June 7, 2024 by Editorial Staff

Nola Champ S3 ($15,000 pr USD)

The latest design from hi-fi legends Carl and Marilyn Marchisotto, the 3.5-way, five-driver Champ S3 delivers a big spacious sound with plenty of power and dynamics and yet they can sound perfectly delicate and natural when needed. The open baffle design also creates an airy, expansive treble with superb balance and a fantastically big sweet spot. The roller-ball bases, now standard, provide more stable images and deeper, tighter low frequencies. A Reviewers Choice Award winner.

NOLA Grand Reference Metro Gold 3 ($65,000 pr USD)

After an extended visit to Dr. Vinyl, we were shocked at how close the Metro Gold 3 came to the $150,000/pr NOLA Baby Grand Reference Gold 3 and instantly became one of our picks for 2024’s best tower loudspeakers. The Metro possessed the same coherence–uncommonly good for a large, multi-driver open baffle transducer–and plays all musical genres with equal care and dedication.

NOLA Baby Grand Reference Gold 3 ($150,000 pr USD)

Carl Marchisotto’s latest entry in his Grand Reference line now features newly developed drivers, Alnico ring magnets, gold-plated phase plugs and ribbon tweeters that can reach 100kHz. This is a big, full-range speaker–one of 2024’s best tower loudspeakers–that reveals its impressive strengths slowly, as it excels in recreating the performances at the proper and realistic scale. What we found most intriguing about the Nola Baby Grand Reference Gold 3 “was its ability to melt into the music and not dominate the system–like most six-figure loudspeaker systems do.”