2024 Golden Ear: Rockport Atria II Loudspeaker

$38,000

I recently welcomed a pair of Rockport Atria II’s into my home as a step towards my addition-by-reduction system overhaul (I’ll go into that way more in an upcoming REL 6-pack review). The Atria II is Rockport’s lowest-priced model at $38k. It uses a triple-laminated, constrained-mode-damped enclosure with a solid 4-inch-thick front baffle. Rockport focuses on immense stiffness and minimum resonant signature in all its cabinets, and their performance benefits proportionately as a result. The simple 3-way design utilizes a waveguide mounted beryllium 1″ tweeter, a custom 6″mid/bass, and a 9″ carbon-fiber-sandwich cone woofer, designed and developed from the ground up by Rockport Technologies. The drivers play with a scale that belies their size and offer exceptional resolution, texture, detail, realism, and impact. The Atria II creates an expansive wall-to-wall stage with depth, height, and energy, and its capacity to convey information beyond the first layer of musical presentation—to recreate the air and presence of the venue itself—is, at times, almost unnerving. Their performance, in my room, engaged and enraptured in a way that very few other (much more expensive) speakers could. If that doesn’t justify a Golden Ear, I don’t know what does. (Forthcoming)