July 2026

PERFECT8 Cube-S With Sub Review — Reference-Grade Musical High-Fidelity Loudspeakers With Real-World Transparency
A deep dive into PERFECT8's glass-enclosed omnidirectional loudspeaker sound system that delivers endless musical pleasures for both casual and serious listeners.
Review By Dr. Matthew Clott

  OK. Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way... Yes, they are glass speakers, and yes, they sound "transparent." OK. Phew. Glad we got that over with!

At a high-end audio show in 2015, I met Jonas from Sweden for the first time in a big room on the first floor. All Ypsilon electronics and their The Point speakers. All glass, open baffle design, dual dipole midrange, and a ribbon tweeter, each sitting on a sealed two-driver subwoofer. As the name implied, they were the closest thing to a point source I had ever heard. Tonally spectacular, they threw a massive sound stage forward, backward, sideward, upward, downward, and every other way there is; and absolutely vanished into that big room. I went back time and time again, and decided that I needed to get to know Jonas better and make sure I heard his room at every show I went to. I also remember the speakers were very expensive, so owning them was not going to happen back then; not without a divorce, and although I loved the speakers, I love my wife too much for that option...

Over the years, I got to know Jonas and PERFECT8 Technologies AB. Each exposure only increased my desire to hear more. Here is the current line-up:

The Cube-S: Small stand-mounted omnidirectional monitors with side-firing midrange drivers (wired in phase) and a single front-firing tweeter. Passive crossover for mid and tweeter. Pricing is €24,250 per pair and €42,500 per pair with subwoofers (approximately $28,500 and $50,000, respectively).

The Cube-T: Floorstanding omnidirectional side-firing midrange and woofers (a pair of midrange, two pairs of woofers) and a single front-firing tweeter with a wave guide. Powered (two channels @ 500 Watts each) woofers.$75,500.

The Point Grande: Similar to the point but with two pairs of side-firing woofers per speaker, two front-firing open-baffle dipole midrange drivers, and a ribbon tweeter on top. Powered woofers.$165,500. There is still a The Point that uses a single pair of subs. $129,500.

The Force Grand Ultimate - Large line array with eight open baffle forward-facing midrange dipoles, a full ribbon tweeter top to bottom, and eight powered dipole subwoofers (four per side), actively crossed over. $400,000

The front / rear firing dipoles in the Point Grand and the Force emit in a figure-of-eight pattern. Hence PERFECT8.

Technical Details
So, why glass? That is what I also asked. To which Jonas replied, "Cuz it's so cool!" I could not argue. But then he added, "It eliminates vibration and cavity resonance. Removing the cabinet from the equation without needing to stuff it with damping material, reinforce it, or compensate for it. It's naturally the ideal solution if done right. It was not just two decades of trial and error. Controlling resonance was a design criterion from day one. Glass rings, that is a given, so eliminating cavity resonance was the whole premise we started from, and not a problem we discovered along the way (it is the reason the glass enclosure needs no damping materials at all). The years went into executing it beautifully, but the goal itself was clear from the first sketch. The study is on their website.

The history of the brand is like so many others. A group of audiophiles and engineers who got together to build themselves a better speaker. They came upon the solution for a glass enclosure and then built the Force, with 8 midrange drivers. His friends and audio associates loved the speakers so much they started selling them, and the rest is Swedish history. PERFECT8 is not a big company, and Jonas likes it that way. He gives each customer the kind of attention most audiophiles only dream of. And he makes friends, not customers.

The drivers match the model ranges, and the crossovers are similarly congruent. Design changes focus on implementation to manage air compression, dynamic expression, and speed of resolution. The sealed enclosure omni's use a custom design SEAS midrange that differs from the dipole midranges in the Point/Force models. The monopole subs also use different drivers from the Dipole subs. The dome tweeters in the Cube series are SEAS as well, while the ribbon tweeter in the Point/Force series is fully in-house designed and built, and they are quite proud of that.

Jonas explained," What the years actually went into was refinement, in two areas especially. The first is the crossover, where we have continually moved to the best components as they became available, beginning, for example, with high-quality metal-film resistors, then Duelund Carbon Silver, then Mundorf's latest, and now Path Audio, each one a real and audible step up. The second area, and the bigger one, is that we have just released a new wide-throwing waveguide for The Cube-S and The Cube-T. It improves room integration by letting the treble bounce off three walls and the bass and mids off four, which makes it far easier for the mind to assemble a single, coherent soundstage. Best of all, the new waveguide tames the tweeter so thoroughly that it needs no series resistor at all, and the best-sounding resistor is no resistor."

Focusing on the reviewed speakers, the Cube-S is 9.84" wide by 10.6" deep by 14.6" tall. They ship with a stand rod sized for either a relaxed sofa or recliner listening height, and a heavy glass plinth to hold them upright and stable, and they are VERY stable. As stable as a pair of similarly sized floor-standing speakers for those with young children, pets, housekeepers, or drunk friends looking to knock over anything that can be knocked over.

The sub is 11.6" wide by 14" deep by 18" tall and was placed one-third of the distance from one side wall to the other, and ended up between the speakers to the left. Frequency response in the room and extends to 25kHz, with the system presenting a 4 Ohm nominal impedance and a sensitivity of 86dB/W/m, so they are relatively easy to drive. The loudspeaker drivers are a 35mm dome tweeter with a custom wave guide and 7" aluminum cones.

The internal passive crossover uses Mundorf caps and air-core coils, and is located in a blacked-out area at the base of the sealed enclosure. They weigh 46 pounds each; I'm not sure if that includes the support beam and plinth. When I was moving them to fine-tune placement, they felt heavier than 46 pounds; that's all I know. The speakers and subwoofers are both sealed enclosures, and both are made of a proprietary glass compound that Jonas told me he would have to kill me if he divulged its secrets. They are also adhered with a proprietary glass adhesive that supposedly will last until the Eloi and Morlocks roam the planet.

Subwoofer Made Easy
The subwoofer setup was surprisingly straightforward. Jonas programs the system on a laptop during installation, fine-tuning placement and integration to the room. Once configured, two settings are available. The first is a normal bass alignment that works beautifully in smaller rooms. The second pushes the drivers to their full depth — this is how the system achieves an in-room response reaching down to 6 Hz, deeper than virtually any conventional floorstander. A third slot exists in the software, reserved for rooms with particularly unusual acoustics, but Jonas tells me he has never needed it. The two standard settings have been sufficient for every installation so far. Everything about these speakers was almost too easy.

I always remember Vince from Totem displaying his tiny floorstanding Arro speakers (which are still stupid good for the money) with them literally pointing toward the side walls and still sounding terrific. I'll bet you could do the same with the Cube-S! Even balancing the woofer to the main speakers was not a massive challenge, like it almost always is. 

The software is programmed on a laptop by Jonas during installation, and the sub position is fine-tuned, so adjusting different curves and gains is easy, and once Jonas sets up the final parameters, you have a choice of two bass alignment settings: one is optimized for smaller rooms, one that pushes the drivers to full depth reaching down to 6 Hz in-room (note: a third slot exists in the software but has never been needed and remains empty). Jonas explained, "It starts with exact anechoic measurements of both the speakers and the subs, and on top of those measurements, we bring decades of hard-won understanding of how real rooms actually behave acoustically. Together, those two things are the key, because they let us integrate the sub seamlessly and design the bass curve for an optimal result in typical rooms, which is something you can only achieve with a sealed, 12 dB/octave alignment, and never with a vented or a passive-radiator design. In many rooms it runs flat, with more genuine output below 16 Hz than even the largest conventional floorstanders." I left it on the flattest curve and tried the others just to try them. Everything about these speakers was almost too easy.

And with an 86dB/W/m sensitivity and a powered subwoofer, they didn't require enormous amounts of power to drive either. I tried both the Ypsilon integrated Jonas left with me to play with, as well as my Lamm monoblocks. The Phaethon integrated has 110 Watts per channel (Wpc) into 8 Ohms, and my Lamm's are 150 Wpc into 8 Ohms. Since most non-SET amps these days put out 80 Wpc or more into 8 Ohms, considering the PERFECT8 Technologies' Cube-S are 4 Ohm nominal and don't go much lower, they are easy to drive, and virtually anything you are going to connect to a $50,000 pair of speakers will drive them well. Since the sub is active / self-powered, it removes that stress from the primary amplifier.

Yes, They Are Transparent... And More!
So other than "transparent," how do they sound, you ask? Well, pretty damn good. Most of my readers know my listening set now. And I sometimes feel as if defining the listening details loses the forest for the trees. If you are looking for ultra-resolving, detail-oriented speakers that present electron microscope imaging and razor-sharp resolution, then look elsewhere. If you are looking for a speaker made by a big box brand with a 20-person customer service department and name recognition from your local audiophile society, then PERFECT8 is not for you. This is one step away from a Mom and Pop brand, and Jonas is Pop. I haven't met Mom yet, but I look forward to going to Sweden to meet her. I did meet Junior, and he's as nice a guy as his Pop! They have grown beyond Mom & Pop and are a real brand with real infrastructure, but still: one-on-one attention for a hand-built product. Sorry, I am easily distracted.

It sounds campy, but the Cube-S sounded like music. Just music. I have high expectations for proper tonal and textural depth and the speaker's capacity to reproduce the deeper harmonic layers that make music emotional and involving. For this, I will sacrifice staging width and depth, or imaging presence and accuracy; although ideally I want both, and if they can vanish entirely and throw a palatial stage and offer holographic imaging, even better! I also value low-frequency extension combined with a capacity to reproduce both the primary and secondary harmonics of those lower frequencies, as the magic of midrange is hidden and interspersed between the base notes. It is the reason that I fell in love with my Rel six-pack and believe it can turn a great pair of stand-mounted speakers into something magical.

The PERFECT8 sub was something special, always impressed and sometimes shocked. While I value high frequency extension, I find that as I age, it is not extension I value and perceive (assuming most of us over 40+ can't really hear much above 15 kHz anyway) as much as speed, proper integration with the mid driver, and the capacity to reproduce air and presence. The Cube-S accomplishes all of the things I value most in the smallest, most compact, most attractive, and easiest to set up package I have ever encountered.

When I sat down to listen, and grabbed my clip board to take notes (Yes, that is how I do my reviews, I actually have a 4-page document that I fill out while I'm listening!) I jotted a few notes, and then the clipboard sort of slowly fell to my lap under the iPad, and I just listened, and listened, and listened. Then I would remember and scribble another few notes, and then forget about it again.... I had several audiophile friends who came over, and all said the same thing, "I want a pair of these in my living room!" They sound like they were made by music lovers and audiophiles for music lovers and audiophiles. They are boutique speakers for sure, but have a very casual and inviting personality. They are Cartier with an LL Bean soul.

Conclusion
Would I buy them? Hell yes! As a reviewer, I need something people have easy access to hear, recognize the brand, have every day provenance, and are inherently full range without needing subwoofers. So the PERFECT8 Cube-S is not a great choice for my very specific needs, having absolutely nothing to do with their performance. PERFECT8 is a speaker you save up for and mature into. You grow into these speakers, or the larger ones if you can afford them. To that point, I have never seen a pair of PERFECT8 speakers up for sale on Audiogon or anywhere else. They are not purchased to impress people or to show off at an audiophile society get-together.

PERFECT8 Technologies' Cube-S with Sub has thunderous bass, but not like a Wilson. They are majestically tonal, but not like a Rockport. They are refined and elegant, but not like a Kharma. But there is a reason they show so well with Ypsilon. Ypsilon and PERFECT8 are appreciated by music lovers and mature, seasoned audiophile listeners who have owned a lot of other equipment and want to settle down. The point is, music lovers and longtime high-end audio enthusiasts may stop focusing on only the tonal harmonics or the dynamic expression, or concerns of low-frequency extension or super tweeters. They stopped analyzing listening sessions and just want to lose themselves in the music.

That's what you can do with the PERFECT8 loudspeaker system.

If that's who you are, and you have the financial means of entry, then I suggest going as high in the PERFECT8 Technologies AB model line-up as you can afford. They just keep getting better and better the higher you go. Email or call Jonas and figure out how to hear them, because you need to hear them. Eventually, I know I will own a pair!

I have to touch on the price. Yes, $50,000 is quite a bit for loudspeakers. Keep in mind that PERFECT8 currently sells direct — not by philosophy, but because building the right dealer relationships takes time. They are actively looking for dealers in the U.S., and distribution in Europe appears to be close. They do not aggressively advertise other than shows, and continue to successfully develop a truly grass-roots following (or would that be glass-roots?). As such, their loudspeaker prices are more about manufacturing cost than profit, especially when compared to a brand that sells through distributors and dealers. Also consider that a nice gold Rolex or Audemars Piguet timepiece can cost between $40,000 to $100,000 easily — that (and higher) are the clientele they are selling to.

In fact, to expand upon the fine mechanical timepiece analogy for those very knowledgeable about horology, PERFECT8 would equate to a true Indie (independent watch maker) like Rexhep Rexhepi, R.W. Smith, MB&F, or Remy Cool.

As they say, if you know, you know... and you should know PERFECT8 loudspeakers.

Manufacturer's Comments
Matthew — thank you. Eleven years since we first met, and you still made me feel like I was hearing it for the first time through your writing.

PERFECT8 started with a simple directive: build me the best-sounding loudspeaker possible, no budget constraints. Kolja Willimzik spent 2,500 man-hours on research and development and arrived at three fundamental designs — the Cube, a compact sealed enclosure monitor; the Point, a point source dipole; and the Force, a full line array dipole. Each one a different answer to the same question: what does it actually take to reproduce music the way it sounds in a concert hall?

After hearing the first prototypes, the decision to start a company was obvious. This was too good not to share. That love of music is still what drives everything we do.

It is perhaps fitting that a prototype of the very speaker you reviewed — the Cube-S — is permanently installed in the Namen-Jesu-Kirche in Bonn, a church dating from 1307 located on Bonngasse, directly next door to Beethoven's birthplace. Since 2015, Beethoven's music has been performed there every Thursday from 3 to 5pm, and on Saturdays, free and open to the public, as part of the project "Kirche klingt – Beten mit Beethoven." The project was initiated by Professor Uwe Reinhold and uses Kolja Willimzik's loudspeaker system. In 2018 it was awarded the Götterfunken prize by Bürger für Beethoven. With 2027 marking the 200th anniversary of Beethoven's death, the installation feels more relevant than ever. Perhaps worth a detour if you are ever in Germany.

One gentle addition to your closing thought: you described PERFECT8 as a speaker for the seasoned audiophile who is done tweaking and just wants to enjoy the music. That is true — but it may be even more true for people who have never been audiophiles at all. The listener with season tickets to their local concert hall. The person whose reference is the real thing, not a previous hi-fi system. They hear what we do and immediately recognize it — because their brain has been trained on live music, not on loudspeakers. The audiophile, by contrast, often wants something that sounds like their current system, only better. We are after something different entirely.

Our goal is not to achieve "great sound" — whatever an audiophile thinks that means. Our goal is to create a magic illusion in an almost arbitrary listening room.

Level 1: A convincing illusion that there is a real acoustic event in front of the listener.

Level 2: A convincing illusion that there is a different, real acoustic space in front of the listener.

Level 3: The listener is teleported to a different acoustic space entirely.

Your clipboard falling to your lap tells me we got all the way to three.

Jonas Räntilä
Co-founder & CEO, PERFECT8 Technologies AB

Specifications
Cube-S
Type: Compact reference loudspeaker
Frequency Response: Below 30 Hz in-room, up to 25 kHz
THD: Below 0.3% @ 96 dB (midrange/treble)
Impedance: 4 Ohm
Sensitivity: 86dB/W/m
Maximum Output: 112 dB SPL
Drivers: 35mm dome tweeter and two 7" aluminum-cone midrange / woofer drivers
Crossover: Mundorf capacitors and air-core coils
Dimensions: 9.84" x 10.6" x 14.6" (WxDxH)
Weight: 46 lbs.

Cube-S Subwoofer
Type: Active, powered, and sealed subwoofer
Radiation Pattern: True monopole point source

Frequency Response: Below 16 Hz (lowest setting, Q0.5 @ 16 Hz, anechoic 4π, 12 dB/octave roll-off, bass contour adaptable to room acoustics via DSP) to over 300 Hz (+/-1 dB from target response)

Drivers: Two ultra-linear, super-long-stroke 10" drivers with extremely stiff aluminum cones in a force-balancing arrangement and large rubber surrounds and 22 lbs magnet system with copper cap around the pole pieces.

Amplification: Two 500 Watt Class D amplifiers (one per driver), with ultra-high damping factor.

DSP Crossover: State-of-the-art, with three user-selectable presets plus optional individual optimization for perfect integration and room adaptation, decoupled from internal air-pressure variation and vibration

Dimensions: 11.6" x 14 x 18″ (WxDxH)
Weight: 110 lbs.

Price: Cube-S compact monitor is €24,250 per pair, add Sub option for a total of €42,500.
(Approximately $28,500 and $50,000, respectively)

Manufacturer
PERFECT8 Technologies AB
Pilgatan 2A
587 31 Linköping
Sweden

Voice: +46 708 15 22 31
E-mail: info@perfect8.com 
Website: Perfect8.com