Living Voice — Vox Olympian and the Art of the Horn

Rafi Mercer
2025-09-27T14:27:15+01:00

Living Voice treats speakers as instruments, not appliances. Rafi Mercer explores how the Vox Olympian horn system brings beauty, scale, and refinement to listening bars.

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Some loudspeakers aspire to transparency, others to muscle. Living Voice aspires to beauty. Founded in Nottingham in 1990 by Kevin Scott, the brand has always treated loudspeakers not as appliances but as instruments — objects to be tuned, voiced, and lived with. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Vox Olympian and Vox Palladian systems, extraordinary horn loudspeakers that have become legends in listening culture. For bars bold enough to house them, they are not simply sound systems; they are works of art, as sculptural as they are sonic.

The Vox Olympian was unveiled in 2012, though its spirit reaches back much further, drawing inspiration from Western Electric and Altec theatre horns of the 1930s and 40s. Yet where those machines were industrial, the Vox Olympian is artisanal. Each is built to order, crafted from hardwoods, metals, and leather with a jeweller’s attention to detail. The design is tiered: exponential mid horns, folded bass horns, delicate supertweeters, all aligned with obsessive precision. The result is a speaker as imposing as a piece of architecture, yet as intimate in its voicing as a string quartet.

Spiritland in London famously chose a Vox Olympian system as its centrepiece, pairing it with bespoke valve amplification. I remember my first visit: the horns stood like totems, polished wood gleaming, bronze glinting in the low light. When the needle dropped on John Coltrane’s Naima, the sound was breathtaking. Not loud, not overwhelming — but alive. The saxophone floated with body and texture, the room itself seemed tuned. Patrons sipped quietly, conversations soft, as if the very presence of the Olympians had set the rules of listening.

That is the paradox of Living Voice: though monumental in scale, the speakers are voiced with restraint. They carry dynamic swing and microdetail without aggression, warmth without murk. In bars, this translates into nights where music feels less like a playback and more like a performance — vivid yet effortless, powerful yet graceful.

Compared with the muscular directness of JBL or the raw theatre of Altec, Living Voice is more rarefied. These are not workhorse speakers; they are connoisseur instruments. They require space, sympathetic electronics, and a proprietor willing to treat sound as the main event. But where they are installed, they define the venue absolutely. A bar with Vox Olympians is not just another room with records. It is a destination.

Visually, they command attention. Polished horn flares, inlaid veneers, even gold leaf in some editions — they are designed to be seen as much as heard. In the context of a listening bar, they become part of the identity, signalling a commitment to artistry at every level, from the whisky on the shelf to the needle in the groove.

Living Voice continues to produce more approachable models, such as the Auditorium series, which carry the same voicing philosophy in smaller packages. But it is the Olympian and Palladian that embody the brand’s mythos. They are reminders that horn loudspeakers, often thought of as brute machines, can also be instruments of refinement and beauty.

In the end, Living Voice represents the art of the horn — not as theatre, not as nostalgia, but as beauty. In a listening bar, they transform music into presence, presence into atmosphere, and atmosphere into memory. Nights with them are not forgotten. They linger, like the last note of a record in the silence that follows.