TESTED: Loiminchay Chagall Loudspeaker

An Act of Passion

I don’t know the exact price point where you have to love a speaker to own it, but it certainly is far lower than the cost of the particular configuration of the Chagall that I’m reviewing. It has the diamond tweeter and a multiclear lacquer finish and sells for $48,500 (and this is the less expensive finish—cherry, piano black, and custom finishes sell for thousands more) Passion is the only excuse for possessing it.

The Product Passion Buys

There are reasons, however, why you may develop such feelings about the Chagalls. The visual aesthetic is striking, which means it is not an anonymous box and you actually have to think about its visual impact. I would note, however, that it looks better in your room than in the photos, and the photos are striking. [AHC is correct that photos don’t do justice to this loudspeaker. I was quite taken by the Chagall’s beauty and exquisite finish when I first saw it for myself. —RH] 

What a photo will not show you is that the Chagalls have a more modest visual profile than most speakers in their price range: 14" wide by 51" high by 18" deep. They are very heavy for their size: 150 pounds each. This weight reflects the fact that the wood parts of the “voluptuously-shaped” enclosure are made of exceptionally strong and resonance-resistant 30mm birch multi-ply, that the box has extremely good internal bracing, that the woofer plinth is made out of concrete, and that the speaker has a solid aluminum base.

The speaker is said to be hand-built in China. Loiminchay says: “The enclosures are bored out then finished inside and out with fully sixteen coats of the finest hand-polished lacquer for a lustrous cabinet so finely sealed that no air bubbles remain to leak internal pressurized air. Loiminchay employs three people just to route the interior and driver holes, and even the baffles are hand-shaped in the laminate during fabrication. We go a few steps beyond with luxurious hand-built, hand-lacquered cabinets and really high-quality drivers. We buy wood by the batch and store it in a temperature and humidity-controlled warehouse. One lot makes five pairs of speakers, so they’re all perfectly consistent, all hand-sanded and polished between their sixteen coats.”

You can see some aspects of this quality simply by looking at the Chagalls and touching them. No one does this kind of woodwork and assembly any other way. Patrick Chu also claims that this kind of work affects the speakers’ sound. “Measurements are very important but only part of the story,” he explains. “Everything makes a difference in the sound: the choice of drivers, the shape and density of the cabinet, how well it’s braced, the quality and quantity of the lamb’s wool stuffing, and especially how the sound waves flow around the cabinet’s exterior surfaces, and even which lacquer finish you choose! That’s right, the Chagall in high gloss black piano-lacquer sounds slightly different than one in multi-clear lacquer. That’s why every pair’s crossover is optimized for the best possible overall sound.”

The cost and sound quality of the Chagalls is shaped by a lot more than their enclosures. While a given design choice is ultimately only justified by how the speaker sounds, not by what goes into it, it is important to know what the design intention is behind a given speaker and the reasons for its cost.

The diamond tweeter in my review pair of the Chagalls is clearly a key feature shaping their sound quality. It also sharply raises their price. The driver manufacturer sells a custom version of this tweeter to Loiminchay for $7000, and Loiminchay makes the following case for using it:

•  Diamond is the hardest natural substance on the planet. It’s at the top of the Mohs scale of mineral hardness at 10. That’s about 5 times harder than Accuton’s extremely hard ceramic membrane, which in fact consists of corundum, i.e., opalescent sapphire, number 9 on the Mohs scale.
  
• The internal sound velocity of diamond is faster than in any other natural substance, one of the main features that makes a diamond membrane so desirable for audio transducers.
  
• Diamond conducts heat better than any other material in the world, five times better than silver, which is the second best. It’s the best conceivable sink for the typical heat generated by a voice coil. The result is the voice coil always operates under the same stable conditions without variation.
  
• The carbon atoms in a diamond lattice are packed closer together than any other atoms or molecules in any other material. This makes material bonding stronger than anything else and yields unsurpassed transient response.
  
• Diamond resists wear and has the highest melting point of all natural substances.
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