STORGAARD & VESTSKOV GRO LOUDSPEAKERS
Storgaard & Vestskov are an €18,000 pair of compact floorstadning loudspeakers that fall in the middle of this relatively new Danish brand’s portfolio of loudspeakers. Stuart Smith takes a listen for HiFi PiG.
INTRODUCTION
Storgaard & Vestskov is a relatively new Danish brand that comes from Bornholm, an island off Denmark. I’ll not go into the whole history of the brand here, as I would be repeating what I said in my review of their FRIDA speakers; if you would like to know more about the company and their standmounts, you can read the review here.
However, I do think it’s worth repeating this quote from Casper Vestskov Poulsen, CEO, Founder, and designer of the speakers:
“Storgaard & Vestskov began as a family dream, driven by a shared passion for sound and craftsmanship. With over 25 years of experience in precision CNC manufacturing, I partnered with my brother-in-law, Kim Storgaard, who brings decades of expertise in sound reproduction and speaker building.
Our philosophy is simple: ‘Sound that Matters.’ It’s the foundation of everything we create, using only the best components possible. As a designer, I aim to create speakers that blend exceptional performance with timeless, furniture-like aesthetics.”
BUILD AND FEATURES OF STORGAARD & VESTSKOV GRO LOUDSPEAKERS
The GRO speaker from Storgaard & Vestskov is a floorstanding loudspeaker that falls between the larger FENJA floorstander and the aforementioned standmount, FRIDA. GRO costs €€ 18.995,00 in Europe. This seems at first glance a good deal of money for a compact floorstander, but that’s the price, and they do look very nice, and have very good components making them up.
GRO is a smallish (21 x 100 x 32 cm) two-way design which is ported around the back with three ports. These back ports mean that placement will be critical in my experience, and Storgaard & Vestskov suggest they are placed from 30cm to 180cm away from the back wall, which I duly comlpied with.
Aesthetically, GRO carries on the Storgaard & Vestskov design principles. The company utilises aluminium for all exterior parts, except the cabinet, because the material allows for engineering exact tolerances, structural stability, and acoustic consistency. The signature front baffle (you see it and know it’s a Storgaard & Vestskov speaker) is milled from solid aluminium and features a sun-inspired pattern, conceptualised by Casper Vestskov Poulsen as a tribute to Bornholm (the “sunshine island”), serving the acoustic purpose of reducing unwanted reflections.
The GRO speaker utilises pre-matched driver units paired into matched sets before installation – I like this attention to detail. Drivers on the GRO are:
A 38 mm ring radiator tweeter, and two 5-inch woven mineral cones that deal with the mids and bass frequencies. Storgaard & Vestskov say that these drivers exhibit excellent internal damping and extremely linear frequency response characteristics. The cones feature an optimised centre bullet that functions to reduce compression resulting from temperature variations in the voice coil. Plus, the lower suspension system minimises sound reflection, air flow noise, and keeps cavity resonance to a minimum.
The crossover is a 12 dB Linkwitz/Riley design. It crosses over at 2750 Hz with a slope of 12 dB per octave and includes incorporated T.I.M. (Transient Intermodulation Distortion) reduction circuits. The crossover network, designed by Jens Posselt, uses high-grade audio capacitors and metallised polypropylene film to minimise parasitic impedance and preserve signal purity. The coils are wound from low-resistance 13 AWG 1B-grade copper, which the company says is essential for maintaining dynamics, clarity, and micro-detail across the entire bandwidth.
The GRO speakers are fitted with WBT terminals and use a special hybrid internal wiring configuration that combines pure copper and silver plating. There is only one set of terminals, but that’s fine by me.
The GROs are 22kg (48.5lbs), are 90dB sensitive, present a nominal 4 ohm load, and go down to a claimed 27HZ, which seems a bold claim for such a compact loudspeaker.
The review sample speakers came in black cabinets with a very nice, deep blue front baffle and stand – the images supplied are of the Bentley Bronze version, which I’ve seen in the flesh, and it’s really rather lovely. You can get the GRO speakers in Matte Black cabinet and Bentley Copper aluminium, a High-Gloss Black cabinet and Metallic Matte Black aluminium, and, finally, a Brilliant White cabinet with Light Anthracite Grey aluminium. Custom colours are avaialble on request.
The speakers come with a matching aluminium frame stand, onto which the speakers bolt.
Overall, the build quality is excellent, and these are a lovely-looking speaker that will fit in almost any home environment you choose to place them in. They look modern and yet understated, but I did prefer the look of the standmount…I think. Obviously, that’s a taste thing, and I did actually grow to love the aesthetics of the GRO.
SETUP AND USE
The GRO speakers arrived for review in a sturdy wooden box, but I’m guessing that the ones you buy will come in more conventional crates. Setup was a hassle-free experience, with me needing to bolt them onto the stands and fanny about a bit to get their best position. I had them about 3 metres apart, about 150cm from the back wall and well away from the side walls.
Power was supplied by our Electrocompaniet AW800 M amps, via a Music First pre, Lampizator DAC, and Auralic streamer using ROON.
SOUND QUALITY
Despite really loving the FRIDA standmounts, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from the GRO loudspeakers. My preference in speakers is usually big floorstanders, or exceptionally good standmounts. Compact standmounters are not really a format that screams “buy me” (to me), though I recognise that they are hugely popular and perform the job of bridging that gap between folk who want a bigger box than standmounts, but don’t have the space or the room dimensions for a big floorstander.
Anyway, any doubts I had soon dissipated as soon as I started playing some tunes.
I’ll go into some tunes I played and the usual format of my reviews in a short while, but I thought I’d give my overall first impressions (as I often do) whilst just sitting listening to tunes, or pottering about whilst the speakers run in for a bit. My immediate impression was that these speakers throw a huge soundstage for their size and that sounds seemed to hold their position in that stage very solidly; both front-to-back, and side-to-side; certainly, some of the sounds on Yoshiesque that I had been playing came from well beyond the physical constraints of the speakers. I’ll expand on this later, but my thoughts were that the GRO performed in a way that really good standmounts do with regard to soundstaging; this is one of the main reasons I like good standmounts. The second impression I had was that they sound surprisingly “big” for their fairly compact proportions.
This was all looking very promising, but let’s listen to some tunes and delve a bit deeper into how the Storgaard & Vestskov GRO speakers sound when listened to a little more critically.
Bass is my usual starting point with any speaker that comes in for review, and that’s exactly where I started with the GRO. One of my test tracks for bass has been Hardfloor’s Once Again Back (Rumble Mix). It’s a track that has an enormously raucous and deeply distorted 303 bass line at the start of it, and that usually separates the men from the boys where bass is concerned. Whether the speakers are flat down to 27Hz, I don’t know, but they went plenty deep enough in our room. They don’t have the same trouser-flapping air-moving capabilities of our Ø Audio ICON 12s with their 12-inch bass driver, nor our Audiovector R6 with their isobaric bass. But for such a modestly proportioned loudspeaker, they don’t do too badly at all; somewhere between a standmount and a big floorstander, as you would expect. However, I was particularly drawn to the texture of the bass in this track, specifically the more siney and clean 303 bass at around 3 minutes 50. The sound was full, round, and powerfully pristine. I put on You Make Loving Fun from Rumours and enjoyed the timing of the bass on this track, though it was a little more subdued than what I am used to with our bigger speakers; a bit polite, perhaps, for my taste. Telegraph Road by Dire Straits came on, I upped the volume a little bit, and the bass just clicked into place. I’ve found this with a lot of speakers that come in for review; there is a critical point volume-wise where they just seem to come alive, and this is very much the case for the GRO and how they perform with bass. This is why I sit with the volume remote by my side, as different tunes need a little bit more (or a bit less) to hit that sweet spot.
My thoughts on the soundstaging from the GROs are consistent with my initial first impressions; they fill the room with sound so that you sit in a bubble extending beyond the back and sides of the speakers. This isn’t an unnatural feeling soundstage, but it does make for a listening experience that draws you into the mix of the records you are playing. Sods law applied here for a while, given my iPad ran out of juice, and so I sat and listened to what ROON threw forth. Some Van Morrison, some early Fleetwood Mac, and some Elton John. Each tune had the same wide, deep, and spherical shape to the soundstage. Mona Lisas and Madhatters pulled me in and sounded gloriously “big” with me feeling I was about midway down the stalls and looking slightly up at Elton’s voice. Other songs played whilst I waited for my iPad to charge, and the experience was the same each time; a big stage that extended beyond the speakers and had me sitting in the same spot in the theatre. Floyd’s Is There Anybody Out There washed over me, but with a solid and linear core to the music presented in front of me. I particularly enjoyed the drums on Dylan’s Mozambique that came across as very dry, but also spread out just behind the speakers from left to right, presumably where each drum was mic’d and panned on the desk.
I guess the job of a loudspeaker is to get out of the way and present the music it is being given in a way that is uncoloured and unchanged as much as possible from the original recording. Of course, all the elements in the HiFi chain contribute to this, but the biggest effector in this respect is the loudspeaker. The GROs do a really good job of this and allow the tonality and timbre of instruments to cut through the mix. A good example of this with the GROs was Jeff Beck’s Diamond Dust. From the electric piano at the start to Beck’s guitar, everything is presented in its own sonic space that allows you to hear small details of the instrument you are focusing on. The strings on this tune sit a little I the background but are still audible and aurally tangible, even when Beck slices through them with his laidback soloing.
Reviewing law dictates that I have to listen to some jazz and some classical music, but I’m going to go full-blown anarcho and just listen and talk about some jazz. I fully expect the review police to descend and take me away to the “Boss Review Beast” who will most likely sentence me to a lifetime of listening to opera. Anyway, Jazz it was and Kind Of Blue was singled out as my partial chance of reprieve. It alll sounded suitably laidback on So What, with the horns raspy, the hats panned right, piano left, and Miles’ horn cutting through it all wonderfully. Likewise, the saxophones of Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane sounded perfectly balanced. And that’s the point of all this, isn’t it? You can sit and analyse the tunes as much as you like, but the main thing here is that the music moves you in some way, and on this record, that manifested itself with a right foot that just wouldn’t stop tapping.
As I always tend to do, I’ve spoken about individual aspects of music and how the GRO speakers cope and present them to the listener. However, all these individual parts are nothing if they don’t come together as a whole and present you with music you can sit down and relax with. And these speakers do that really well. They are neither too forward nor too laid back in their presentation. Music comes across as sounding natural and coherent, and I found myself getting lost in tunes that I’ve not really sat down and listened to in ages. Motivation Radio by Steve Hillage was a case in point, and I sat and listened to the whole record without thinking, just enjoying the music. I even listened to the whole of Kind Of Blue. This is a good sign in my book.
QUIBBLES
Not so much a quibble as most speakers have this, but there is definitely a point volume-wise when they come alive.
Seem to be quite expensive for what they physically present. However, as I’ve mentioned, the parts used in these speakers are all top-notch notch and they do sound fab.
CONCLUSION
The GRO speakers by Storgaard & Vestskov are a lovely-sounding pair of speakers that present the tunes you listen to in an unforced and natural kind of way. They are neither forced nor too laid back, but do sound bigger than their proportions might suggest.
Soundstaging is excellent and lays out the tracks you listen to in a three-dimensional kind of way, but, again, without the feeling that they are pushing this in an unnatural kind of way.
I threw all kinds of tunes at them, from techno to jazz and everything in between, and I enjoyed them very much. There was a lot of foot tapping going on during my time with them. However, I did find myself needing to push the volume a little more than I usually would to get them on song.
I’m awarding these speakers our Five Hearts award; this is a very high Five, bordering on our top award. They are excellent, and whilst the price is what it is, I think potential buyers might take a look and think they could get better value from something bigger and more visually “impressive”. However, bigger isn’t always better, and if you don’t have the space for bigger speakers (a lot of folk shoehorn speakers that are far too big for their space, just because they look impressive), these may well fit your needs perfectly.
If you are in the market for a relatively compact pair of floorstanders (they take up no more room than standmounts) and can afford the €19K they cost, then fill your boots – I don’t think you will be disappointed.
AT A GLANCE
Build Quality And Features:
Build and finish are excellent
Options for many different finishes
Good looking and compact
Quality components used throughout
Sound Quality:
Excellent soundstaging
Coherent throughout the frequency range
Relatively uncoloured
Speedy and tight in the bass
Good insight into instruments’ tone and timbre
Detailed and engaging
Value For Money:
That’s for the individual buyer to decide
I think they offer reasonable value for money, but I can see why some might think they are (at first sight) quite expensive
We Loved:
The engagement I felt with all the music I listened to – I tapped my feet a lot during the review sessions
Compact and unobtrusive
Well finished and stylish
We Didn’t Love So Much:
They do like to be pushed just a little to get the best out of them
Elevator Pitch Review: The GRO loudspeakers from Danish brand Storgaard & Vestskov are a relatively compact and bijou floorstander that looks very nice and uses quality components throughout.
Price: € 18.995,00
Stuart Smith
SUPPLIED BY STORGAARD & VESTSKOV
SUPPLIED SPECIFICATIONS
Terminology: 2-way passive loudspeaker
Dimensions (cm): 21 W x 100 H x 32 D
Weight: 22 kg (48.5 lbs)
Weight Shipping: 80 kg (176 lbs)
Placement From The Wall (cm): 30 – 180
Recommended Room Size (kvm2): 15 – 60
The Recommended Power Amplifier: 25 – 350 watts
Sensitivity: 90 dB
Nominal Average Impedance: 4 ohm
Frequency: 27 Hz – 38 kHz
