Wave Hearth Shelf Speaker

Details

One box for a living room, in a rubberwood cabinet with a woven front. It runs from the mains, so there is no cell to age, and it takes optical, 3.5 mm, USB-C and Bluetooth, which covers a television, a turntable amplifier and a phone with no adapter in between. A shelf speaker is usually sold on one number, and that number is almost always peak power measured on one channel. 60 W is what a competitor prints for the amplifier in this cabinet. There is also a quieter omission: the crossover point and slope, which decide how the woofer and tweeter hand over and which no consumer speaker page prints, and the cabinet internal volume and port tuning, which decide the bass. All four are here.

• Amplifier 2 x 30 W RMS into 4 ohm at 1 percent THD plus noise, both channels driven simultaneously, Class D on a 90 W mains supply. At 88 percent efficiency, 60 W out draws 68 W and dissipates about 8 W as heat, which is why the rear panel is a heatsink
• Per side, one 100 mm woofer with a coated paper cone and a rubber surround, and one 20 mm silk dome tweeter. Crossed over at 2.6 kHz, second order, 12 dB per octave, and that is printed because it is the number that decides how a speaker sounds through a voice
• Response 48 Hz to 22 kHz within plus or minus 3 dB at one metre on axis, minus 6 dB at 42 Hz. Rear port tuned to 46 Hz
• Cabinet 4.6 litres net internal volume in 18 mm rubberwood, 420 x 145 x 165 mm external. Both the material and the volume are stated, because a thin cabinet at the same external size is a different speaker
• Maximum 98 dB SPL at one metre on pink noise at under 1 percent distortion
• Optical input takes 2-channel PCM up to 96 kHz. It does not decode Dolby Digital or DTS, and it says so here rather than leaving you to find out: set the television output to PCM
• 3.5 mm line in, USB-C audio at USB Audio Class 2.0 up to 24-bit 96 kHz, and Bluetooth 5.3 with SBC, AAC and LDAC. No aptX, because we hold no licence for it
• Volume is a real potentiometer with a detented knob, and the input selector is a rotary switch. Neither needs an app or an account
• No microphone is fitted. Not muted, not disabled. There is no microphone on the board, so there is no wake word and no assistant
• Standby 0.4 W measured, and a hard rocker switch on the back that takes it to zero
• Eight Phillips screws on the rear panel. Woofer, tweeter and amplifier board are all separately priced parts
• The honest trade is placement. A rear-ported 4.6 litre cabinet needs about 20 cm of clear wall behind it. Pushed into a bookshelf it will boom, and that is the port doing what ports do
• There is no Shuunnya service-centre network. A warranty claim means sending the speaker to us, with no turnaround time promised