Visaton B200

The Visaton B200 started my journey into DIY full range speakers. Before the Visaton, I owned a very early Tekton 3 piece subwoofer speaker set with 4 inch Fostex drivers, and then a small open baffle loaded with 8 inch Fostex fe206 drivers. After reading through 50 or more pages of a now legendary thread on Audiocircle called the “Gravity Well of a DarkStar,” I ordered a pair of Visaton B200, bought a jigsaw, and made my first circle cuts onto wood panels. After mounting the drivers and hooking them up to my Decware monoblocks, I was completely blown away by the sound quality of these well made 8 inch German drivers. How much simpler could it be than this? I couldn't believe the sound these produced, and my itch for DIY speakers was born. The Visaton eventualy moved on, but their success led to a seemingly endless progression of one or another driver; Lowther, Supravox, Norelco, Coral, ElectroVoice, etc. Almost 20 years later I found another well used pair of Visaton for sale and bought them again, to sort of take a pulse and see what the first great driver I owned still has to offer. And I am here to say that I started with a winner. In many ways the Visaton B200 is the ideal wide band OB speaker driver, and mounted in the Telefunken cabinets these drivers could easily be an end game setup. Sometimes you don't know how good you had it until its gone, and I am so happy to have these beautiful drivers back in my life.

The Visaton B200 are 6ohm fullrange drivers, made in Germany, and are optimized for large volume or open panel speakers. They make prodigious, room vibrating palpable bass on OB, and they play high enough for my hearing without need of a whizzer cone and its distortions. These are solid, well made drivers that deliver the goods with a minimum of BS, and at 96 db/wm they dance well with the little amps that I love. 1 watt will energize the B200 to room filling, neighbor complaining sound levels. 45 watts is no problem either, these are not fragile drivers, and they really get up and boogie with some power applied. In my Telefunken cabinets (which I didn't own the first time around), these are an ideal solution, and perhaps the best the Telefunken have ever sounded to me.

All in all, the Visaton B200 are some of the very best sounding full range, wide band speakers that I’ve heard, and are probably the best no nonsense solution for the Telefunken baffles yet, producing the full range of sound without really any compromises. The Supravox 215RTF64 were also fabulous drivers for this cabinet, and I regret selling them, but they did need a tweeter which the phase-plugged Visaton eliminate. The Coral Flat 10 were also sweet but not as direct as the Visaton; the Corals are more relaxed. Oleg Rullit’s Lab 8 field coils made more bass than the Visaton, and sounded very excellent, but the field coil power supply is added complication. And while my endearing fascination with the Coral Holey Baskets in these big cabinets is not eclipsed by the Visaton, its easy to appreciate the differences, so those two are my long term setups for the Telefunken baffles.