm, whose products are manufactured in India. At that time and for more than a decade after, all Rethm loudspeakers had two predominant characteristics: They were designed and
