A Towering Value

Emotiva Airmotiv 5CH Speaker System.

- Daniel Kumin

THERE’S BEEN PLENTY OF INK spilled, print and digital, in Sound & Vision and elsewhere, about Tennessee’s direct-to-consumer brand Emotiva and the disruptive pricing the company has brought to various audio categories. To date, this has been mostly focused on electronics, where power amps, preamps, pre/pros, and DACs have been offered up for surprisingly small sums that seem to belie their inherent engineering and build quality. Corner company founder Dan Laufman about how he does it, and he’ll enthusiastically share his prior life as an OEM for other audio brands (many of which you know well) and how he’s learned a few tricks about where and how to stretch raw material costs in the most meaningful ways. He’ll go on about the firm’s focus on in-house design. Beyond this, there’s the efficient manufacturing, done domestically at Emotiva’s Nashville headquarters and abroad. Then, there’s the (mostly) web-direct product distribution. But, in the end, it all seems to come down to this: Laufman just doesn’t think good audio kit should cost so much, and he’s willing to sell his widgets for a bit—or a lot—less money, rather than compete directly with like quality products at their higher price points.

That philosophy—indeed, all of the above—is clearly evident in this latest example from Emotiva, a new full-size passive loudspeaker line dubbed Airmotiv, which borrows both the name and some design elements from the company’s professional line of powered studio monitors.