Hermann Winters and Alfred Rudolph founded Acapella Audio Arts in Duisburg, Germany, in 1978, on a conviction that loudspeakers should disappear into the music — never the other way around.
Their answer to that conviction was the horn — and, eventually, the plasma tweeter, a massless ion-generated treble driver that Acapella has refined further than any other company in the world. The original Triolon (1982) put plasma-treble in front of a wide-mouth midrange horn and a long-throw bass cabinet; the Triolon Excalibur (current) is the fourth iteration of that lineage and is widely considered one of the most resolving full-range loudspeaker systems ever made.
Everything is built by hand in Duisburg — horns turned on lathes, ion-tweeter capsules wound one at a time, cabinets veneered in the workshop’s own shop. The company has stayed small on purpose; the production rate has not changed materially since the early 1990s.
Audio Autobahn is the exclusive Montréal partner for Acapella. The reference range — Triolon Excalibur, High Violon Mk VI, La Campanella, Apollon — is in residence and on audition by appointment. The horns reward the room they sit in. Bring a record.
