For Christmas in 2020, a friend sent me a gift: a coffee mug decorated with a one-out-of-five-stars rating for the annus horribilis the world had just been through. The caption on the ceramic read, “VERY BAD WOULD NOT RECOMMEND.”
True, the pandemic year and the lockdowns had been no fun, to put it mildly, but that doesn’t mean there were no positives. Every day, rain or shine, my 10-year-old daughter and I played soccer on the field behind our house. We—pointlessly, I concede—trained our shepherd to walk backward on command. I savored having more time to read, watch movies, and take naps when the urge struck. Finally, I used the long stretch of weeks, then months, to rekindle my lifelong infatuation with music. Thousands of old and new recordings kept me balanced and tethered me to the rest of humanity during the dark days of social distancing. Rarely had music soothed and comforted me more than during the 10 months before the vaccines arrived.
My musical appreciation—reverence at times—was due in part to the new Tekton Moab floorstanders that, over the summer, had arrived for review.1 For under five grand, factory-direct from the ever-scrappy Utah company, the man-sized towers lit up my living room. Practically from day one, they sounded exciting and true to life. Edging out the MartinLogan Odysseys that had been my conduit to musical joy for years, the Tektons became my new reference speakers.
All things must pass, and I semiretired them a couple of years later when I bought Focal Scala Utopia Evos, which retail for more than 10 times the cost of the Moabs. But I never lost my fondness for them.
Then, last spring, came a call from Eric Alexander, Tekton’s founder, owner, and chief engineer. Would I like to audition a pair of different Moabs? What he had in mind wasn’t an incremental upgrade, and Alexander wasn’t discontinuing the original model. He was offering to send a product in which all the fabric-dome tweeters had been replaced by beryllium ones. For Moabs, that’s an ambitious, shoot-for-the-stars upgrade, because beryllium drivers are expensive and there are 15 tweeters in each Moab—30 for the
