Fritz Speakers Carbon 7

John F. Heiler, the "Fritz" in Fritz Speakers, is one such builder. He's been designing and constructing loudspeakers since his college years in the mid 1970s, so that today the company produces an extensive and highly affordable line of both audiophile and home-theater speakers delivered factory-direct. The heart of his compact line is the Carbon 7, a 16"-tall two-way in a thick MDF bass-reflex enclosure with a rear-mounted 2.5" port. The look of the Carbon 7 is chunky Old School and reflects the aesthetic that function is foremost. Its visual simplicity marks it as a loudspeaker that could have been manufactured anytime from 1970 onward. The drivers are sourced from ScanSpeak and include a 7" mid/bass with a carbon-graphite-fiber/paper-pulp cone and Kapton voice coil, and a 1.1" ferro-fluid-cooled soft dome tweeter in a non-resonant rear chamber. The first-order crossover, which kicks in at 2.2kHz, is point-to-point hard-wired and minimalist to the core. It uses no caps or resistors in the circuit with the tweeter and only a single inductor on the mid/bass transducer.