A house builder who fixed his own Klipschorns.

Volti Audio is the work of Greg Roberts, a builder of houses who turned a teenage obsession with horn loudspeakers into a second career. In a history on the company’s website, Roberts says he bought a used pair of Klipsch La Scalas at fourteen with money from selling sports cards, later traded them for Klipschorns, and grew frustrated with what he calls the “inherent shortcomings” of those famous corner horns. Rather than sell them, he writes, he fixed them, starting with a wooden midrange horn with a 2-inch throat and a shallower Tractrix flare that he built in his own woodworking shop.

The business grew out of the housing slump. Roberts told Stereophile in 2017 that he and his wife had built “some of the most technically advanced homes in the U.S.,” and that “after the economic slow-down in 2009, I picked up work doing speaker restorations, mostly with Klipsch KHorns.” The earliest archived copy of the Volti website, captured in February 2010, shows that stage: it describes a business “specializing in Klipsch speaker upgrades and restoration,” signed by Greg Roberts of Benton, Maine, who wrote that after 22 years of building custom homes in Maine he was “burned out” and that his next step would probably be a new corner horn based on the Klipschorn. The company now says it has made loudspeakers “since 2010”; a 2024 Part-Time Audiophile review says the upgrade work began by 2009 and that the first Volti speaker followed by 2011.

The name is a musical instruction. The company says “volti” is an Italian directive in orchestral scores meaning “turn the page,” chosen because Roberts wanted to build on the horn tradition rather than abandon it; the 2010 website glossed it as “to turn over a new leaf; to move forward.” State records trace the company’s geography. A Maine corporation, Volti Audio, Inc., classed as a speaker manufacturer, was formed in 2014 with a Waterville address and administratively dissolved in 2017; a Tennessee corporation of the same name has filed annual reports there since at least 2019. By May 2017 Stereophile was describing Roberts as “a former Maine resident who now lives in Baxter, Tennessee,” and that is where the company is based today.

Vittora, Rival, Razz and Lucera.

The first Volti loudspeaker was the Vittora, a fully horn-loaded three-way with a folded bass horn. Art Dudley reviewed it for Stereophile in September 2013, writing that listening to it was “like hearing your favorite musicians take off the three or four heavy overcoats” they had been wearing. The Rival followed as a smaller answer to buyers who wanted the Vittora sound for less. Ken Micallef wrote in 2017 that it used the Vittora’s drivers in a bass-reflex cabinet: a 15-inch “pro audio–sourced” woofer, a 2-inch-outlet midrange compression driver on a wooden Tractrix horn built by Roberts, and a 1-inch compression tweeter. It cost $7,900 a pair then, and Tom Gibbs reported in 2020 that it remained in Class A (Restricted Extreme LF) of the magazine’s Recommended Components list.

The cheaper models came with a change in method. Gibbs wrote in 2020 that the panels for the Vittora and Rival had at first been cut and routed by hand, and that Roberts had moved to a nearby CNC shop to cut the 1-inch Baltic birch plywood used in every Volti cabinet. The result was the Razz, a 12-inch three-way at $4,999 a pair and, Gibbs wrote, “the first Volti model that will be available off-the-rack.” Part-Time Audiophile gave the Razz a Reviewers’ Choice award and named it its Best Value of the Year for 2021. The Lucera, with a 15-inch woofer, filled the gap between the Razz and the Rival; it was shown at Capital Audiofest in 2024, and Micallef reviewed it in August 2025 at $12,900 a pair, describing cabinet parts that interlock “like a 3D puzzle” and hand-built crossovers. He ended the review: “I bought the review pair.”

The line shares a recipe. Every model is a three-way with horn-loaded midrange and treble, rated by the company at 97 dB for the Razz, 99 for the Lucera and 100 for the Rival — sensitivity that suits low-powered tube amplifiers — and, on the Rival and Lucera, resistors that let owners trim the midrange and treble. The Vittora has since become a rarity: its page now says it “is no longer produced as a regular model” and is built only occasionally, with final voicing by Roberts.

America’s small loudspeaker makers.

The seven loudspeaker makers in this guide are small American companies, most of them built around a single designer. The oldest is Legacy Audio, which Bill Dudleston started in 1983 in Springfield, Illinois, where it remains. It sells through authorized dealers and online, and in 2025 it introduced Jay McArdle as its new owner and chief executive.

Two are in Utah. Tekton Design, run by Eric Alexander, gives its address as Orem and calls its business model “strictly direct-to-consumer.” Spatial Audio Lab, founded by Clayton Shaw, also sells direct, saying dealers “often want a double digit mark-up rate”; the company says Shaw sold its assets to Sam and David Whitt in 2023.

In the Midwest, Salk Sound, Jim Salk’s company, built speakers to order in Pontiac, Michigan, by its own account, and sold them direct. On 15 September 2023 it said it had stopped taking orders and sold its woodworking equipment.

On the coasts, Stereophile places Jeff Joseph’s Joseph Audio on Long Island, New York, and the company’s website sends buyers to dealers. Daedalus Audio, which Lou Hinkley founded in 1992, works from Ferndale, Washington; it says its speakers are sold only direct in the US, with dealers in Australia and Singapore.

The South has Volti Audio. Greg Roberts, who started out rebuilding Klipschorns in Maine, now builds horn loudspeakers in Baxter, Tennessee, selling almost entirely direct.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A husband-and-wife workshop in Tennessee.

Volti Audio is privately held. Roberts describes himself as its owner, and the company says every speaker is “hand-built here in Baxter, Tennessee by a small team led by me and my wife Laurie”; Laurie Roberts is named as the Tennessee corporation’s registered agent. A page about visits says the company builds “about fifty pairs of speakers each year,” that the shop and the family home share one property, and that the listening room is also the living room. We found no outside owner or acquisition in the sources we checked.

Sales are almost entirely direct. In 2017 Stereophile reported a single US dealer, Fidelis Music Systems of Nashua, New Hampshire, and direct sales “from his factory” otherwise. In 2024 Michael Lavorgna of Twittering Machines wrote that Volti speakers “are sold direct,” so that the only places to hear them are shows, the Baxter workshop by appointment, or an owner’s home. The company calls trade shows its “primary marketing tool” and says it attends three or four a year; its policies page says all sales are final and the written warranty runs one year.

On where the speakers are made, the company’s claim and the reviewers’ reports agree as far as they go: cabinets, crossovers and, on the Rival, wooden midrange horns are built by Roberts’s team in Tennessee, with cabinet parts cut by CNC. The drive units are another matter. Neither the company nor the reviews we read names their makers, and Stereophile called the Rival’s woofer “pro audio–sourced,” so we do not describe Volti’s drivers as made in-house or in the United States.

For a design guide, Volti Audio shows how a craftsman’s brand can rest on materials as much as on a mark — real wood veneers, birch plywood and a name borrowed from sheet music. Compare Klipsch, whose corner horns Roberts started out rebuilding, and Zu Audio, another American maker of high-sensitivity speakers sold direct. For this guide we use lacquer black, birch blond and a deep bubinga red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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