Hands On: RSL Compression Guide Speakers
An old speaker company is reborn.
I hear again and again how home theater dealers yearn for the good-old-days when consumers took audio seriously and would hunt out the perfect speakers for their home listening rooms. Today, these dealers will tell you that people want big, bright TVs and maybe a home theater-in-a-box system to complement it. They want compressed and streamed music in their headphones more than they want high fidelity.
One of these people might have been Howard Rodgers, except he decided to do something about it. In the ‘70s and ‘80s Rodgers owned a series of hi-fi stores in southern California called Rogersound Labs. In those stores he sold his own RSL loudspeakers—a brand that attracted a healthy following of audiophiles at the time.
Eventually, the Rogersound Labs stores went away and Rodgers himself moved on to other things. One of those things was his own home theater—unfortunately he was unsatisfied with any of the speakers he could find on the market, so he went back to the drawing board and built his own. From the results came the new RSL speakers.
He liked his new designs so much, he started comparing them to other premium-level speakers. As Rodgers tells it, all that comparing convinced him he could make speakers to stand up against the best brands in the business, but for less money. Thus the beginnings of a new business emerged.
