Your ears know.

Maturity lies in knowing how much you don’t know. Just because you’ve never heard of something doesn’t mean it’s not a big deal.

For instance, take this guy YongSe Kim (or Young-Se Kim, or Kim Young-se, depending on how you prefer to transliterate Korean names). He’s an acclaimed industrial designer, winner of awards, subject of a Wired profile, and founder of one of the top design groups on the planet, Innodesign.

And we knew nothing about any of this until the Palo Alto Rhombus speaker drifted through our transom. Kim designed it. Those clean, elegant lines that are both exotic and comfortable, that somehow feel familiar while not looking quite like anything you’ve seen before? That’s kind of his thing. Or so we just learned.

Then there’s this other guy, Peter Larsen. He’s a Danish audio designer who’s a legend in speaker circles. After spells as chief engineer at companies like Vifa, Dynaudio, and JBL, he started his own consultancy, Loudsoft. One afternoon he got bored and invented the ring radiator tweeter. Again, that was all news to us until we saw that he designed the drivers for the Palo Alto Rhombus.

Do you know anything about 24-bit lossless USB digital streaming? Nah, us neither. But evidently, you can play your iDevice or newer Samsung phone through the USB port on the Rhombus. The digital signal is digitally processed and then amplified digitally, for as pristine a sound as ones and zeros will allow.

The one thing that didn’t take any research for us to learn was how fricking amazing the Palo Alto Rhombus sounds, whether via USB, Bluetooth, or the optical port. (OK, we didn’t try the optical port, we just wanted to let you know it was there.) Rich. Full. Deep. Loud. It’s everything a $300 countertop audio system was supposed to be, minus the Bose marketing voodoo. But don’t take our word for it. Learn for yourself.

오늘의 메는 한국 스타일로! 한국의 세계적인 디자이너인 김영세씨가 본인이 세운 이노디자인을 통해 이 스피커 외관을 직접 디자인하셨답니다. 스피커 드라이버쪽은 덴마크 오디오의 전설인 피터 라르센이 디자인했다고 하는데… 덴마크에서 직구하는 사람은 없는거 같으니까요. 뭐.