I had forgotten how much I missed listening
Today began with a very good introduction call.
About a dozen members of 26Eight joined Pete Hollenhorst with the Loewe / Cabasse US team to learn more about Cabasse: its history, its engineering legacy, and the role that high-performance HiFi has always played in the company’s design and development.
That history matters. Cabasse was founded in France in 1950 by Georges Cabasse, an electrical engineer, music lover, and descendant of generations of French luthiers. His ambition was not simply to manufacture loudspeakers. It was to reproduce music without alteration, coloration, or distortion—and to preserve the emotional force of the original performance.
The company’s record includes early coaxial loudspeakers developed for CinemaScope presentation, active three-way monitors selected for Radio France, the extraordinary La Sphère, and decades of research into coaxial driver geometry, controlled directivity, active amplification, and digital signal processing.
That is the historical background. But this is not a history lesson, and it is not a conventional review of another disconnected audio component.
This is a System Review.
Full disclosure: I wasn’t expecting this
I had heard about Cabasse, and I understood that the speakers now in my home were quite expensive and very good.
I am used to living with, selling, installing, and appreciating significant HiFi systems—some of which could be considered among the finest available in the world.
Twenty years ago, this same position in my home was occupied by a system built around Wilson Audio WATT/Puppy 3/2 loudspeakers, a Jeff Rowland Design Group integrated amplifier, a Theta Digital transport and DAC, a REL Stadium subwoofer, and Transparent Audio cables.
I am not a newcomer to HighEnd two-channel HiFi.
For most of my career, I may have been considered an audiophile snob—and I was proud of that.
These days, I consider myself a recovering audiophile. Even with my understanding of Cabasse’s reputation, I did not have much confidence that the Pearl Akoya speakers were going to rise to a truly HighEnd performance level.
Well, I was pleasantly surprised.
These modern works of art do, in fact, operate at a truly HighEnd level.
More importantly, it became something personal.
I sat quietly and listened to music. I didn’t get any work done this afternoon! Luckily, this review actually is work-adjacent…
That sentence sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But I realized how long it had been since I had allowed myself to do it—without working, testing, designing, answering, building, or being “busy.” I had forgotten how much I missed sitting in a room and letting music be the only thing demanding my attention.
The Cabasse Pearl Akoya gave that experience back to me.
“Just” two stand-mounted speakers
My new Cabasse system appears to be “just” a pair of speakers on stands.
There is no large equipment rack. There are no monoblock amplifiers on the floor. There is no preamplifier, outboard DAC, streamer, room-correction processor, or bundle of expensive speaker cables connecting one collection of boxes to another.
In my installation, the only visible cables are the two power cords.
That visual simplicity hides what the Pearl Akoya actually is. Each compact sphere is a complete three-way, high-resolution connected audio system containing its own streaming platform, digital conversion, signal processing, room correction, drivers, and amplification.
And there is a great deal of amplification.
Each Pearl Akoya is rated at 1,050 watts RMS and 2,100 watts peak: 300 watts RMS for the high frequencies, 300 watts for the midrange, and 450 watts for the bass. A stereo pair therefore places 2,100 watts RMS—and 4,200 watts of combined peak amplifier capability—into the room without one external amplifier or speaker cable.
That number is dramatic, but the point is not simply to play loudly. The active architecture lets Cabasse match the amplifier, DSP, crossover behavior, and individual driver as one engineered system. The power is available to preserve dynamics, attack, control, and composure when the recording asks for it.
The Pearl Akoya is specified for a 30 Hz–27 kHz frequency range and up to 121 dB peak output as a stereo pair. Its driver system combines a 13 cm coaxial BCI midrange-tweeter with a 17 cm HELD—High Excursion, Low Distortion—woofer. Cabasse specifies 20 mm of linear woofer travel from a rigid carbon membrane inside an enclosure only about 22 cm in each dimension.
Those are remarkable specifications. But none of them would matter if the system did not make us want to keep listening.
It did.
A real room—not an audiophile shrine
Look at the photograph.
This is my home office. It is a comfortable working room with desks, chairs, windows, draperies, tables, cabinets, hard surfaces, soft surfaces, and all the compromises of an actual lived-in home.
It is not an acoustically engineered laboratory. The furniture was not selected to flatten a response graph. My listening chair has not been bolted to a mathematically perfect location. The room still has to function as an office tomorrow morning.
The Pearl Akoya includes Cabasse’s automatic CRCS room calibration along with its digital signal processing. That does not make placement irrelevant, and it does not repeal the laws of acoustics. What it does is make serious performance much easier to achieve in the kinds of rooms where people actually live.
That is important. A system that only works after it takes over the architecture is not simple, no matter how elegant its components may be.
The Pearl Akoya pair settled into this room without turning the room into a servant of the system.
The room became the stage
We were not confined to a tiny, approved listening position.
We spent much of the evening in the family room toward the back of this part of the house. From there, singers, guitarists, and drummers sounded as if they were performing in the front room.
I walked through the house while the music played. It remained surprisingly loud, clear, and coherent away from the speakers—particularly in the hallways. I did not take laboratory measurements, so I will not pretend that a walk through my own house is a controlled directivity test. But the experience was unmistakable.
It also makes sense in the context of Cabasse’s engineering priorities. The spherical form and coaxial driver architecture are intended to create consistent spatial behavior and preserve coherence between direct and reflected sound. In a home, where so much of what we hear has interacted with the room before reaching us, that matters.
The system did not sound as if music were leaking out of an office at the front of the house. It sounded as though the performance had taken possession of that entire part of our home.
Date Night in Stereo—created by Rob Skuba
My great friend Rob Skuba created and branded an experience he calls “Date Night in Stereo.” The concept and the name are Rob’s, and he deserves full credit for recognizing something important: sharing music intentionally can become its own kind of date night.
Well, my love returned from a sales trip tonight, and we unexpectedly fell into one of our own.
There was no formal listening checklist. We did not sit with clipboards, swap cables every 45 seconds, or reduce music to a sequence of approved audiophile sound effects.
We followed the music wherever it led us.
We began with five different interpretations of “Wild Horses,” then drifted into the hazy intimacy of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.” Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Riviera Paradise” opened the room. Dada’s “Dorina” and The Jayhawks’ “Save It for a Rainy Day” carried us somewhere else again.
Joe Henry’s “Sparrow” brought calmness and space—but also the physical weight of the kick drum. That combination stayed with me: quiet without thinness, delicacy without losing mass.
Greg Brown’s “The Poet Game” reminded us what texture and humanity in a voice can do. Kansas gave us “Carry On Wayward Son,” “Icarus—Borne on Wings of Steel,” and “Dust in the Wind,” moving from scale and drive to the simple clarity of strings and voices.
Diana Krall’s “Besame Mucho” and Jennifer Warnes’ “Famous Blue Raincoat” slowed the room down again.
Then we played Sting’s “Fields of Gold” and followed it with Eva Cassidy’s interpretation. The Pearl Akoya let us hear the interplay between lead and rhythm guitar while keeping the song whole. The details were present, but the system did not hold them up like evidence. They remained part of the performance.
Then came the clear tones of Eva Cassidy singing “Over the Rainbow.”
At some point, without deciding to, we settled into our own private Eva Cassidy concert.
We had stopped reviewing the system.
We were simply together, listening. For three hours! I can’t remember the last time that happened.
Date Night in HiFi
That is where Rob Skuba’s “Date Night in Stereo” inspired our own Date Night in HiFi.
The difference was not a specification. It was not volume, resolution, bandwidth, or amplifier power considered in isolation.
It was the ability of the system to make music important in the room without making the system itself the center of attention.
The Pearl Akoya could reveal the clear tone of Eva Cassidy’s voice, the relationship between two guitar parts, the atmosphere surrounding a singer, and the weight of a kick drum. It could maintain clarity as I moved through adjoining rooms and hallways. It could play with authority when the music demanded it and then settle back into calmness without losing presence.
And it could do all of that as two beautiful stand-mounted objects powered by two ordinary wall outlets.
This is the essential point: the Cabasse Pearl Akoya is not merely a wireless speaker with an impressive amplifier specification. A stereo pair is a complete high-performance HiFi system—one in which the source platform, digital processing, room calibration, amplification, drivers, enclosure, and network synchronization have been engineered to work together.
That integration removes friction without removing the performance.
It also changes where high-level HiFi can belong. A client does not necessarily need a dedicated listening room, an equipment rack, visible cable architecture, or a floor full of black boxes to have a serious musical experience. The Pearl Akoya can make an office, sitting room, bedroom suite, family space, or other lived-in room into a place where people actually stop and listen.
For Custom Integrators and HiFi dealers, that is not a lesser category. It is an opportunity to put meaningful music back into rooms that conventional audio systems have stopped reaching.
The verdict
The Cabasse Pearl Akoya performs at a very high HiFi level.
It has the power, scale, clarity, bass authority, spatial coherence, and resolving ability to reward serious listening. Its integrated architecture makes that performance dramatically easier to place, connect, and live with than a conventional collection of components with comparable ambition.
But the strongest thing I can say about it is not technical.
It made me sit quietly and listen to music again.
Then my love came home, sat with me, and the review became a date.
The system disappeared into the experience it had created.
Date Night in Stereo became Date Night in HiFi.
Brought to us by the HiFi Renaissance™.
You take my breath away, Songbird.
With appreciation and full credit to Rob Skuba, creator of “Date Night in Stereo,” for the idea that inspired our “Date Night in HiFi.”
Review system and verified specifications
- System: Two Cabasse Pearl Akoya active high-resolution connected speakers on Cabasse stands
- Configuration: Wireless stereo pair; power connection to each speaker
- Architecture: Three-way tri-coaxial active system
- Amplification per speaker: 1,050 W RMS / 2,100 W peak
- Amplification allocation: 300 W RMS high-frequency; 300 W RMS midrange; 450 W RMS bass
- Stereo-pair total: 2,100 W RMS / 4,200 W peak
- Drivers: 13 cm coaxial BCI midrange-tweeter; 17 cm HELD woofer
- Frequency range: 30 Hz–27 kHz
- Maximum stated output: 115 dB mono peak / 121 dB stereo peak
- Room adaptation: Cabasse CRCS automatic calibration and onboard DSP
- Digital conversion: 768 kHz / 32-bit DAC; high-resolution playback support up to 24-bit / 192 kHz
- Connectivity: Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, optical S/PDIF, 3.5 mm analog input, Micro-USB
- Dimensions and weight: Approximately 220 × 220 × 220 mm; 8 kg per speaker
Disclosure and source note
This is an experiential system review based on Loren Roetman’s listening session at home on August 28, 2026. Cabasse were introduced to members of the 26Eight network by Pete Hollenhorst with the Cabasse / Loewe US team. The relationship provides the opportunity and context for the review; the listening observations and conclusions are Loren’s own.
Product specifications and historical details were checked against Cabasse’s official Pearl Akoya product literature and official company history. Subjective observations—including room-to-room clarity, imaging, tonal character, bass weight, and the emotional experience of the session—are presented as firsthand listening impressions, not laboratory measurements.