MedHed

Every once in awhile a product is made that does exactly what it should, no more, no less, and does it with style.

The Tivoli Model One radio, designed by the late Henry Kloss, is a perfect example of this.

Five years ago I wanted one thing and one thing only...a good radio. I did weeks and weeks of research trying to find something that had excellent reception, had Aux input, and had excellent sound quality akin to the Bose Wave Radio. So why not just buy the Bose? Because $500 for a radio is just plain crazy...and while I love great audio quality...I am not foolish.

Finally, by accident, I stumbled upon the Tivoli Model One radio in a magazine review. The reviewer went on and on about how good this little gem was and compared it to the audio quality of the Bose.

At $99, purchasing it was worth the risk.

Five years later, some of my musical gear has changed (I now stream my radio), but I still have my Tivoli and I still love it.

Besides having a clean, simple design, the real reason I love this radio is that the sound quality is excellent. In fact, I can't even believe how so much rich sound comes from something so very tiny.

Well the secret to why this radio works so well is clearly in the engineering.

Five years ago I had a phone conversation with Tom DeVesto, founder of Tivoli. He was on his sailboat (his favorite office) explaining to me how much engineering went into the tuner dial alone. He was talking about the attention to detail put into the tuner dial to get the “feel” of the dial just right.

Well they got it right, in more ways than one.

"Our radios utilize a Gallium Arsenide Metal Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (GaAs MES-FET). Gallium is a byproduct of smelting metals, chiefly aluminum and zinc, and is actually rarer than gold. Gallium Arsenide is a superior alternative to Silicon for producing solid state chips."

The Tivoli also has an audio-in jack which allows you to plug in a CD player, an iPod/MP3 player, or like me, a Sonos ZP80. My Model One currently resides in the bathroom with the Sonos ZP80.

The current list price of the Model One is $119, but since I purchased mine all those years ago, they've released a whole bunch of radios and stereo systems that have the same great design aesthetic.

About Henry Kloss

Kloss (rhymes with gross) was a student in physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (class of 1953), but never received a degree. He co-founded Acoustic Research Corporation (AR) with Edgar Villchur in 1954. Villchur, a former teacher of Kloss, had conceived a novel way of building an accurate loudspeaker. Together they developed the AR Model 1, which changed the way that speakers were designed. Until then, speakers of quality had to be quite large. By using an enclosure with a sealed air cavity behind the speaker cone which acted as a spring to damp woofer motion, they were able to make less-expensive, bookshelf-size speakers. Although they were inefficient in power consumption compared to ported designs, they had extremely low distortion. The AR-1 was the first commercial acoustic suspension loudspeaker.

Kloss founded Advent Corporation in 1967. The name came from the legal description the advent corporation ("advent" means approaching in Latin) used in the incorporation documents before the actual name is selected. The original goal had been to develop a projection television, but by 1969 he had quit KLH to build a remarkable dual driver speaker system with 10 inch (25 cm) woofer called simply The Advent Loudspeaker (later colloquially called the Large Advent after introduction of The Smaller Advent loudspeaker). It rivaled the sound of the then top-line AR Model 3a (which used three drivers and a 12 inch (30 cm) woofer), but only cost about half as much. He then went to work on increasing the fidelity of cassette tapes, a format that had originally been meant to be used only for dictation. Kloss introduced the Advent 201 in 1971, incorporating Dolby B along with chromium dioxide tape on a Wollensak tape drive to create the first high fidelity cassette deck.

Kloss briefly went into retirement in the late 1990s, but soon found himself co-founding another company, Tivoli Audio, with long-time associate and former Cambridge SoundWorks co-founder Tom DeVesto. There, he made the Model One (mono) and Model Two (stereo) table radios using MESFET technology to increase selectivity. The high-quality tuner combined with a good speaker arrangement led some reviewers to call these radios "Bose killers."