Estonia

Estonia is a country of 1.3 million people with a loudspeaker industry that consists, essentially, of one company aiming at the very top of the market. The engineering tradition it draws on is Soviet-era electroacoustics and ultrasound research, retooled after 1991 by a generation that had spent decades designing transducers for state institutes and then found themselves able to sell to the world. What came out of that is not a volume business: small runs, hand-finished cabinets, exotic composites, and a willingness to put a speaker's entire design budget into one sculptural idea. Tallinn is close enough to Scandinavia to share its driver suppliers and far enough from its design conventions to ignore them.