Richard Thompson is an electronics engineer who has been interested in hi-fi and digital audio since the early 1980s, and spent a few years happily building synthesisers and playing with tape recorders until it became obvious to him that a PC could do it all. After a decade or three of listening to commercial hi-fi gear, and never being completely happy with it, it is relatively recently that he came to realise that speaker design is not 'a done deal'. His thoughts on the subject can be found in his highly sceptical blog therationalaudiophile.wordpress.com.
Richard Thompson proposes that we take a rational approach to high-fidelity sound reproduction: “My argument is that we should simply ditch every arbitrary distortion of the signal if we can” and not continue to “dress up traditional compromises with exotic materials and pointless over-engineering.” He tests the concept with an active system based on low-cost components and linear-phase crossovers implemented in PC software.