Beauhorn Virtuoso Lowther DX4 Horns

The Beauhorn Virtuoso is considered by many to be the ultimate Lowther loudspeaker design. The Beauhorn cabinets are beautifully designed, modern rear horns, and employ a gorgeous large mushroom-shaped wooden phase plug to cancel out some of the famous “Lowther Shout” and mechanically equalize the response. These cabinets were loaded with 16 ohm Lowther DX4 drivers, and have a claimed efficiency of 106 db/wm. I’m not aware of another transducer speaker that can claim that!

It’s hard to describe how excited I was to get these speakers in my room. My daughter and I drove 12 hours round trip to pick these beauties up, playing Harry Nilsson cd’s and singing along the whole way. And it was certainly worth the trip!

Being a single driver guy, I had been looking for a Lowther system for quite a while. They have that love it or hate it reputation, and are probably “the” classic full range driver. And in many ways these are the penultimate.

All in all, this is a large and imposing speaker system that originally retailed for somewhere North of $12,000 from the dealer. It presents some of the most realistic sound I have heard. And yet, I found them to be a bit limited and somewhat narrow in their presentation. They excel at low level detail, as one would expect, but need a bit of volume to open up and can be somewhat painful with the wrong recording. I had read all of these criticisms of course, but now experienced them first hand. My room is too small for these, so I tried them in my living room, which is a much more open and live space. Again, they were fatiguing. Back to back with Supravox 215rtf64 in the Telefunken open baffle cabinets, the Lowther sounded nasal and brittle in comparison to the rich and lush Supras.

So for me, this is a story of the wish it had been. Your mileage may vary, and if you are fortunate enough to get a chance to own or demo these, I would recommend doing so. The Beauhorns are gorgeous speakers, they sound incredible on the right recording and are an amazing experience. There aren’t many out there, and it is very seldom that a pair comes up on the used market. As for Lowther drivers, I think they definitely have potential, and am now on the lookout for the right pair of PM2A to mount into the Telefunken cabinets.