If you assembled every one of the thousands of different tower speakers made today on a basketball football field, you'd be able to pick out the BC Acoustique products with ease. Most tower speakers take the form of ugly black ash boxes. But BC Acoustique's flamboyant metal tweeter horn and complementary metal rings surrounding its woofers show an aesthetic sense that most speaker designers lack. Even without the fancy trim, the cabinets exude elegance; they are spare, simple enclosures clad in your choice of maple, cherry, amarante, or wengé veneer.

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The A1 is the smallest tower speaker in BC Acoustique's line, but all share the same tweeter and midrange/woofer. (Click image to enlarge)

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All of the speakers in the company's Act Series—five tower speakers, a bookshelf model, two center speakers, and a surround speaker—share the same look. They also share much the same sound. All use the same horn tweeter, a design BC Acoustique developed in conjunction with professional audio company Fostex. And all of the tower speakers and the larger of the two center speakers use the same 7.2-inch polypropylene-cone midrange/woofer driver. (The other speakers use similar but smaller woofers.)

The "-que" at the end of the company's name is not a pretentious flourish, like a diner in Peoria tacking an "e" onto "restaurant." BC Acoustique is a real French company. French speaker makers are not common—at least not to American consumers—but there are others, including such esteemed names as JMlab and Cabasse.

We were first attracted to the BC line after seeing the company's website. BC agreed to send us its smallest tower speaker, the A1, for a photo shoot, and we promised we'd give it a listen. We liked what we heard, so we asked for a C1 center speaker and a pair of D1 surround speakers to flesh out the A1s into a full surround-sound system.

BC Acoustique's U.S. importer, Musical Sounds, also suggested a Mosscade Saturn 12 subwoofer. Mosscade is a line of subwoofers designed and manufacturered by BC Acoustique. Most high-end speaker makers' subwoofers are nothing more than a driver and an amp in a big, ugly box, but the Saturn 12 shows a real engineering effort. It's an isobaric design, with two woofers clamped against each other face-to-face. This may seem a strange arrangement, but it works beautifully because each driver cancels the other's distortion. It also allows the use of a box half the size that would normally be required to achieve the sub's rated bass extension of 25 hertz. The drivers are completely enclosed in the medium-density fiberboard box; they vent through the bottom of the box and a slot in the back. A built-in 300-watt amp powers the drivers.

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The Mosscade Saturn 12 subwoofer comes in white, black, or wood finish. It uses an unusual but effective isobaric design, with two woofers mounted together face-to-face. (Click image to enlarge)

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The horn tweeter dominates my impression of the Act Series' sound. Most conventional dome tweeters exhibit a slight decrease in high treble response at the upper reaches of human hearing, but this one seems almost as if it were designed for a dog's stereo system. The treble has an unusual presence, letting me hear the details in musical recordings and highlighting the foley effects in movie soundtracks in a way that heightens my involement in the DVDs I watch. I also notice an extraordinarily coherent sound, creating a surround-sound effect that sounds more like real ambient sound than like sound blaring from speakers. It actually makes my listening room sound much larger. Either it's the character of the tweeter or the excellent matching of the speakers, or a little of both.

The treble does seem a little too pronounced at times. I try to soften it a little using the beautifully designed jumpers on the back of the speaker, which raise or lower the treble by as much as 3 decibels. But even lowering the treble by just 1.5 decibels seems to throw the speaker out of balance—the woofer starts to dominate vocal reproduction and the speaker doesn't sound as natural. I advise sticking with the factory settings.

The A1 puts out a decent amount of bass on its own, but its single woofer can't handle the pounding that a DVD soundtrack like King Kong delivers. Fortunately, the Saturn 12 sub handles the big ape with ease. In fact, the Saturn 12 quickly becomes one of my all-time favorite subwoofers. It has that magical mix of high output and precise, punchy bass reproduction that the best subwoofers strive for but that we so seldom encounter in reality. And it does all this without taking up several square feet of floor space. The sound is exceptionally clear and undistorted, and it has all the "tightness" that you want for music reproduction. Yet it also plays very, very loud, and can easily shake the floor when you want it to.

This is my first experience—and likely yours too—with the BC Acoustique brand, but I'm pretty sure it won't be the last. You don't find this combination of style and serious engineering every day.

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The back of each Act Series tower features this unusual tweeter level control, which uses a jumper wire to give the user five setting options. (Click image to enlarge)

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DESCRIPTION
Speaker system for surround-sound or stereo use

COMPONENTS
A1: metal horn tweeter, 7.2-inch poly-cone woofer
C1: metal horn tweeter, two 6-inch poly-cone woofers
D1: metal horn tweeter, two 2-inch midrange drivers, 5.6-inch poly-cone woofer
Saturn 12: two 12-inch woofers, 300-watt internal amplifier

CONNECTIONS
A1, C1: Four-way binding posts
D1: Two pairs of four-way binding posts
Saturn 12: Five-way binding posts for speaker-level input and output, RCA jacks for stereo analog line-level input and output

DIMENSIONS
A1: 36 x 8.4 x 13.2 inches (hwd)
C1: 5.2 x 15.2 x 6.4 inches (hwd)
D1: 12 x 14 x 6.8 inches (hwd)
Saturn 12: 14.8 x 18 x 16.8 inches (hwd)

PRICE/CONTACT
PRICE: A1 $2,500 per pair, C1 $1,100 each, D1 $2,500 per pair, Saturn 12 $2,900 each
CONTACT: 203.877.7776, www.bc-acoustique.com, www.mosscade.com