Fleetwood Sound Company DeVille SQ
Oswalds Mill Audio’s products espouse a sort of steampunk-meets-modern visual style, but the company’s philosophies are straight from hi-fi’s ’50s and ’60s glory days, an era when idler-drive turntables, low-power tube amps, and horn-loaded loudspeakers were the norm. That history and hi-fi’s future fascinate and inspire Jonathan Weiss, OMA’s proprietor.
“The DNA of OMA is in fact ‘Old School,’” Weiss wrote in a post on the OMA blog called “Audio Heirloom?” “There is no reason our loudspeakers, amplifiers, or even turntables won’t be running and playing music in a hundred years, just as the RCA equipment in our reference collection, most of which is 80 years old, still works just fine. That equipment, made for professional cinema use before WW2, … [before] planned obsolescence became the norm in US industry, was built so well that it too could easily be running a hundred years from now, and that is exactly how we approach our own products.”
Fleetwood Sound, a branch of OMA, has so far released just one product; a second is on the way. Forthcoming is the all-in-one Excelsior system. Here now is the Fleetwood DeVille loudspeaker, which comes in both a standard version and the “Superior Quality” DeVille SQ ($18,600/pair), the version under review. The base Fleetwood DeVille costs $12,600/pair. Both versions are hand built from locally sourced hardwoods and Italian-made pro-audio drivers at OMA’s Pennsylvania factory. Twenty-four-inch, naturalfinish “torrefied” stands add $1550/pair; black-painted, reclaimed hickory stands add $750/pair. The DeVilles are available from OMA dealers and the Fleetwood Sound Company website. A twoweek in-home audition is available.
“We wanted to leverage everything we had learnt and accomplished with OMA over more than a decade into something reasonably affordable in the DeVille,” Weiss told me in
