Andrew Quint of The Absolute Sound noticed that Larsen's US importer, Michael Vamos, always seemed to be in an exceptionally good mood at audio shows. Quint suspected the reason was setup. Hotel rooms are hard places to make a system sound good, and a Larsen just goes against the wall the listener faces, pointing straight ahead. A speaker out in the room sends sound to the nearby walls, and those echoes reach your ears a moment after the direct sound and blur it. Engineers call them early reflections. A Larsen stands flush against the wall and angles its drivers inward and upward, so, in Vamos's words, "the sound travels for the longest amount of time before hitting another surface." Robert E. Greene of The Absolute Sound heard the Model 9 erase his room and wrote that "it sounds very much not like a speaker." Larsen suits people who listen in a shared living room and want speakers that stay out of the way and sound good from many seats.

Start with the small Model 6. Steve Lefkowicz of Positive Feedback notes that it uses the same mid/bass driver and tweeter as the more expensive Model 8. Give it a strong amplifier. Quint heard the bass improve when he moved from 60-watt Pass Labs monoblocks to a 200-watt Parasound, and he concluded that "these little speakers thrive on power." Lefkowicz set his low-powered tube amp aside for a solid-state Burson. The step up is the flagship Model 9, which adds a woofer near the floor and two upward-firing tweeters that fill in the room's reverberant sound. Alan Sircom of Hi-Fi+ calls it "among the most live-sounding loudspeakers I've heard." Setup is mostly about the wall. Lefkowicz pushed his pair as close to it as his cables allowed, and Sircom says they work best firing across the room rather than down its length. Barry Jones of SoundStage! Australia then moved his Model 9s away from the side walls a few centimeters at a time until the bass extended furthest.

Stig Carlsson, a Swedish engineer, began working on these ideas in the 1950s. His Coalscuttle of 1953 looked like a cannon, and in 1966 Sonab introduced his OA-6, with OA standing for Ortho Acoustic. Around 1979 Larry Cox of Positive Feedback heard Sonab speakers in a California shop. He thought they looked like "ottomans that'd run away from their sofa," and then an orchestra appeared life size on the wall between them. In 1983 Carlsson began building speakers under his own name in Skillingaryd, and his OA-52, styled by the art professor Lars Lallerstedt, looked like a small armchair for children. John Larsen, an electrical engineer, spent sixteen years working with Carlsson. He founded Larsen HiFi in 2007, with Anders Eriksson handling the electroacoustic design and Larsen the cabinets, and the speakers are still made in Skillingaryd. Sircom notes that boundary speakers are rare today and names the Model 9 one of the exceptions. Greene calls it "a speaker that should be heard by every student of the audio arts."