The Flame Still Burns
“Then the music started and I was again startled by the clearest, most life-like reproduction of recorded music I’d ever heard. The recording being demoed was a solo A Capella contra-basso male voice. The image produced could have fooled me into believing the invisible man was singing in the room. When they functioned, they played better than anything I’ve ever heard.” Steven Kastner
“We suspect, though, that most audiophiles will find these speakers to provide the most mind-blowing listening experience they have ever known.” J. Gordon Holt, Stereophile
“The Single Best System Commercially Available.” J. Peter Moncrieff, International Audio Review
Ever seen these types of comments regarding a speaker before? You haven’t, because this speaker is truly unique. Here’s a few more from respected reviewers…
“We just stood there, dumbfounded, with our jaw hanging open.”
“So much closer to live music than anything else.”
“Our standards for being able to tell live from reproduced music have been forever changed. ”
Imagine a speaker with no moving parts. No mass, no cones, no ribbons, no diaphragms, no enclosure, no Doppler shift, no resonances- just the ability to modulate the air directly.
Now imagine a perfect audio point source (the ideal pulsating sphere) radiating uniformly with constant phase. This has been the dream of physicists for at least a century.
There has been only one speaker that has ever come even remotely close to those lofty goals- the Hill Plasmatronics 1A, built in New Mexico by one of the world’s preeminent laser physicists.
Chances are you’ve never heard a Plasmatronics speaker. Not surprising, as only 52 pairs (we’re aware of Serial Number 70 though) were made thirty plus years ago. You had to be a dedicated hi-fi enthusiast to have heard them even back then.
The Hill Plasmatronics 1A was expensive- no doubt you could purchase a home in some parts of the country for the same price. It was complicated- vacuum tubes, helium tanks, an electronic crossover, multi-amplification, and even a rock inside each speaker.
Yet it was remarkably simple to explain its key virtue- if you played back a recording of a telephone ringing, someone in the house would come in the room and pick up the telephone. The Plasmatronics 1A did not require an extended listening session to prove its inherent superiority.
Lynn Olson once compared Alan Hill’s speaker as an SR-71 Blackbird lurking in a world of Boeing 737’s, a claim many owners would agree with wholeheartedly.
This site is dedicated to the enjoyment and preservation of this technological masterpiece.