Empire 7500M Grenadier
A 75-pound cylinder of marble-topped furniture with a downward-firing 15-inch woofer, and a price tag that made reviewers do a double take.
Overview
The shape is the first thing people notice. The Empire 7500M Grenadier is a column - a three-way acoustic-suspension system in a cylindrical pedestal enclosure 20 inches in diameter and 27 inches high, weighing 75 lbs. Empire's own advertising called it "Empire's most exciting Grenadier" and promised "360° spread for lows, 160° at high frequencies." It also billed the speaker as designed to outperform speakers up to twice the price. That last claim is marketing. The independent press still took the speaker seriously enough to put it on the test bench.
The drivers are a 15-inch woofer, a 5-inch dome midrange and a 1-inch dome tweeter, crossed at 450 and 5,000 Hz. The woofer sits close to the floor and fires downward into a funnel-shaped loading plug. Bass escapes through eight roughly oval slots at the bottom of the cabinet. Up top, behind a decorative bronze panel, the mid and high domes sit behind a cast acoustic lens meant to widen their dispersion. That is a real design decision, not decoration. The cabinet came in satin walnut or antique oak, and the top could be ordered in wood or in imported marble. Empire's literature listed response as 25-20,000 Hz, power handling at 100 watts, and nominal impedance at 8 ohms.
The marble option is where the 7500M gets interesting from a buyer's perspective, and not entirely in a good way. High Fidelity (June 1972, p.40) flagged that the marble tops are subject to natural variations in color, and suggested checking a pair for color match before taking them home. A matched pair of stone tops is not something a dealer can guarantee off the shelf. The wood-top version saved $15 per speaker — $169.95 versus $184.95 with marble — and one suspects more than a few buyers took the discount.
What the measurements showed was a speaker that behaved better than its furniture-store looks suggested. Audio (November 1972, p.70) found the impedance stayed at 8 ohms or more through most of the range, dipping only briefly to 4.5 ohms — an easy load for a tube amp or a modest receiver. The same review noted efficiency on the high side: a rather modest 20-watt amplifier or receiver would drive the speaker to levels approaching 100 dB, while the system would absorb 100 watts and more in peak loads without complaint. That combination — efficient and robust — is rarer than the spec sheet suggests, and it means the 7500M is unusually forgiving of whatever amplification happens to be on hand.
Audio's listening notes (November 1972, p.71) characterized the overall sound as robust, with a midrange on the full side — a polite way of saying the mids run rich. Treble dispersion held up well to 16,000 Hz, and the bass was called clear and very deep, with the range and power at the low end described as most impressive for a system of its size. Placement mattered: the review noted bass performance was affected by floor material, and the tester preferred the speaker on deep-pile carpet, well away from any wall. The cylindrical form has a practical upside here — the cabinet can be rotated to aim the high-frequency energy toward or slightly away from the listening position, which is a degree of tuning most box speakers don't offer.
A three-position slide switch sits next to the polarized input binding posts on the cabinet bottom, marked DECREASE, NORMAL, INCREASE. It gives some treble shaping. Audio measured that most of the boost in the INCREASE position lands above 6 kHz. It is a coarse control, not a tone network, and it works better for matching the room than for voicing the speaker.
Empire's own advertising in HiFi/Stereo (December 1971, p.39) and again in 1972 pushed the "no box" angle hard. The pitch was that a cylinder avoids the standing-wave problems of a rectangular cabinet, and that the finish goes all the way around with no grille cloth to hide behind. The marble top, the ad noted, "is meant to be used." The speaker doubles as an end table flanking a free-standing couch, which is how Audio's reviewer suggested using it.
By early 1973, Empire was running full-page ads quoting the reviews back at buyers. High Fidelity (February 1973, p.99) carried a compilation pulling lines from Audio and from Larry Zide at the American Record Guide, including the observation that the Grenadier struck the reviewer as among the best systems of its size and price for home use. An ad like that is a period artifact more than a verdict, but the underlying reviews were real and largely positive.
The 7500M is not a common speaker today, and the reasons are practical. Seventy-five pounds of cylinder with a stone top is a moving-day nightmare, and the marble is the first thing to crack. The downward-firing woofer and its loading plug sit close to the floor, where dust, pet hair, and the occasional spilled drink live. The bronze panel and cast lens are period-correct but not robust. None of this is a knock on the design — it is simply what 50-year-old furniture-shaped audio looks like in the wild. Collectors who find a pair with intact marble tops and matching color should treat that as the exception, not the rule.
At $169.95 in wood or $184.95 with marble, the 7500M was positioned as a value play against larger box systems, and the period reviews largely agreed it delivered.
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