2011 Certified & Recommended

Typical tower speakers arrive with so many wonderful opportunities for self-injury: When you take them off the truck and when you haul them into the listening room, for starters. And that’s not to mention when you unpack them and set them up and when you adjust placement (especially with carpet spikes). But Oregon’s Aperion Audio, God love ’em, has finally delivered a tower speaker that even the most physically challenged audiophile can love: the Verus Forte.

Since time immemorial (or at least the late 1980s), designers of compact subwoofer/satellite speaker systems have struggled against The Hole.

The Hole is the gap between the lowest note the satellites can play and the highest notes the subwoofer can play. The Hole can make voices sound thin, and can rob gunshots and other sound effects of their dynamic impact. But the usual methods for filling The Hole can cause worse problems than The Hole itself.

You already own a speaker that’s better in some ways than any ever reviewed in Sound+Vision — and you’ve owned it since you were born. What is it? 

On my first gig as an electronics journalist, way back in 1989, the magazine’s senior editor introduced me to the technical editor with the explanation, “He’s in charge of all the black boxes.” Twenty-two years later, little has changed.