I have not had a chance to review this popular system in details so far, as I could not find one to photograph.
Thanks to the power of the Internet, I have now found this system scattered between Belgium and Switzerland, and made another discovery - more on this later...

I had approached my good client Pierre Breart at Audioconseil in Uccle, the posh suburb of Brussels, where he has been operating for quite some time, bringing the pleasure of good music reproduction to a lucky and loyal clientele. He was my second best dealer, and share with me a passion for good food and wine, obviously sprinkled with good music!
I was hoping he would be able to access some of my products from of his past clients...and he found something of a rarity, a lone exemplar of an ACTIVE central subwoofer.
My guess is that we would have designed this just for him, as I do not recall selling many.
By co-incidence, a reader in Switzerland got in touch with me to find out more about a pair of ACTIVE SATs! Lucky day...

The SATs in their active version were invented for my German distributor, and ended up being quite a success there, and also in Norway, where my distributor, Martin Viktorin, ended up selling over a hundred pairs to the National Norvegian Radio.
As a further twist in the story, the amplifier was designed by a very good and astute dealer we had in Strasbourg.
His original design sounded sublime, but didn't pass the German inspection, as it was internally wired as a valve amplifier would be - so, in short, it looked quite messy inside, but the resulting sound was outstanding, primarily because of the perfect grounding of the circuit, reducing noise floor and IMD distortion to an absolute minimum. Unfortunately, I have no photos left of this product, and would very much like to find one pair to review.
So, I had to fight with my dealer, to get him to change his design to be more professionally made - at least on the surface...
Being the purist he was, he refused, and reluctantly gave me the circuit diagram for me to produce an "industrial" version myself - here is the result:

Very neat and tidy, easy to build, install and service, but auditively a shadow of the original...
Don't get me wrong, it still work extremely well and I quote my contact in Switzerland here:
"although I didn't position the speakers too precisely, voices were nailed spot in
the middle of the speakers - amazing! With certain music the speakers actually
did what I love about a good speaker: disappeared! There was music - not sound!"
And these speakers are in fairly bad condition, having their foam suspension starting to desintegrate and fed but an iMac...
Now, let's have a look at the subwoofer.
This is actually one sample equipped with the best driver we ever used a double coil Cabasse 21 cm, (single coil in this active version, and a black membrane), specially made for us, and very expensive. It is the ancestor of what is used in the Sphere now, and it works wonders - specially when only using the lower two octaves (30-120Hz).
Using the driver downfiring against a known surface and a fixed distance gives a very linear bass response indeed (+/- 1db over that range)
Using an integrated amplifier helps adjust the levels betweem satelites and subwoofer. The very low cut off frequency ensures that it is difficult to hear the position of the subwoofer.
This active TRITON system would make a very good sub/rear channels add-on to the front channels of a 5.1 home theater system. I might soon be able to report on the results...
Below are a few photos of this unique product, courtesy of Audioconseil

Finally some more images of the SATs active, courtesy of my reader in Switzerland:

Let's start the year - late for sure - but with a bang!
If you had the chance to meet Georges Cabasse, the man would have left an indelebile impression on you.
First because he was a very big man physically, but also because you could not ignore his presence in the room, nor could you not not have an opinion on his designs.
The Sphere, launched 4 years ago, and its little sister the Ocean launched in October last year are the latest incarnations of Cabasse revolutionary ideas about speaker design. They have been at it for 60 years!
Somebody has tagged this latest incarnation of the "pulsating sphere" as the UFO of French HiFi.
They look more like "Big Brother" to me and I would have a difficult time living with them at home, but one has to admire the work and research behind these massive speakers.
These two speakers share the same medium and treble three-way coaxial assembly, the Sphere is equipped with a 55cm (yes, you read it properly...and that's 22" for the non metrics of you) woofer and the Ocean with only (!) a 38cm one.
The digital filter for the Ocean separates the signal in four bands with 175, 1830 and 4500Hz cut off frequencies and 150Hz, 800Hz, and 4kHz for the Sphere.
One thing to be noted though is that even if you take into consideration the 15 years of research behind these speakers, at 176K$ and 110K$, these are a lot cheaper than the Grand Utopia from Focal.
I missed out on listening to these speakers in Paris, as time was too short to get to the venue where they were presented during the Paris HiFi Show.
But I did hear the first incarnation of that technology, the Baltic, a number of years ago.
It used a simplified two-way the medium-treble unit and a DuoCell 21 cm for the bass.
Now, I am very familiar with this woofer, as I used a double coil version of it in my Triton subwoofer. It is probably the 21cm woofer you can find.
I used to pay 200$ for one of these wonders in 1985...Do the math with inflation and so on and you can see it is not for the faint hearted! (that's about 1000$ in today's money...).
One of the main quality of this arrangement is the time alignement and the pulse response, as well as spatial diffusion and image stability, due to the coaxial design and the spherical enclosure (we are back to Elipson, aren't we?).
If you want a good review of the Sphere, I recommend you read Stereophile: here is the link: http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/608cab/index.html
And finally, here is a photo of our Microphase Triton, a revival of the triphonic system introduced in 1985, which has been done to death by almost every single speaker manufacture ever since! (home theater, anyone???)
If anybody has one of these relatively rare systems, please get in touch via our comments link.