A cabinet is the part you can judge with your hands.

Mitred corners, splined by hand

Every corner is mitred and then reinforced with a through spline of a contrasting hardwood, sanded flush to both faces. Maple into walnut and ebonized oak; walnut into ash.

There are two reasons and they happen to agree. A bare mitre in a box that spends its life vibrating is a weak joint, so the spline is structural. And from three feet away you see four contrasting lines running the height of each corner and understand, without being told, that a person cut these.

The joinery is the argument. Everything else is a claim.

Every edge is specified

The vertical baffle edges are radiused 19 mm, full height, both sides. That is an acoustic decision before it is an aesthetic one: a sharp baffle edge re-radiates the wavefront as it passes it, and that delayed copy arrives back on the listening axis as ripple in the response. A generous radius spreads the transition out and smooths it.

It also catches a soft continuous highlight down the full height of the front face, which is what stops a rectangular box from reading as a box. The top baffle edge takes a 6 mm chamfer to terminate the radius. The bottom stays square. Rear edges are eased 3 mm — enough to hold finish and resist chipping, not enough to read as round.

Three finishes and one accent

Oil-rubbed walnut is the house standard: American black walnut, hand-rubbed oil, satin, open grain. Ebonized oak is the dark option — and it is ebonized, not painted, so the grain still reads through the black. If the grain disappears the finish has failed and the cabinet does not ship. Natural ash is the light option, pale and hard-wearing.

One accent metal, and it appears in exactly two places on a cabinet: the rosette inlaid into the top panel, and the engraved plate on the back. Nowhere else. No piping, no badge on the baffle, no logo where a logo would be easy.

The rosette

A rosette is the concentric inlay ring around a guitar’s soundhole — a woodworking operation rather than a printed mark, which is the whole point of using one. Up close it reads as inlay. From across a room it resolves into the shape of a driver. It is cut into the top panel of every cabinet.

Then it gets measured

Once the finish has cured, the pair goes on the measurement rig. Frequency response, impedance, sensitivity, and both cabinets overlaid to confirm they match within ±0.5 dB. That curve is printed and goes in the box with your serial number on it.

How the measurements are taken

And then it gets signed

A blackened brass plate on the back, engraved: built by hand, Richard Reardon, the serial number, the month and year. It costs almost nothing and it is the most persuasive thing about the entire product, because it lives on the cabinet rather than in the marketing.