Floorstanding loudspeakers — Spendor Classic 200

The Classic 200 is the larger of the two three-way floorstanders in the Classic line from Spendor, the British company started in the late 1960s by Spencer and Dorothy Hughes. Earlier versions were sold as the SP200, and the cabinet keeps the proportions of Spendor's 1970s enclosures. A version with a multilayer titanium front baffle is sold as the Classic 200Ti with the same acoustic specification. Like all Spendor loudspeakers it is designed and assembled by hand in the UK, with the company making its own drive units and cabinets. The standard cherry or walnut veneer version has been listed at GBP 16,500 to GBP 19,500 per pair on the British market.

Key specs that matter

Bass comes from two 30 cm bextrene cones fitted with Kevlar composite stabiliser domes, the midrange from an 18 cm unit with an EP77 polymer cone and the treble from a 22 mm wide-surround polyamide dome. Crossover points are 550 Hz and 3.8 kHz. Spendor's figures are a typical in-room response of 20 Hz to 25 kHz, 89 dB for 1 W at 1 m and an 8 ohm nominal impedance with a 6.0 ohm minimum. The recommended amplifier range is 25 to 300 W. Each cabinet is 1117 mm high, 368 mm wide and 513 mm deep, and weighs 55 kg.

Engineering and use context

Spendor closes the box completely, an infinite baffle loading that follows the BBC approach of the 1960s. Below its resonance a closed box rolls off at 12 dB per octave, a gentler slope than a reflex design, and it reacts less to the distance from the rear wall, which Spendor says lets the Classic 200 work in a smaller room despite its two large woofers. The panels are thin walled, braced and damped - viscoelastic pads on the walls allow a controlled amount of flex and convert part of the vibration into heat instead of making the box as stiff as possible. Handing the midrange to a dedicated driver means the woofers cover only the lowest octaves, while the same small dome tweeter used across the Classic range handles the treble. Connection is through gold-plated binding posts, and spikes are included.

Pairing

A benign impedance curve combined with high efficiency lets the Classic 200 run from low-powered amplifiers at the lower end of Spendor's range as well as from large transistor designs near the top.

Alternatives

Within the Spendor floorstanding range the D9.2 from the D-Line is a slimmer three-way option, 1155 mm tall and 35 kg, with an LPZ 22 mm polyamide dome tweeter, an 18 cm EP77 midrange cone and two 18 cm Kevlar composite bass units.