From a new company came a new loudspeaker design that was four years in the making—thanks in part to the pandemic. But COVID downtime gave Malbork Audio founder and designer Daniel Fajkis (above) one advantage: more time to refine his inaugural Malbork Warsaw loudspeaker design through more math and engineering and simulations, Fajkis told me.
The Malbork Warsaw is an ambitious speaker. Named after a stately castle in Poland not far from Fajkis’s hometown, the Malbork company is based in South Florida, where the speaker was built. With an enclosure made of machined aluminum, its unique futuristic aesthetic stands out. It’s architectural—all smooth planes and precise angles—reminding me of some Zaha Hadid buildings. If you saw it at the show, chances are, you’d remember it. The 2.5-way’s four individual enclosures (one open-baffle) are united by a single 0.5″ vertical through-rod inside a self-contained frame. Made entirely of aluminum, this structure maintains alignment and rigidity. But they needed to manage aluminum’s unwanted resonances. “We took [aluminum’s] uniform density and machined the way around the problem,” Fajkis said. The interior of each driver enclosure is a tapered cylinder to prevent standing waves and ringing.
The Warsaw is all passive. No DSP is used. (Apparently many people asked.) The input connections and crossovers are all contained within the woofer’s housing. You can tri-amp the speakers, powering the individual driver enclosures—labeled Soprano, Alto, Tenor—separately. Or you can use included bridges that were machined in a similar design. Speaking of machining, the panels’ forms look sleek and cool but they’re also functional, serving to disperse the surrounding “wraparound” resonances. There are no visible screws; apart from those on the driver surrounds, they’re all mounted inside.
The AMT tweeter’s housing is an open-baffle design that looks like a (slightly) exploded drawing. Other drivers include two 5.5″ midrange units and a long-throw woofer.
I only had time for a brief listen to the Malbork system; it was late on Sunday. Fajkis kept the demo system as streamlined as the Warsaw’s smooth forms: Spotify tracks streamed from an iPad via Wi-Fi to a Sonos Port ($449), which includes an internal preamp and DAC, connected via RCA inputs to a Moon Audio W-5 power amplifier, a dual-mono design that delivers 380Wpc. The W-5 was tethered to the speakers (with the bridges in place) with cables of Malbork’s own creation. The 87dB-sensitive speakers seemed to like power.
The sound was clean and crisp, mercifully not “metallic”—maybe the felted room treatments on the sidewalls also helped. Music, particularly percussion, seemed fast on the attacks on tracks like Thomas Newman’s “Dead Already” from the American Beauty film soundtrack. O-Zone Percussion Group’s “Jazz Variants” showed more texture and body on the various drums, along with clarity on tambourine, chimes, and cymbals.
The Malbork Warsaw is available now directly from the company for $65,000/pair. They’re also talking with dealers, Fajkis said. The Malbork Warsaws are certainly conversation-starters.
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