Epos Loudspeakers are part of FinkTeam which in turn is an adjunct to Europe’s premier loudspeaker design consultancy, Fink Audio Consulting.

OVER 40 YEARS OF HISTORY

Epos Loudspeakers was founded in 1983 by Robin Marshall., who was responsible for the iconic Epos loudspeakers, that gained a big following and legendary status.

In 1988 Epos was sold to Mordaunt-Short. In 1999 TGI PLC group decided to closed the Epos/Mordaunt-Short operations. Epos was sold to Creek Audio Ltd. Then in 2020 Creek sold the Epos Loudspeaker brand to FinkTeam; Karl-Heinz Fink had always been interested in the Epos design philosophy and knew he could update that philosophy with more modern design and engineering techniques.

Robin Marshall designed speakers based on the ideas and know-how he had at that time – not more and not less. That sounded like the Fink Audio way stretching boundaries and not copying the past.

RANGE OVERVIEW

ES-7N

Two way reflex loaded ‘bookshelf’ loudspeaker

A baby EPOS.

Smaller speakers especially give the designer some severe headaches. This has something to do with the size of the front baffle and the small baffle’s influence on a speaker’s response curve. A design for free space should be different from one that plays close to a wall or inside a bookshelf.

In order to work in a semi-free space (some distance from a wall) and ‘on’ a wall, the crossover filter can be changed with a switch on the back of the speaker.

Now, you are free to choose the place of your speakers without making compromises in tonal balance.

ES-14N

Restarting EPOS could only mean re-creating the most famous model, the ES-14. This was a 2-way speaker in a fairly big cabinet and classic looking cabinet, to be used on a dedicated stand. The design should be classic, not lifestyle, only doing things that help with the sound and as straight forward as possible.

Analyzing the old construction was interesting. It used a 7“ woofer with Polypropylene cone and an underhang coil with a huge magnet, but multiple layers of VC winding to make the whole coil heavy in order to get a sort of roll-off in the response curve of the woofer. The size of the woofer was not following any standard – too big for a 6.5“, but too small for an 8“. But it was a clever choice, because you could get more drive at lower frequencies more like an 8“ and a midband character closer to the 6.5“.

ES-28N

“All good things come in threes” is a proverb often used in Germany the third time something happens. The ES-28N is the third model in the current EPOS line-up, it’s a 3-way loudspeaker made by a designer who is well known for doing 2-way systems – even with bigger woofers. So what changed his mind?

Experience!

It’s just that a 2-way system doesn’t work so well in a configuration with two woofers. OK, there is the typical D’Appolito configuration with a woofer above or below a tweeter, but as the tweeter should be sitting around one metre, the speaker would end up as a huge tower. Mounting the woofers below the tweeter would need a so called 2.5-way configuration. In such a configuration, one of the two woofers stops working in the lower midband, and the second woofer covers the rest of the midband to connect to the tweeter. That sounds like a good idea, but unfortunately, the main radiation axis for those two woofers would be tilted downwards, so it is difficult to manage the mid-frequency energy properly. So why not make it 3-way?

OK, that’s what we did.

EPOS PHILOSOPHY

When they began designing loudspeakers for themselves in 2014, the designers envisaged demonstrating their capabilities as loudspeaker engineers, not loudspeaker manufacturers – that changed with the successful introduction of the first FinkTeam Models. In 2020 they acquired Epos with a clear mission to relaunch the brand. The design should be classic, only doing things that help with the sound and as straight-forward as possible.