Posted on August 26, 2026
Sometimes you encounter challenges to long-held beliefs. If you’re lucky, you’ll accept the challenges and see what they have to say. If they can withstand honest scrutiny and still remain, they provide an opportunity to learn, to expand one’s perspective.
In the spring of 2025, I encountered multiple challenges to some long-held beliefs in the form of the Linkwitz LX521.4MG loudspeakers. After years of having sworn off traditional, cones-and-domes-in-a-box type loudspeakers for the speed, musicality, and transparency of planar designs, especially those from Magnepan, I heard a speaker comprised of cones and domes (though not in a typical box), that drew my attention. Further, it uses steep filters in the crossover, not the gentle first-order slopes I’ve always favored. To top it off, the system incorporates class D amplifiers, designs which had always given me shivers at the coldness and sterility of their sound.
Cone and dome drivers? Steep crossover slopes? Class D amplification? These are all things I’d have deemed anathema. And yet… and yet… I can’t deny the audible evidence demonstrated by this particular design. Some of which, no doubt, is due to it being, like my Magnepans, a full-range dipole. (In typical box speakers, the sound radiates in a forward direction, except for the bass which tends to radiate in all directions. That’s why you can stand behind such a speaker and still hear the bass, while the higher frequencies tend to sound muffled. Dipoles radiate sound frontward as well as rearward with little or no sound to the sides or vertically, and that in turn means fewer reflections from room boundaries, making it easier to hear the room contained in the recording.)
I’m reminded of when I first heard that cables can make a difference in the sound of an audio system. I found the idea laughable… until I listened. I thought the idea that turntables (which I thought "just turn") could impact the sonics of a system something I couldn’t subscribe to… until I listened. So it was when I first auditioned the Linkwitz LX521.4MG loudspeakers.
The first thing I noticed was the sound seemed to be emanating from the whole of the room behind the speakers, not from the speakers themselves. This experience alone inspired an earlier entry in this blog that I titled Keep Your Ears on the Screen. In that entry I talked about how when watching a movie, we all know it originates from a projector but we don’t look at the projector expecting to see the movie. Instead we turn our attention to the screen on which the projector will present the movie. Similarly, in the best music playback systems the speakers act as projectors and the room becomes the screen. The loudspeakers seem to disappear, leaving behind a 3-dimensional soundstage that transforms the space into the one in which the musicians performed during the recording. The Linkwitz LX521s excel at this.
As we listened to different recordings I was impressed by how chameleon-like the LX521s are, revealing just how different every recording sounds from every other recording. It is this ability to, as I call it, "get out of the way" that I need in speakers I use to evaluate my recordings or recordings other folks send to me for mastering. I’ve heard many speakers that sound wonderful but they tend to make everything played through them have the same "wonderful" sound. In the end, this is a coloration, diminishing the inherent differences between recordings and obscuring the recording’s true nature.
The LX521s are also one of the few loudspeakers I’ve heard where I haven’t felt the need for subwoofers to support the bottom half of the bottom octave. They sound effortlessly full range and quite dynamic as well.
But that soundstage… and the 3D images of the players on that stage… It feels like a real-life holodeck. For those to whom the term is new, a holodeck is (for now) a fictional construct popularized by the science fiction television program Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was a section of the starship where folks could visit and interact with a fully 3-dimensional recreation of any place they wanted to visit. The LX521s create a holodeck-like experience, bringing the listener into the space in which the recording took place, whether a real location as in the finest recordings, or a studio-contrived one created by the engineer and producer.
Combine this characteristic with an amazing ability to get "out of the way," along with seemingly unrestrained frequency and dynamic capabilities and you have the new monitoring system I use for my work and listening pleasure.
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