Electro-Voice CD 35i
A loudspeaker that turns up in Electro-Voice dealer price lists and French listening rooms, but almost nowhere else in the written record.
Overview
Owners in France know this speaker as the "Baron." The Electro-Voice user manual listing prints the model plainly as the CD 35I. A Vintage Audio Heritage thread calls the same cabinet the "CD35i 'Barons'", so the nickname and the catalog designation apparently belong to the same box. The forum at audiovintage.fr titles its thread "Electro-Voice Baron CD 35i." That is the closest thing to confirmation that Electro-Voice itself attached "Baron" to the model, and it is a thread title, not a catalog page. No spec sheet has surfaced in the accessible record.
The CD 35i is a loudspeaker. That much is clear. The Vintage Audio Heritage poster refers to "ces enceintes" - these speakers - and the audiovintage thread treats it as a floorstanding or shelf pair in a music system. Past that, little can be stated with confidence. The material gives no driver sizes, no crossover points, no impedance or sensitivity figures, no frequency response, no dimensions, no weight and no original price. The Electro-Voice manual exists. manualmachine.com lists it at eleven pages and 2.36 MB. But the specification values inside it have not been captured anywhere the archive can reach, and the section heading "Specifications and Main Features" is all that survives of that content.
The model does have a small paper trail in the American audio press of the mid-1980s. It never shows up as a review subject. It shows up as a name Electro-Voice dealers kept putting in their classified listings. Rick Marder, an authorized E-V dealer in New Jersey, ran the same advertisement across multiple issues of Audio magazine in 1985, and the CD35i appears in the copy each time. One version, in Audio (August 1985), lists "CD35i and Interface" alongside the rest of the E-V catalog. A later placement, Audio (November 1985), names "CD35i and Interface" again in the same dealer's speaker-component listing. A third variation, in Audio (September 1985), pairs the CD35i with the Interface Stage System S-200 and offers a "last pair Interface C equalized" at $1050. These are dealer ads, not independent reviews - the CD35i is being sold, not evaluated - but they establish the model as a live product in the E-V dealer channel during 1985 and 1986. A fifth listing, in Audio (March 1986), groups "E-V CD35i, Interface, stage speakers" together in the same free-flyer format. The model was current enough, and stocked widely enough among E-V dealers, to keep appearing in the back pages for at least a year.
What the CD 35i sounds like, and what it was designed to do, is largely undocumented. The one extended listening impression in the record comes from the audiovintage.fr thread. There a poster describes a session with the Electro-Voice speakers in terms that suggest a coherent, well-integrated presentation: everything "was there and in its place," the backing voices "come back to adulthood," present enough to give a song an epic dimension, and the instruments "well placed to reinforce it." That is one listener's impression in one room with one recording, and it should be read that way. It does not say what the drivers are, how the crossover is built, or what the bass extension is. It does suggest the speaker was not a boom-and-sizzle box, since the poster's language is about placement and integration rather than impact.
A second data point comes from the Vintage Audio Heritage thread on the Leak Stereo 60. An owner running the CD35i "Barons" with the Leak amplifier reports that "this Leak and these speakers go really well together." That is a compatibility note, not a specification. Still, it is useful to a collector: the CD 35i was apparently not a difficult load and did not fight a mid-powered British tube amplifier. Whether that comes from benign impedance, reasonable sensitivity or a forgiving tonal balance cannot be determined from the available material. It is a hint, not a measurement.
The CD 35i is a real Electro-Voice loudspeaker from the mid-1980s, sold through the American dealer network and known in France under the "Baron" nickname. The surviving record documents it almost entirely through dealer classifieds and a handful of owner posts. The manual is the primary document. It exists, it is short, and it is the only place the specifications are likely to be written down. The archive would welcome scans, measurements or photographs from an owner.
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