Roland Gauder has a doctorate in physics, and he told Alpha Audio that scientists and philosophy don't mix. His speakers start as sets of equations, and even the compact Arcona 40 needed a university computer cluster to solve them. Gauder calls his speakers "impulse machines," because drums, pianos, guitars and the human voice are made of sharp attacks rather than steady tones. His big idea is in the crossover, the circuit that splits the music between the tweeter, midrange and woofers. Where two drivers overlap, the same note comes from two places at once, and Gauder says the attack smears and the cabinets give themselves away. His crossovers cut each driver off far more steeply than usual, so the overlap is tiny, and a delay circuit holds the tweeter back so its sound arrives together with the midrange. Michael Lavorgna of Twittering Machines heard an "uncanny dynamic snap" from the Capello 100. Gauder Akustik suits listeners who want sharp timing and a steady stereo image from speakers designed for ordinary living rooms.

Start with the Arcona line. Oliver Masciarotte of HifiZine heard the sealed Arcona 40 keep its tone from the couch to the kitchen, where he was making corn bread. Gauder says its balanced crossover is an easy load for a moderate amplifier, and Masciarotte settled on a 40-watt class A amp. The Capello line comes next, and its aluminum tweeter can be swapped for a beryllium one at home later without changing the crossover. Every line shares the same core technology, so moving up mostly changes the cabinet. The feature to learn is Bass Extension, a set of plug-in modules on the back that deepen the lowest bass in steps. It draws on the amplifier, so the manual says to pull the jumper with a small tube amp, or when the speakers stand close to a wall. Lavorgna tried them all on his Capello 100s and settled on the White module. Wojciech Pacuła of High Fidelity notes that Gauder's own stands for the Capello 40 raise the ear to the height of the mid-woofer.

Gauder ran an acoustic consulting firm in the 1980s and from 1989 designed speakers for the German maker Isophon, before founding Gauder Akustik with business partner Achim Knapp. In the 1990s he built a square aluminum speaker and gave up on it because, he told Alpha Audio, it "rang like a bell." The answer came from asking how nature would build a speaker, Andre Jennings of The Absolute Sound explains, with a sternum for the front baffle, ribs for the sides and a spine. Gauder stacks solid aluminum ribs with damping ribs between them, so vibration can't pass from rib to rib. The rib cabinet first appeared in the Berlina series, and the room with the Berlina RC 9 earned Jennings' cost-no-object Best of Show at CES 2015. The DARC line, for Dynamic Aluminum Rib Construction, carries the idea on. Every speaker is built in Renningen, near Stuttgart, and Jennings calls the DARC 250 Mk II "as nearly complete as any loudspeaker system I've experienced, anywhere."