Hyperion Sound Design's Albert Wu holds up his SVF midrange driver. It's quite a piece of work. It has no spider, incorporates what Wu calls "rear pressure reduction," and the flat-carbon fiber plate that I took for a dust cap is really the transducer.

Obviously, the driver is proprietary to Hyperion—and it seemed like a lot of innovation for such a modestly priced speaker. "We like keeping prices sane," Wu smiled. "We think of ourselves as providing balance to an industry that needs some."