In my high-school days, I visited a friend whose well-to-do dad proudly demonstrated his new Quad ESL system for us. First up was a recording of a man with heavy footsteps traversing the space from left to right. Next came a speeding police car, siren engaged, complete with Doppler tail. I found it impressive, and a little lame at the same time. My friend and I, in love with our own artsiness, preferred Fear of Music by Talking Heads and Drums and Wires by XTC, or (in a pinch) U2’s Boy.

It wouldn’t have occurred to me that I’d ultimately derive frequent joy from listening to sound effects (though in my case they’re usually integral to the music, not apart from it). When I hear Yosi Horikawa’s bouncing marbles on Wandering, I prick up my ears and smile. A panting dog on Holly Cole’s Temptation, an overhead hovercar on the Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack … bring it on. A babbling river on Andrew Bird’s Echolocations; seed pods on Tom Waits’s Blood Money; liquid splashes and crinkling paper on Felix Laband’s Dark Days Exit … yes, please. I don’t care if it’s a little gimmicky. It’s also sensual in the original meaning of the word, an aural pleasure.

The Raidho TD3.8 speakers that, after three months, just departed my home, do the trick of conjuring points in space with great acuity. I figured they might after they made a fool of me at AXPONA 2022. Here’s what happened: I’d entered the Danish brand’s room and taken a front-row seat for a brief audition. Suddenly a deep-voiced man spoke up, just to my right: “You guys ever heard of the Purple Man?” Puzzled, I looked in his direction; no one was there. Being from Maine, I wondered if I’d somehow ended up in a Stephen King horror flick.

A millisecond later, my brain clicked into gear. The voice was on the recording (nine seconds into Natalie Merchant’s “The Peppery Man,” from Leave Your Sleep). Cheeks flushed with embarrassment, I realized that I’m apparently no smarter than my dog, who sometimes barks at other dogs he sees on TV.

At this point, I was deeply intrigued by the Danish duo and hoped to do a review. It would be another 10 months before the speakers, in a premium burl walnut finish ($117,000/pair), arrived chez moi, accompanied by US importer Bruce Ball, who, for an afternoon, kindly oversaw and tweaked their setup.

Before Ball even had them dialed in, I heard and enjoyed the forward-projecting effect again. On Roger Waters’s “Perfect Sense Pt. 2,” from Amused to Death (24/192 FLAC, Columbia/Qobuz), the dialog between the sportscasters that starts at 1:35 comes from the left speaker—seemingly not just several feet outside it but pushing so far to the front that it seemed as if the duo had taken up residence on the leather couch that’s 5′ from my left knee (footnote 1). The vast majority of speakers I’ve auditioned paint the soundstage left-right-and-back; they don’t tend to place sounds into the room. By contrast, the Raidho TD3.8s sometimes render two-channel mixes with imagined Dolby wizardry—as if there were auxiliary speakers on the sides. It’s almost too cute and coincidental that Raidho is headquartered in Denmark’s Jutland.

Speaking of: Can we just take a moment to marvel at the country’s 100-plus-year rise as an audio powerhouse? In 1915, Danish inventor Peter Laurits Jensen and his American partner Edwin Pridham produced the world’s first moving coil loudspeaker (footnote 2). Jensen’s pioneering work seems to have fed a petri dish of hi-fi innovations in his homeland. According to the 2015 e-book Danish Loudspeakers (footnote 3), “Danish companies manufactured more loudspeakers per capita than any other country in the world” in the 1960s and ’70s. Today, Denmark’s hi-fi industry includes AudioTechnology, Bang & Olufsen, Børresen, Buchardt, DALI, Dynaudio, Gryphon, ICEpower, JAMO, Lyngdorf, Peerless, Ortofon, Raidho, Scan-Speak, Scansonic, SEAS, Vitus, and more. That’s stupefying for a population of just 5.7 million people—about the same as Minnesota—and for a country that, in terms of land mass, is half the size of Maine.

Fast as a bullet

4’8″ tall and lanky, the TD3.8 does a better job at softening its visual dominance than other tower speakers I’ve had in my room recently, including the Focal Maestro Utopia EVO and the all-beryllium-driver version of the Tekton Moab (reviews of both forthcoming). No, the Raidhos don’t exactly disappear from sight, but their front baffle (slightly curved concavely in the vertical plane and convexly in the horizontal one) is only 10″ wide. Viewed from directly overhead, the forward-sloping tops of the three-way speakers have a pronounced bullet shape as the flanks swoop sharply backward to end in a wedge-shaped rear (the bullet’s tip). The TD3.8s are much deeper (23″) than they are wide. I’m sure that all design decisions regarding their enclosures were made for acoustical reasons—time alignment, minimizing diffraction, subduing standing waves—but it doesn’t hurt that the speakers ended up looking aerodynamic and fast. And fast they are, transient-wise, which starts with the high-frequency drivers.

Raidho’s proprietary ribbon tweeter, mounted in an MTM array with two 5″ midrange drivers, is 3″ tall. It’s a planar magnetic with an 11µm-thick foil membrane that weighs just 20mg, equivalent to maybe a dozen snowflakes.

The purple prose on the company’s website explains that Raidho’s bass and midrange transducers (8″ and 5″ in diameter, respectively) are no slouches in terms of speed and other virtues. Each combines strong neodymium magnets with underhung titanium voice coils. The magnet systems and the baskets that contain them are turbine-shaped, claimed to counter reflections that would otherwise smear and colorize the sound. The diaphragms of these midrange and bass drivers consist of layers of aluminum, ceramic, and tantalum topped off with a 10µm-thick deposit of artificial diamond. These tantalum and diamond layers, which give the TD series its name, are applied in “highly specialized machines [that] pump in argon gas and fire particles at lightspeed, thus fixating the atoms to the membrane,” the website says.

The TD3.8 is fourth from the top in the series—after the $250,000/pair TD6, the $156,000/pair 4.8, and the $146,000/pair 4.2. At this level, nothing is off the shelf, Raidho says. “No essential part is picked from a brochure. All is custom made” to achieve “unique creations.” The drivers are designed and built in-house in Pandrup (population 10,000), the company’s home in northern Denmark. Within its stepped-slope crossovers, Raidho does use third-party materials, including Mundorf components connected with Nordost wire. Bass frequencies up to 400Hz are handled by the TD3.8’s double 8″ woofers; above that, the dual 5″ midrange drivers take over. On yonder side of 2.4kHz, the ribbon tweeters fire.

Pairing is caring

For a week or two, I did my listening with the fabulous all-in-one HiFi Rose RS520 I reviewed in the July 2023 issue. Judging by retail prices, this should have been a dicey matchup. The Rose, a streamer, preamp, tuner, and class-D stereo amp in one, costs only $3695. That means you can buy 30 of ’em for the price of the Raidhos and have money left over for a bacchanal or two at a Michelin-starred restaurant (or half a ticket to a Taylor Swift show, footnote 4). In reality, the Rose+Raidhos combo wasn’t as Oompa-Loompa-meets-the-Hulk as you’d expect. I enjoyed everything I played, although it fell short of world-class performance in terms of absolute resolution and midrange fluidity.

Next, I gave my Krell FPB 200c stereo amplifier a whirl, fed by an Auralic Vega DAC. Crispness and bass authority increased, and with the further addition of an Audio Research LS16 MkII preamp, I also had a winsome midrange, bending toward mellifluousness. Nice.

Ultimately, these were just warmups—a form of delayed gratification. I hadn’t forgotten how supple and seductive the TD3.8s sounded at AXPONA 2022, where they’d been married to a pair of Margules U280 SC 30th-anniversary-edition tube amps. The same amplification had driven the $46,500/pair TD2.2s at the Florida Audio Expo in February of this year, producing such synergy that it became one of my top three systems at that show. “Pure and surprisingly 3D in a way that turns off your brain and connects you to the music in seconds flat,” I wrote in my wrap piece.

Footnote 1: This song, like the rest of Amused to Death, was recorded in Qsound, a 3D-positional sound-processing algorithm that renders a binaural image from a two-channel system, enhancing such spatial effects—which takes nothing away from the Raidhos’ impressive rendering.—Jim Austin

Footnote 2: They later started Magnavox together.

Footnote 3: Free at tinyurl.com/2kkfuc45.

Footnote 4: See tinyurl.com/pca9s6yj.

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COMPANY INFO

Raidho Acoustics

15 Bransagervej

Pandrup

9490 Denmark

+45 98247677

raidho.dk

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