There’s a conundrum that many movie fans face. You might be perfectly happy with your TV’s picture performance, but the audio is often another matter entirely. Punchy action scenes might be missing a sense of energy, and it may be difficult to make out dialogue during busy parts of a film.

Luckily, there is a way to fix this common problem. If you don’t have the budget or space for a multi-speaker package to upgrade your sound, then adding a soundbar to the mix is a great way to go.

• View all the Prime Day deals on Amazon

And, for those on the hunt for an even more room-filling experience, there is the option of getting a soundbar with Dolby Atmos support, which can provide a much-desired extra boost of surround sound.

With Amazon Prime Day deals swarming your search like ants to a melting Calippo, it can be hard to find a model that is genuinely right for you. That’s where we come in. We have tested hundreds of soundbars over the years, and have hand-selected four products that provide immersive sound and are at a discounted price right now.

Sonos Beam Gen 2

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 holds the crown as the top entry-level Dolby Atmos bar in our best soundbars guide.

The Beam Gen 2 measures just 7 x 65 x 10cm (hwd) and weighs 2.8kg, making it easy to place in front of your TV without obscuring the picture. Under the hood, you will find four front-facing elliptical mid-woofers and a centre tweeter.

Most importantly, it offers a detailed, rich, and enveloping audio experience, which is particularly impressive considering its compact footprint.

Despite the bar’s lack of up-firing drivers, the soundfield is immersive and we get a good sense of height as well as scale. In fact, we note in our review: “Whether it’s a chirping bird, a car or a voice, there’s remarkable consistency across the complete soundfield, and seamless handover between drivers, which we have to say doesn’t always happen when a Dolby Atmos soundbar has upward drivers to contend with.”

It launched at £449, but this Prime Day deal has seen its price drop to £337 at Amazon. That’s a saving of £112, and is well worth considering if you are looking to add an Atmos soundbar to your system.

Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9

If you are looking for a step-up soundbar to add to your system, then the Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 is hard to beat. This Sony sounds exceptionally crisp and precise, and the Atmos-ness of its delivery is hugely impressive for a standalone bar.

We find there is a slightly clinical tone in its overall delivery, but its superb detail and punch mean it still achieves five-star success.

In terms of connectivity, gaming fans will be pleased to hear that the Bar 9 has a dedicated HDMI 2.1 input and support for 4K/120Hz, VRR and ALLM.

You can find it for £999 at Richer Sounds, chopping £400 off its launch price. At this price, it is also worth considering the Award-winning Sonos Arc Ultra. It’s a brilliant-sounding system, offering a rich overall sound with expressive vocals.

It features only a single HDMI eARC port, however, which is not as comprehensive as the Theatre Bar 9’s offerings. The Sonos model is currently available at its launch price of £999 at Smart Home Sounds, but we have our fingers crossed for a reduction before the end of Prime Day.

Hisense AX5125H

All-in-one soundbars work excellently for some people, but you might be craving that extra sense of immersion that can come with a soundbar package. And our top budget soundbar system recommendation is currently available for an absolute steal.

You can pick up the Award-winning Hisense AX5125H for just £199 at Currys, making it easily one of the best-sounding affordable soundbar systems we have heard.

The 5.1.2 system, which supports both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, offers a relatively compact design that is easy to accommodate in most homes. It is made up of two small wireless surround speakers, a wireless subwoofer and the main soundbar. Even though the surround speakers are surprisingly compact (each one measures just 14 x 9 x 11cm), they produce an impressively enveloping soundfield that massively improves upon our experience with the TV’s sound.

We noted in our review when watching Civil War: “Bullets whizz from the front to the back of the room and even behind the listening position, helicopters hover at ceiling height, and distant explosions rumble menacingly.”

Vocals are clear and sound relatively emotive too, although the subwoofer can get a little overzealous and cause them to become muffled in the busiest sections. Still, the Hisense system is a top performer in its class and is even more tempting at this discount.

Samsung HW-Q990F

Finally, we have the Samsung HW-Q990F, an Award-winning 11.1.4 soundbar package. Like the Hisense system, it is made up of a soundbar, a subwoofer, and two surround speakers.

It is a chunkier system in terms of its build, though. The surrounds, for instance, measure 25 x 25 x 25cm and the soundbar comes in at a more hefty 7 x 123 x 14cm (hwd).

With support for Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, we were impressed by the soundbar’s ability to create that all-important dome of sound as well as ensuring the sound moves organically between the channels.

When it comes to its bass performance, we say in our review: “There is a much greater sense of tonal variation from this subwoofer [compared with the older Q990D model], which unearths a new layer to the bass. The Q990F’s bass feels more organic, balanced, and seamlessly integrated into the system as a result.”

That all makes it a focused, tonally varied overall sound that immerses us in whatever we listen to. You can find the system for £750 at Amazon, saving you around a whopping £949 off its original price.

We recently reviewed the Q990F’s successor – the Samsung HW-Q990H. This new system managed to build upon our favourite aspects of the older model, resulting in an even more detailed and nuanced performance. That meant the Q990H took the crown when we put them head to head – but the Q990F is without doubt still a brilliant performer in the category.

Plus, the Q990H's price has dropped only a small amount for Prime Day (the cheapest we have seen so far is £1299 at Amazon). That makes the older model all the more tempting.

MORE:

These are the best Dolby Atmos soundbars

Check out the best budget soundbars

And here are the best TVs right now

If you want a satisfyingly cinematic or sporting experience at home, there really is no substitute for screen size.

The good news is that a big TV needn't cost big money. These days, 65-inch TVs go for much less money than you might imagine, and if you wait for a big sales event, your cash can go even further.

And it just so happens that we're right in the middle of a big sales event – Amazon Prime Day – and I've sifted through all of the deals to find three super-cheap 65-inch TVs that I can recommend as great buys.

• View all the Prime Day deals on Amazon

What do I know about it? I'm so glad you asked!

I've been testing TVs for almost 20 years now, so I know the good from the bad (and the ugly, for that matter). I've also been personally involved in every What Hi-Fi? TV review in probably the last 10 years – and that includes the reviews of the three models I'm recommending here.

Happy with those credentials? Excellent! Here are my three picks, ranked in order of quality.

1. TCL Q6C

Deal price UK: £529 at Amazon
Deal price US: n/a

If you're looking for the best-value 65-inch TV in the Prime Day sales, this is the one I'd buy.

The TCL Q6C impressed us so much in testing that we awarded it five stars and described it as "an absolute steal". That's high praise for any TV, but it's especially impressive when you're talking about a 65-inch set that's currently selling for well under £600.

What makes the Q6C stand out is that it brings technologies normally associated with much more expensive TVs down into the budget category. It uses a Mini LED backlight with local dimming, alongside Quantum Dot colour technology, and the result is a picture that's far more sophisticated than the price suggests.

In our review, we were particularly impressed by the TV's contrast and black-level performance. Dark scenes look surprisingly deep and convincing, while bright HDR highlights have real punch.

Colours are another strong point, delivering plenty of vibrancy and richness without tipping into the sort of exaggerated look that often plagues cheaper TVs.

It's also an excellent option for sport and gaming. Motion is handled confidently, helping fast-moving action stay clear and composed, while gamers get features such as 4K/144Hz support, VRR and low input lag.

No TV at this price is perfect, of course. The sound is merely decent rather than exceptional (something that can be rectified with one of the best budget soundbars), and you'll get the best results by spending a little time tweaking the picture settings. But those are minor caveats when the overall performance is this strong.

Simply put, if your budget stretches to the TCL Q6C, it's the best cheap 65-inch TV I've seen in the Prime Day sales.

2. Amazon Ember QLED

Deal price UK: £600 at Amazon
Deal price US: $710 at Amazon

The TCL Q6C is my top pick, but the Amazon Ember QLED isn't far behind, given its current Prime Day price.

In fact, one of my colleagues recently described the deal on this TV as "impossible to ignore", and it's easy to see why. Amazon has cut the price dramatically, turning what was already a solid mid-range TV into one of the most tempting bargains in the sales.

The Ember QLED is a significant step forward from Amazon's previous QLED efforts. It features a full-array backlight with 160 dimming zones and a panel that's considerably brighter than its predecessor, resulting in a picture that's sharper, punchier and more three-dimensional than you might expect at this sort of money.

During testing, we were particularly impressed by its detail levels and colour performance. Images look crisp and vibrant, while upscaling of lower-quality content is handled well enough that everyday broadcast TV remains enjoyable.

The TV also supports every major HDR format, including Dolby Vision IQ and HDR10+ Adaptive, so you're covered regardless of which streaming service you use.

Another advantage over many budget rivals is the sound. Built-in TV audio is rarely worth talking about, but the Ember QLED produces a fuller, clearer and more spacious presentation than most affordable sets manage.

Why isn't it above the TCL? Primarily because the Q6C's Mini LED backlight delivers superior black levels, contrast and gaming performance. The Amazon also tops out at 60Hz, making it less appealing to serious gamers.

Still, if you're heavily invested in the Amazon ecosystem or simply want a big, capable and easy-to-use 65-inch TV for as little money as possible, the Ember QLED is an excellent Prime Day buy.

3. Samsung U8000F

Deal price UK: £367 at Amazon
Deal price US: $400 at Samsung

The Samsung U8000F is the TV I recommend if your budget is as tight as possible.

At £367/$400 during Prime Day, it's substantially cheaper than both the TCL Q6C and Amazon Ember QLED, and that price difference is impossible to ignore. In fact, it's one of the least expensive big-brand 65-inch models you can buy.

Of course, some compromises are inevitable at this sort of money. Unlike the TCL and Amazon models above, the U8000F doesn't have a Mini LED or full-array backlight, and its picture isn't as bright or as impactful when displaying HDR content. Black levels are also less convincing, meaning movie nights won't have quite the same cinematic punch.

That said, Samsung has done a commendable job with the fundamentals. In our testing, we found the U8000F delivered a balanced, natural picture that avoids many of the exaggerated traits often seen on budget TVs. Colours are pleasingly authentic, detail levels are respectable, and standard-definition and HD content are handled particularly well.

Samsung's excellent Tizen smart platform is another big plus. It's packed with streaming apps, easy to navigate and generally feels more polished than many rival smart TV systems.

The biggest reason to choose the U8000F over the TVs above is simple: value. While the TCL Q6C is undoubtedly the better performer and the Ember QLED offers a more advanced specification, both cost considerably more. If spending £500-£600 on a TV still feels like a stretch, the Samsung gives you a huge screen from a trusted brand for comfortably under £400.

No, it's not the best TV in this list. But when price becomes the priority, the U8000F makes a very strong case for itself.

MORE:

Here are all of the best TVs and the best TV deals you can get right now

Don't forget the sound: here are the best budget soundbars

Danish hi-fi brand Tangent overhauled its Spectrum speaker range only a few months ago, but now it has a new addition: the Tangent Spectrum II X5 Active BT.

These are active speakers, featuring two 50W Class D amplifiers, so you don't need an external amp. The 130mm cellulose‑pulp mid/bass driver and 25mm soft‑dome tweeter combine to deliver a soundstage that is described as “balanced, dynamic and natural”, with precise bass, expressive vocals and refined, transparent highs.

But that’s not the only improvement. The feature set has been beefed up, offering Bluetooth 5.3 with aptX HD for better-quality wireless playback, and a built-in moving magnet phono input for hooking up a turntable. You can use these speakers for your TV audio too, thanks to the HDMI ARC port, while you also get optical, coaxial and hi-res USB Audio inputs, plus a subwoofer output for adding more bass.

As you would expect from Tangent, the aesthetic is best described as clean and minimalist, i.e. very Scandi. They come in black or white, one of which should, no doubt, match your interior style.

The Spectrum II X5 Active BT are out now for £499 (around $660 / AU$940) per pair.

MORE:

The best wireless speakers money can buy

When do wireless speakers stop making sense?

Google's Gemini-touting smart speaker is officially here – can it compete with Alexa and Siri?

In 1976, Steve Wozniak demonstrated his Apple 1 prototype computer a few months after he, Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne founded the company; Peter Frampton released what would become one of the best-selling live albums in history; and JVC launched (and won) the video cassette format war against Sony’s Betamax with its VHS (Video Home System) player.

It was also a golden year for hi-fi – particularly in Britain – and not only because What Hi-Fi? arrived in newsagents for the first time, the debut (mostly black-and-white) issue claiming to provide the price of every piece of hi-fi equipment on sale in the UK.

Arcam and its debut A60 amplifier were born, KEF launched the first speakers to benefit from computer-aided design (CAD), and Pioneer released a new king in the ‘Watt Wars’ era with its SX-1250 receiver.

At that time, the main concerns of an electronics engineer were, according to Cambridge Audio’s head of engineering, Nick Brown, “analogue performance across a handful of inputs, whether the remote control worked across the room, and whether the packaging survived a drop test.” Amplifier design was, he says, already hard, but today it’s a different discipline entirely.

And the same can be said when it comes to wider hi-fi sources and electronics, loudspeakers, and audio-enhancing accessories that weren’t even necessary way back when. We asked several hi-fi brands to pick the technological groundbreakers that changed it all…

An expanding canvas of features and protocols

For Brown, the technological landscape has gone from balcony garden to sprawling arboretum, now that modern amplifiers must handle an array of analogue and digital connectivity, connect reliably to TVs, PCs, gaming consoles and Bluetooth devices, and sometimes incorporate networked and wireless technologies.

“Control might come via an IR remote, a Bluetooth remote, or a mobile app,” he adds. “Customers want sound profiles they can adjust. Regulators want the whole thing running in under half a watt in standby and waking up in seconds.

“Every one of those connections has to be tuned, verified and tested for consistency. Take eARC, for example: supporting it properly means testing against as many television models as we can get our hands on, because TV manufacturers implement the standard differently, and what works perfectly on one television can behave unexpectedly on another. The specification exists, but the real world doesn't always follow the rules.

“The knock-on effect across the whole development process is significant. Where product development once drew on a relatively small core team, it now pulls in software engineers, network specialists, UX designers, compliance experts and more – all working in parallel, all needing to get it right. Perhaps the most telling sign of where things have landed: our fastest-growing team right now isn’t electronics or software. It’s QA [Quality Assurance].”

Along Brown’s line of reasoning, it’s not one game-changing technology per se, but the nature of the game changing entirely. Not only has the hi-fi world expanded to accommodate the mushrooming features brought by digital and the internet, but it has also had to learn to play ball with the ever-expanding world of household electronics, ordinance and all.

Digital disruption on sound quality

Of course, the arrival and continual maturation of digital audio have played a pivotal role in how hi-fi has transformed not just logistically but also sonically in the past 50 years. QED engineer Jon Jeary highlights the Compact Disc as “the ultimate game changer” for democratising access to high-end hi-fi.

“Suddenly, a system costing only a few hundred pounds could potentially rival vinyl or reel-to-reel setups that had cost thousands just a few years earlier,” he says, recalling an experience he had between 1976 and the earliest years of the CD.

“The year What Hi-Fi? launched, I bought the latest Steve Miller Band album on vinyl,” says Jeary. “On the way home, the record warped slightly in the summer heat. Played on my father’s respectable and relatively expensive system – a Garrard SL75B, Trio KA2002 amplifier and Wharfedale Kit speakers – the first track on each side suffered audible wow, flutter and even a jump.

“Yet we still loved the music and accepted the limitations: pops, clicks, end-of-side distortion and a restricted soundstage. That skip simply became part of the song.

“Nine years later, I heard the same album on a friend’s Philips CD104 [player]. The difference was astonishing: no scratches or jumps, an inaudible noise floor, perfect stereo separation, negligible distortion and a ruler-flat frequency response.

“For the first time, I realised as a student I could realistically own a system capable of challenging my rich uncle’s prized Revox reel-to-reel setup.”

Digital audio formats and technology ushered in a different – and technically ‘better’ – sound, but their watershed innovation – network streaming – introduced problems of its own, and, according to Chord Company’s Patrick Mitchell, the quest to solve them has had a huge impact on the modern audio engineering landscape.

It has allowed hi-fi streaming to be the game changer it has become in the high-end space.

“Optimising a digital system has introduced a whole new set of environmental variables that simply didn't exist when we were spinning isolated discs,” says Mitchell. “When you introduce a network streamer, the audio system becomes physically connected to the broader domestic data network – an environment originally designed for office computers, smart TVs and home appliances; not delicate audio signals.

“Standard home networks are inherently noisy environments, and that hidden electrical noise can heavily mask the subtle details that make recorded music sound real.”

While hi-fi has always grappled with the detrimental effects of external noise, streaming has, Mitchell says, removed the natural isolation of physical media, which more or less has a self-contained playback loop.

He argues that in order to maintain audio quality in digital streaming systems, the network path needs to be treated “with the same care and engineering prestige traditionally reserved for premium analogue playback”.

For a cable company such as Chord, this has blown the windows wide open for creating devices that break that unhealthy electrical path and strive to reduce noise, such as network filters and switches.

Parts progression

While the same types of parts are by and large the same for analogue designs as they were 50 years ago, componentry has improved as techniques, materials and research have, and naturally you now have digital elements in the hardware mix.

“The list of improved parts and techniques is almost endless,” says Cyrus’s managing director, Nick Clarke, whose list of examples includes the use of phase change materials for heatsink bonding and a higher current handling in a given transistor package for an amplifier output stage.

For Jack Oclee-Brown, KEF’s senior vice president and chief technology officer, one specific part-progression stands out as particularly groundbreaking for the hi-fi market: the magnet.

Magnets are crucial elements of loudspeaker, headphone and phono cartridge design; they convert electrical signals into mechanical movement in speakers and headphones, and vice versa in cartridges.

“In 1984, a new type of magnetic material based on the element neodymium was developed, offering far higher strength than previous materials,” says Oclee-Brown, adding that neodymium magnets are still the strongest type commercially available today.

“Toward the late 80s and early 90s, neodymium magnets started to find their way into audio products and brought about a technical revolution. At KEF, we used this new type of magnet to allow us to miniaturise the loudspeaker tweeter, placing it at the centre of the midrange driver to create our famous Uni-Q driver array.

“Headphones could be made smaller, lighter and more portable; products like Apple’s AirPods could not exist without neodymium magnets. Whatever you might think of the sound quality, neodymium magnets allow tiny speakers to be buried inside our phones and tablets.”

Magnets in audio (and other industry) applications are also a ‘watch this space’ solution, says Oclee-Brown, who says that they need more research and innovation. “Neodymium magnet demand is rising year-on-year, and the search for greener and more sustainable alternatives is an important field that some companies, like Niron Magnetics, are already working on,” he adds.

From educated guesses to simulated trials

So we have the quantum leap from analogue to digital in how we consume and perceive sound, the many more features to engineer (and engineer around), advanced and innovative componentry, and the closer relationship to the wider technology of the home to accommodate.

But arguably just as significant are the ‘behind the scenes’ technological advancements that shape how audio design, engineering and manufacture look today.

In his 38 years as an audio engineer, during which time he has designed and built products for the likes of Audiolab, Arcam and Harman International, Nick Clarke calls out the impact of Computer Aided Design (CAD) as the biggest change.

“When I started in this industry [1988], there wasn’t any,” says Clarke. “We laid out circuits manually after sketching the idea on paper using black tape on a sheet of plastic at a 2:1 scale so that you had a chance of producing this by hand. This was then sent away and photo-reduced to a 1:1 master, from which the (usually) single-sided PCB was produced.

“There was no link to the mechanical parts of the product design, so that required a lot of work to ensure the PCB and the mechanics matched, and the components were large through-hole parts that were manually fitted and hand-soldered.

“The whole process was costly, labour-intensive, time-consuming and fraught with opportunities for something to go wrong, with absolutely no error checking other than either peer reviews, or building it, seeing what you had done wrong and going around the loop again.

“Today, you have extremely advanced CAD software for both the PCB and the mechanics, which link together in such a way with a vast amount of automated checks that it is virtually impossible to produce a PCB that has errors that would prevent manufacture or doesn’t fit in the casework.

“It is, too, like American mathematician and computer scientist Richard Hamming said: ‘The purpose of computers is insight, not numbers.’ Not only does the use of computer design allow for more accurate ‘doing’, but also more extensive experimenting.

“We can now use simulation tools for trialling circuit ideas or the thermal efficiency of heatsinks – tasks which in the past would have been very educated guesses at best or total blind alleys at worst,” says Clarke.

“It’s no substitute for clever ideas or innovative design, but they allow you to try a lot more things a lot more quickly and that collectively drives higher performance across products at every level of the market.”

Similarly, Peter Comeau, the IAG Group’s director of acoustic design for brands including Mission, Wharfedale and Quad, singles out the monumental impact of advanced measurement methodology and the arrival of simulation tools on speaker design.

“When I first became interested in loudspeaker design, as a teenager in the late 1960s, measurement typically consisted of hoisting a baffle high above the ground on a crane with a microphone suspended a yard or so from it,” Comeau remembers.

“Then, in the ’70s, anechoic chambers became more prevalent, and we had Bruel & Kjaer sweep [noise] generators and a pen graph response tracer to help view frequency response and harmonic distortion.

“Today, there’s a whole raft of measurement systems and software analysis and simulation to help, stretching from laser scanning of cones and domes to crossover software optimisation.

“Does this actually help us design better loudspeakers? The short answer is ‘yes’; we can make better diaphragms and motor systems, control cabinet vibrations successfully and simulate the power response of loudspeakers in rooms.”

Like Clarke, Comeau commends such technology’s ability to speed up prototyping and trialling, as well as facilitating a greater understanding of the problems involved in achieving good sound.

Despite that, however, he still champions what has, since and prior to 1976, been crucial to obtaining that end goal: using our ears: “The process of hours and hours of fine-tuning, experimentation and tweaking that is as relevant today as it always was.”

It hails back to Clarke’s point that, while technologies are advancing, they only work if, in his words, “you have the knowledge of how to use them and what they can do for you (and sometimes, more importantly, what they can't).”

The technological game has changed significantly in the past five decades, absolutely; but designer and engineer know-how remains at the heart of it all as much today as it was back then.

MORE:

1976 vs today: veteran audio experts discuss the biggest shifts in music and hi-fi during What Hi-Fi?'s 50-year lifetime

"The concept is spot on and it could be a signpost to the future of surround" – revisiting our review of the world's first soundbar

9 debut stereo amplifiers from iconic hi-fi brands – legendary amps from Audiolab, Cyrus, McIntosh, NAD, Naim and more

Streaming giant Roku is about to be acquired by Fox. The American media empire, Fox, has announced an acquisition of the company, covering its hardware, software, and services, in a deal worth $22 billion.

That's roughly £16.4 billion or AU$31 billion, using currency conversion, at the time of writing.

Roku currently produces a wide array of streaming devices, as well as affordable TVs manufactured in partnership with the likes of TCL, Sharp and JVC. The company recently launched its first projector, too.

According to the research firm Parks Associates (via BBC News), Roku is the largest smart platform in the US, powering more than a quarter of internet-connected streaming devices. It's closely followed by Samsung's Tizen-powered devices and then devices running Amazon's Fire TV software platform.

Worldwide, it's reported that over 100 million households stream content using Roku devices and services.

While no news regarding Roku's hardware lineup has been announced as part of this deal, it appears Fox plans to capitalise on Roku's existing advertising reach through its The Roku Channel service.

Fox already owns the popular streaming service Tubi, which it could merge with Roku's service in the future.

We've contacted Roku for comment and will update this page when we hear back.

MORE:

Check out our list of the best streaming devices

As well as the best streaming services for movies and TV

And the best cheap TVs

June is always a tricky time for hi-fi and home cinema fans. For whatever reason, companies seem to think the Summer Solstice period is the perfect time to launch new products.

2026 has proven no different. Over the past seven days, our team has wrapped up its coverage of the High End Vienna show, dealt with some surprise AV announcements at Apple WWDC, all the while continuing its eternal search for the best hi-fi and home cinema products.

Eager to make sure you don’t miss any of the important announcements, we’ve inked a fresh entry for our weekly Rewind column detailing all the salient points.

We had an opening look at Dali’s new premium system

Hi-fi systems are a growing category, even at the premium end of the market. Which is why we were curious to check out Dali’s take on the format at the High End Vienna Show.

The giant new Dali Vega is an instantly eye-catching, eight-channel system designed with flexibility, as well as performance, in mind.

At a platform level, this is due to its use of BluOS, which means it has all the streaming smarts most music fans will need.

But it is also due to its design, with Dali claiming you can position it horizontally on a stand/desk or on a wall in either portrait or landscape without impacting performance.

Read our full Dali Vega hands-on preview

One of our favourite portable DACs is back

The appearance of a new AudioQuest DragonFly Copper portable DAC / headphone amp was a welcome surprise last week. Unveiled at High End, the tiny portable DAC is being pitched as a refinement, rather than a rethinking, of the DragonFly’s offering.

It’s a tiny USB dongle designed to offer hi-fi fans a quick and easy way to improve their laptop, tablet or phone’s audio. Key upgrades on its recently retired predecessor include the use of a new 32-bit ESS Sabre DAC and Microchip Technology Microprocessor.

The ESS Sabre doubles the unit’s power output, while the microprocessor reduces the current draw by 25 per cent. We didn’t get to demo it at the show, but we are hoping to get a DragonFly Copper in for review soon. Watch this space.

Read the full story: The DragonFly Copper hovers into view as AudioQuest's most powerful and efficient DAC yet

We had a chinwag with Ruark about why it loves CDs so much

There’s a lot of hype around CDs right now, with numerous reports suggesting Gen Z is suddenly interested in the format.

But, UK-based firm Ruark has long championed CD, even when it wasn’t in vogue with younger listeners.

Which is why, when the firm launched its new Ruark R710 streaming amplifier with integrated CD player at High End Vienna, our hi-fi and audio editor, Kashfia Kabir, headed straight to its stand to have a chinwag with owner and managing director Alan O’Rourke about it.

Read the full story: "It's the last physical format we'll ever have." How the demand for CDs, tactility and good design led to Ruark's new R710 streaming amplifier

Apple unveiled its new TV software

We’ve wanted to see a new Apple TV 4K streaming box for quite a while now – especially our senior staff writer, Lewis Empson.

While one didn’t appear at the tech giant’s WWDC developer conference, we did at least get a hefty update to the current Apple TV’s software, in the shape of tvOS 27.

The new OS promises to help give the long-in-the-tooth Apple TV 4K, which launched all the way back in 2022, a new lease of life, making it “30 per cent” faster and more responsive.

Read the full story: Apple officially announces tvOS 27 – and it nearly makes up for the missing next-generation Apple TV 4K

Moon’s new hi-fi left us wanting more (in a good way)

Moon’s latest 491 streaming preamplifier (£5950 / $6500) and 461 power amplifier (£4450 / $5000) are the latest additions to the firm’s high-end Compass Collection, which includes the five-star 371 streaming amplifier we reviewed in March.

Designed specifically for high-end hi-fi enthusiasts, both units come armed to the teeth with top-end features and hardware. So much so that after having an opening look and listen to both at the High End Show, our global technical editor, Ketan Bharadia, walked away wanting more, reporting:

“All in all, the Moon 491/461 combination makes a great first impression. We’re due to get the products in for review in the next few months, and we can’t wait to hear what they do in our test room's more familiar surroundings.”

Read the full story: Moon's new 491 streaming preamp and 461 stereo power amp is a formidable combination – our first impressions left us wanting more

MORE:

We rank the best stereo amplifiers for hi-fi fans

Our picks of the best hi-fi systems

The best DACs ranked by our experts

Can you believe that there was a time when Samsung didn’t feature a single OLED TV in its range? That all changed in 2022, when it put its spin on OLED by adding a layer of Quantum Dots and launched the excellent S95B QD-OLED TV.

Five years later, the brand is now reaping the benefits of the self-emissive panel technology. It now makes some of the finest OLED TVs around – take the five-star S95F and S90F duo from last year – and its 2026 lineup features more OLED TVs than ever before.

Of course, Samsung was never going to celebrate half a decade of OLED success without taking things up a notch, which is why it has introduced a new, rather unusual flagship model that takes inspiration from one of the brand's other most successful models.

That new flagship OLED is the S99H, a premium QD-OLED TV that oozes style and sophistication, thanks at least in part to its aesthetic similarities to the wildly successful, design-led The Frame LCD range.

Here, though, those smart good looks have been blended with the core abilities of the excellent S95F – with a generous helping of performance upgrades for good measure.

The result? A showstopping OLED TV that blends style and substance, and one that we think could dethrone the current reigning champion of our best OLED TV list: the Sony Bravia 8 II.

Price

We have the 55-inch Samsung S99H before us today, and it’s officially priced at £2499, though in true Samsung fashion, that launch pricing hasn’t stuck around for long. We’re already seeing a £100 decrease across all sizes, which puts the 65-inch version at £3199, the 77-inch model at £4199, and the 83-inch size at £5999.

Now, we need to clear something up regarding model numbers for different regions.

In the US and Australia, Samsung is calling this model the S95H. Despite the different name, it is an identical TV. In these regions, you’ll find the 55-inch S95H for $2500 / AU$3999, the 65-inch S95H for $3400 / AU$5299, the 77-inch S95H for $4500 / AU$7999, and the 83-inch S95H for $6500 / AU$9995.

That's not the end of the story, though. To confuse things even more, Samsung is selling a model under the S95H name here in the UK, too, but it’s a different TV. From what we gather, it is the same TV as the S99H, but without the metal frame-style design. In fact, it looks identical to last year’s S95F.

So, to reiterate, the S99H we're testing here is known as the S95H in the US and Australia, but that is not the same as the UK's S95H TV. Yes, we have given some constructive feedback to Samsung on all of this.

Got all that? Then let's consider the S99H's competition, which primarily comes in the form of Sony’s awesome, Award-winning Bravia 8 II, the 55-inch version of which, after around a year on sale, now costs around £1799 / $2600 / AU$3995. That makes it significantly cheaper than the S99H in the UK, but there's rough pricing parity between the two TVs in the US and Australia.

There’s also the 55-inch LG G6 to consider, which appears to be widely discounted to £1840 here in the UK, but is so far sticking to its $2500 / AU$3995 launch price in the US and Australia, respectively.

Design

We’re confident in saying that this is one of the most unusual-looking TVs to enter our AV testing room.

Samsung clearly took inspiration from its hugely popular The Frame TV when it came to designing the S99H, and while this television’s looks won’t be to everyone’s taste, we’re just pleased to see a TV company that’s willing to push the boat out when it comes to design.

The S99H features a two-layer design, with an OLED screen section mounted onto a slightly larger metal backplate, with a roughly 2cm gap between. Samsung calls this its “FloatLayer” design.

It’s hard to describe, but the effect it gives is essentially a floating OLED panel surrounded by a premium metal frame. Much like LG’s G-series, this TV is designed to be wall-mounted, and while we can’t do that in our testing room, we have seen it wall-mounted at various hands-on events leading up to launch.

In short, the S99H looks like a work of art when it's fixed to a wall, as the floating design becomes really quite striking and effective. Despite the two-layer design, the overall depth is just 2.8cm, which also helps to sell the futuristic look that Samsung is going for.

Unfortunately, the TV doesn’t look quite as suave when it’s set up in its tabletop configuration. Samsung includes two quite cheap-feeling plastic feet with the TV that feel somewhat at odds with the rest of the premium design, and the metal bezel and floating design look less convincing when it's not attached to a wall.

Samsung also includes two remotes in the box: a “traditional” button-heavy number, and a sleeker “smart” remote. The latter includes both a USB-C socket and a small solar panel on the back for easy recharging, though it’s frustratingly not backlit. Then again, neither are the remotes included with the aforementioned Sony or LG TVs, so we can’t knock Samsung too much here.

Features

Samsung’s penchant for cramming (almost) every imaginable feature into its TVs is, once again, evident with the S99H.

We’ll start with the QD-OLED display, which Samsung has managed to squeeze even more brightness out of since we last saw it on the S95F. It can now reportedly reach a whopping 2700 nits in the Movie picture mode, and as you’ll come to find out in the picture section of this review, there are plenty of instances in which we find ourselves being taken aback by how bright this TV can get.

Samsung has also improved its Glare Free coating this year, making it more effective at combating reflections and glare from ambient light. The matte display also makes artwork from Samsung’s Art Mode feature look more realistic for those who want a TV that blends into its surroundings.

In usual Samsung fashion, HDR support comes in the form of HDR10+ (including the Adaptive and Gaming versions), HDR10 and HLG, but not Dolby Vision.

Samsung's answer to Dolby Vision 2, HDR10+ Advanced, is also supported by the S99H. Unfortunately, no content is available in the new format yet, and we don't have a date for its arrival. Amazon is said to be working on adding it to Prime Video in the not too distant future, though.

Hardcore PC gamers will be pleased to learn that the S99H can handle signals right up to 4K/165Hz, as well as the console-friendly 4K/120Hz format, across all four of its HDMI 2.1 sockets. VRR, ALLM and HDR10+ Gaming are also all supported.

All of the connections are built into a side-facing nook in the rear of the TV, which is a departure from the One Connect box that has come with Samsung’s previous flagship OLED TVs.

One Connect does live on, though, and in a quite remarkable way: Samsung is offering an optional Wireless One Connect accessory, which is set to launch in July for £299 / $350 (AU price TBC).

This features four HDMI sockets, and because it connects to the S99H wirelessly, it takes the total HDMI 2.1 socket count to a staggering eight. That’s enough to support all three of the current-generation consoles, a gaming PC, a 4K Blu-ray player, a soundbar or AVR, and a streaming device, and you’d still have one spare.

The S99H also supports Dolby Atmos, both via HDMI eARC and through its built-in 4.2.2-channel 70W sound system.

Samsung offers two simplistic sound modes, Standard and Amplify, but there is also a range of Samsung-specific sound processing features based on its Vision AI platform, including Object Tracking Sound Plus, Active Voice Amplifier Pro, Adaptive Sound Pro, and AI Sound Controller Pro; all of which are fairly self-explanatory.

Q Symphony also returns. This allows you to use the TV’s speakers in unison with those of a connected Samsung soundbar, but it should be approached with caution – we generally find that a good soundbar performs best when the less capable speakers of a TV don't get involved.

AI also steps in to help with picture processing, as Samsung has implemented its 4K AI Upscaling Pro, AI Motion Enhancer Pro and Auto HDR Remastering Pro features, alongside a Real Depth Enhancer contrast enhancement system and Colour Booster Pro.

On the subject of AI, Samsung has applied its “AI for All” mantra in swathes here, as the S99H is positively dripping in artificial intelligence, right down to the AI button on the remote.

A click of this button brings up Samsung’s Vision AI interface, which can recognise on-screen content and provide extra contextual information. This includes related content, cast information and prompts to find out more detailed information about the show or movie.

Scrolling from this page brings us to a more generalised AI interface, from which Samsung allows you to pick your preferred system. Here you can ask for recipes, generate AI wallpapers, or ask general questions. The sky is, hypothetically, the limit.

This is all made possible by the same NQ4 AI Gen3 Processor found in last year’s S95F, as well as Samsung’s Tizen OS platform. The operating system has had a fairly comprehensive refresh for 2026, with a new content bar at the top that splits your apps into categories including entertainment, gaming and art, and the operation feels generally slicker.

App coverage is mostly excellent, with a wide range of international and domestic streaming applications. Currently, the only missing app is BBC iPlayer; we’ve reached out to Samsung, which says that it expects to add iPlayer support soon.

Samsung TV Plus, which features hundreds of free over-the-internet streaming channels, is also included, and gamers are well looked after thanks to the presence of apps for services such as Xbox, Amazon Luna, and Nvidia GeForce Now.

Picture quality

It’s clear that Samsung has been working to tweak and adjust its picture processing over the years in the pursuit of achieving that final pinch of picture quality excellence, and the S99H is evidence that its work has paid off. This is Samsung’s most mature TV yet, and it’s all the better for that.

We opt for Filmmaker Mode as our preferred picture preset, albeit with a couple of tweaks to get the best performance possible: we switch Colour Temperature from its Warm 2 default to Warm 1, and turn the judder and blur reduction settings up to 1.

The resulting picture is extraordinary, and it makes any content we throw at it – from Blade Runner 2049, Civil War, Pan and Drive, to No Time To Die and The Batman – shine. We have the S99F set up next to the Award-winning Sony Bravia 8 II, and despite the tough competition, the Samsung delivers an unflinching visual feast.

Starting with the opening scene of Blade Runner 2049, we find that the S99H serves up oodles of contrast, which results in a deeply three-dimensional picture with superb highlights.

The overhead shot of the solar farm instantly draws us in, thanks to the superb detail levels mixed with the excellent sense of depth. We also approve of how the S99H handles the gloomy, bluish-grey sky, as well as the skin tones of Officer K and Sapper Morton.

In fact, the S99H makes the Sony Bravia 8 II look a bit green in our head-to-head comparison, and skin tones start to look a bit pasty, too. Sony TVs have traditionally leaned towards the cooler side when it comes to colour reproduction, even in Filmmaker Mode, but it’s interesting to see these TVs take a different approach, particularly as they use the same panel technology.

This is most evident in the scene from Pan in which the floating pirate ship enters a cavern; the Samsung runs rings around the Sony when it comes to maintaining low-light colour volume. Skin tones are noticeably warmer and more vibrant on the Samsung in this instance. That being said, the Sony is evidently better at maintaining shadow detail.

In fact, some shadow detail is lost entirely on the S99H, especially during dark sequences in moodier flicks such as Drive and The Batman. In both films, we find facial features and clothing textures occasionally succumb to darkness, while the Sony has no trouble keeping them visible.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Samsung takes the crown when it comes to delivering dazzlingly bright highlights; in fact, we’re adding the S99H to the list of TVs that we’ve had to shield our eyes from physically.

Reverting to the exceptionally bright (and critically dismal) Pan, we find the mix of punchy, concentrated highlights and rich colours stealing our attention away from the Sony entirely.

However, the more conventional-looking Civil War is the perfect test disc to highlight exactly what this TV does well. Everything from the night-time forest fire sequence to a helicopter gliding over a lake and the Charlottesville military camp looks fantastic.

There’s a real sense of nuance here that previous Samsung TVs haven’t always been able to capture. Foliage, for example, is wonderfully textured and detailed without looking over-etched, and while the colours do seem a smidge over-saturated compared with those from the Bravia 8 II, it's not to an extent that looks instinctively wrong.

The sequence that shows the journalists driving through a forest fire seals the deal here. The mix of detail, depth and contrast served up by the S99H is remarkable – the striking, bright flames contrast wonderfully with the dark background, and there is a real sense of intensity and warmth derived from how Samsung's OLED handles highlights.

We fire up the standard Blu-ray of Logan to assess the S99H’s upscaling capabilities, and it's a similar story here, too. Detail levels are superb, and if we weren’t so eagle-eyed, the S99H could almost have fooled us into thinking we were watching a 4K disc.

Colours are also nicely balanced, and motion remains solid, too. This TV excels regardless of what you throw at it.

Sound

It’s not just the picture performance that Samsung has improved. Sound has also been upgraded, which is a good sign after the S95F’s middling delivery.

We stick with Civil War, which highlights everything from dialogue to explosions, and even Dolby Atmos height effects. The rhythmic swooping of helicopter blades is delivered with a strong leading edge, underpinned by a pleasingly controlled dose of bass.

Moving on to the scene in which Lee and Jessie have a heart-to-heart conversation in a wooded area, we approve of how the S99H captures the subtle characteristics of their voices well, and overall, the dialogue is crisp and well-defined. The atmospheric effects, including birds chirping and leaves rustling in the wind, sound pleasingly spacious, too.

There is plenty of height and width to the sound, which is also evident in Blade Runner 2049. The sequence in which Officer K returns to his home from the police precinct is another example of how the S99H captures atmospheric sounds to great effect.

The booming audio adverts are placed with impressive precision and plenty of height, while the S99H somehow manages to beam the sound of the bustling street in a way that creates a fairly convincing sense of immersion.

While we’re on the subject of Blade Runner, we put the S99H through our usual chapter two stress test and find that Samsung has changed its approach. Where many of the brand's previous models have been quite bassy but a little prone to distortion, the S99H digs less deep but proves to be almost entirely distortion-free.

Sony takes a similar approach with the Bravia 8 II (and many other of its TVs), and we ultimately find it to be a sensible compromise. We would of course like more bass weight, but if that has to be sacrificed somewhat to reduce distracting distortion, then so be it.

It’s not all good news on the sonic front, though: like the S95F, the S99H simply doesn't go very loud. Even close to its maximum volume levels, this is an easy TV to talk over. The Amplify setting helps to negate this somewhat, but it does result in some dynamic compression.

The Sony Bravia 8 II also does a better job of organising the sound during scenes with lots of competing effects. The ending battle of Civil War is a perfect example, as the Sony balances dialogue, explosions, and vehicle sounds with care to create a more impactful and immersive soundscape.

With all that said, the S99H is still a big improvement over the S95F where sound is concerned, and it's ultimately a very usable (and even enjoyable) built-in sound system.

Verdict

There’s no other way of putting it; Samsung has knocked it out of the park with the S99H.

With a refined approach to picture tuning, a feature set that (with one key caveat) many TVs can only dream of, and a greatly improved sound system compared with last year’s model, the company’s latest flagship OLED TV takes the title from the S95F as the best TV the company has made to date.

The bold new design might not suit all tastes, and die-hard Dolby Vision fans may be disappointed, but we’re struggling to find reasons not to recommend the Samsung S99H to anyone considering splashing some serious cash on a flagship OLED TV.

SCORES

• Picture 5
• Sound 4
• Features 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Sony Bravia 8 II

Also consider the LG G6

Read our Philips OLED910 review

Best TVs: flagship OLEDs and budget Mini LED sets tried and tested

If you have a smart TV that is getting into old age, you may find that your everyday navigation is becoming slower and slower. Even if the picture still looks great, having to wait for apps to load in order to watch your latest obsession can get quite tedious. You may not want to upgrade to a newer model, whether that's because you are on a budget or simply aren't ready to let go.

But don't worry, because we have a few tricks that will hopefully get your TV running a little faster. Much of this is good practice, even if your TV is spritely and new.

Without further ado, let's get into it.

Get rid of unused apps and clear your cache

This is a great start to get your TV running a little faster, and it takes a matter of minutes.

A cache is a temporary storage area where data is kept for quick access, and it stores information from apps, websites and system processes to help them load faster when you turn the TV on. But if it gets too full, this can delay your system's processing and lead to buffering and lag.

To clear your cache, go to the settings menu and navigate to Apps or Storage. From there, you will be able to select individual apps and clear the cache on each.

You can also remove any unused apps on your TV to help speed up your experience. Still have that streaming platform downloaded that you haven't used in months? Get it out the way to get the most from your system.

Keep the firmware up to date

Getting a notification for an update may seem like a pesky pop-up, but outdated firmware can really slow down your TV. If your model still receives updates, it's best to install them as they fix bugs, add new features and improve overall performance.

You will be able to run these installations by going into the settings menu, and finding the option that says System Updates or something similar. The wording varies by brand, but it should be relatively straightforward to locate.

Give it a few minutes to do its magic, and your TV will hopefully run a little smoother.

If your TV is more than a few years old, it may no longer receive the latest updates. That's where the next option might be the best option.

Add a streaming stick

It costs a bit of extra cash, but adding a streaming stick or box to your set-up is the fastest way to give your old smart TV a facelift. You can simply plug your streaming device into the TV's HDMI port, and it will take over all the streaming functions.

This then gives you access to a range of streaming services that your old TV's platform may no longer offer. That includes Netflix, Disney+ Apple TV, and Amazon Prime Video.

There is a wide selection of models to choose from, and we have found the cream of the crop in our best streaming devices guide. Our top recommendation comes with the Award-winning Apple TV 4K, which we rated highly for its excellent picture and expressive sound. You can currently pick it up for about £149 / $149 / AU$219.

If you are looking for a budget option, then our top pick is the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2nd gen). This five-star streaming stick is available for £70 / $60 / AU$120. The even cheaper Amazon Fire TV Stick HD is also on the cards, costing £35 / $35 (around AU$67). We have not reviewed this model yet but, if it's performance is anything like its more expensive sibling, then it should be a great upgrade.

Connect via Ethernet

Another reason your TV might be running slow is an issue with your wi-fi. If your TV is on the older side, then it may be running outdated wi-fi hardware that cannot reach the highest router speeds. That often leads to slow loading time and buffering which quickly becomes tedious.

Connecting an Ethernet cable from your router to your TV can speed this up, though. While using wi-fi is the more convenient option thanks to its wireless nature, using Ethernet is more reliable because of its direct connectivity.

You might well have a suitable Ethernet cable knocking around in your house already, but they are readily available to buy if you need to add one to your collection.

Re-organise your home screen

If none of that has helped, you can also maximise the efficiency of your home screen by making your most-used apps easier to access. Instead of scrolling through reams of apps and having to put up with buffering, you can pin your favourite ones to the home screen so you can get to them in a few clicks.

The way to do this differs by brand. Some require you to long-hold the app and pin it from there, or you may have to venture into the settings menu.

It can also help make your TV's home screen feel more personalised, creating a more modern overall look.

MORE:

These are the best streaming devices

Here are the best TVs

And check out the best budget soundbars on the market

If you want to watch movies on the big screen without forking out thousands for a TV bigger than 85 inches, a coffee table projector can be a tempting proposition. That’s because they can offer a large screen size paired with an easy-to-carry design that gives added flexibility.

The Soundcore Nebula P1 is the latest model to enter the villa, offering a portable build and boasting promising tech specifications. And there’s an intriguing sound addition that is a unique proposition when it comes to the coffee table projector market.

This audio offering makes this projector stand out from the crowd, but as we’ll see, it is ultimately let down in another key category.

Price

The Soundcore Nebula P1 launched at £700 / $800 / AU$1300, placing it in the mid-range lifestyle projector category. We have already seen some limited deals, which have dropped the price to around £595 in the UK, for example.

At a similar level is the Xgimi MoGo 4, a portable projector that is currently available for about £499 in the UK, although it launched at the slightly higher price of £509 / $499 / AU$1399. We gave this model a solid four stars for its punchy picture and compact design, and it features in our best portable projectors guide.

It’s worth noting that the MoGo 4 is not aiming at the same market as the Nebula model. The Xgimi projector has a built-in battery, unlike the Nebula P1, but it lacks separate speakers.

Design

Those separate speakers really make the P1 stand out from the crowd. The two wireless speakers sit on top of the projector and are secured by a magnetic connection and a cute lock switch on the projector’s body. You can charge the pair from here, or separately via their USB-C ports.

The speakers are lightweight and easy to carry, sporting a sleek grey finish with two rounded corners.

You can place them around your space “wherever you see fit”, as the brand claims when you are prompted to set them up. In our test room, we place the speakers on either side of the projector to achieve a degree of spaciousness and stereo separation, facing towards our seating.

There is no Dolby Atmos support, but they offer Dolby Audio to create 2.0-channel sound.

The projector itself feels practical and sturdy. There is a flexible cloth handle that makes it easy to carry around, especially as the complete package weighs only 2.4kg. You can tilt the body up to 130 degrees towards your screen or wall, and the body acts as a stand, which makes set-up simple.

The included remote control has a sleek, premium feel. You can use this to control power and volume, access auto-focus and streaming platform shortcuts.

Features

On the back of the projector, you will find an HDMI eARC port that supports up to 4K at 60Hz. You will also find a USB-A port and a 3.5mm aux jack if you want to connect your headphones.

As we mentioned, the P1 doesn’t have a built-in battery, but you can run it from a portable power supply via the USB-C port: Anker, Soundcore's parent company, sells specific chargers in a bundle on its website, or you can use a non-official one as long as it has a minimum power output of 100W.

Anker claims that its official 737 Power Bank delivers “one hour of continuous use” with the speakers attached to the body and the brightness set to full. That is, of course, not long enough for a full movie or even a football match, so we feel it’s best to think of the P1 as a compact mains-based projector, rather than a true portable one.

The P1 can output an image up to 180 inches in size, and it has a 1080p resolution and HDR10 support.

Nebula claims the projector can produce up to 650 ANSI lumens of brightness, which is brighter than its Xgimi MoGo 4 rival, which comes in at 450 ANSI lumens.

It also uses the Google TV operating system, giving you access to streaming apps such as Apple TV, Prime Video, Channel 4 and Netflix. There is no BBC iPlayer, although you can cast it from your phone as a workaround.

There is a range of smart features to help you get your picture looking straight. That includes auto-focus and auto-keystone, but you can also do this manually if you need to fine-tune. Once you have set up your projector, you can save settings into presets if you repeatedly use it in the same location.

You can also employ Nebula’s own “Vision Fit” tech to set up your screen. This is used via the Nebula Connect app, from which you take a photo of the surface where you’d like to project the image, and the projector will use it to optimise the results. It’s a neat idea in theory, but it is rather time-consuming, and we find ourselves sticking with the more traditional settings.

The app gives you much of the same functionality as the remote control, but you can also access more detailed picture and sound settings.

Picture

When we first switch on the P1 in the default 'Nebulamaster' picture setting in our dark test room, we are greeted with an overly vivid and unpleasant image. We kick off with Sinners on Blu-ray as Sammie drives up to his father’s church, where his movements look exaggerated and too smooth, so he bobs around in the car like a giddy child on a seesaw.

Once we change to Movie mode and turn the MEMC (Motion Estimation and Motion Compensation) setting to low, motion looks much more natural and lacks distracting judder. Sammie enters the frame with a little bit of a bounce, but feels more grounded than in the default setting.

We also knock the sharpness and saturation settings down a few notches. With these adjustments, the picture is much more balanced. In Sinners, as the sun peers out from the clouds at the start of an ominous morning, the projector delivers a relatively natural-looking image, but the colours lack the degree of pop required to deliver a genuinely punchy picture. Instead, you get a slightly flat overall look. The shining sun, for instance, lacks the vibrancy to break through the rest of the picture.

Switching to No Time To Die on Blu-ray, as Daniel Craig’s Bond has a near miss with an explosive device, his skin tone also lacks much natural warmth, instead looking a little pale and unnatural. His features look overetched as well (even with the projector’s Sharpness setting dropped down to zero), exaggerating wrinkles and bumps to a clearly unrealistic degree.

This is a wider issue with the P1 – especially when it comes to wide scenery shots. In the sweeping footage of the Italian town, the projector exaggerates the outlines of the trees and bricks in the buildings. This makes the image look too busy, and in fact means the whole picture verges on grainy instead of clean and clear.

Shadow detail is not the strongest, either. In Civil War, as the journalist protagonists recover from a traumatic event, young photographer Jessie sits with her legs hanging out of a parked van. It is hard to distinguish the interior from her dark hair in the shadows. There is a differentiation between the inside and the outside of the van, but it does not go as dark as rivals.

Despite its claimed 650 lumens, the P1's brightness is underwhelming and lacks the punch we expect. When we test the projector in a lit room, the P1 is still usable, but it isn't impressive, and it loses some shadow detail and colour.

We compare the Nebula model with the Xgimi MoGo 4. Both projectors accept movies in HDR, and the P1 is certainly the better performer in this format. It looks less overcooked compared with the MoGo 4, and keeps the image more balanced overall.

When we switch back to SDR content, the MoGo 4 delivers an image with both deeper blacks and punchier highlights, resulting in a more three-dimensional overall picture that immediately grabs the eye.

While the Nebula P1 offers a reasonably balanced picture and performs acceptably in brighter environments, its lack of punch and brightness holds it back, and in picture terms it can't match the cheaper MoGo 4.

Sound

The P1’s speakers, each powered by 10W of amplification, really are the stars of the show. They deliver clean, engaging sound that adds much-needed energy to movies and TV shows.

In Civil War, as an army chopper takes off, each swing of the rotor blade is portrayed with an impactful punch that elevates the tension of the scene. The wide soundfield is impressive, too; the chopper moves from one side of the screen to another, giving a real sense of breadth.

Dialogue is also clear and emotive. Vocals take centre stage, as they should, but not at the expense of the rest of the mix.

The performance of the speakers will depend at least somewhat on where you can put them in your space, especially if you are outside, and they’re certainly not on a par with the best dedicated Bluetooth speakers, but compared with the speaker systems of most portable and lifestyle projectors, they’re a massive improvement.

Verdict

With the best sound we have heard from a coffee table projector at this price, the Soundcore Nebula P1 certainly offers something new. And its clever, compact design makes for a practical and flexible proposition.

It's a shame the picture performance isn't at the same level, but if you don't mind sacrificing some quality there in the name of much better sound, this is a compelling choice.

SCORES

• Picture 3
• Sound 5
• Design 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Xgimi MoGo 4

Also consider the Hisense M2 Pro

Read our Anker Nebula Mars 3 Air review

Best projectors: the best options tested by our home cinema experts

There’s a war going on for your living room. The premium TV technology of choice of the last few years – OLED – is under attack from a new, stunningly bright and vibrant foe – RGB Mini LED.

Every major brand has either launched its first RGB Mini LED TVs or is about to. Hisense launched its first RGB Mini LED models last year, in fact, but those were gigantic, 100+ inch sets, so a long way from a serious proposition for most people.

Hisense is also the first brand to submit to us a proper, mainstream RGB Mini LED TV to review, though – the UR9.

RGB Mini LED TVs are pitched at different levels by different brands, but Hisense is absolutely pitching the UR9 as a rival to flagship OLEDs. The price confirms as much.

So, what better way to benchmark it than against our current favourite flagship OLED, the Sony Bravia 8 II.

That, then, is what we’ve done. Over several days, we’ve tested the Hisense UR9 and Sony Bravia 8 II side by side, feeding all of our favourite discs and streams into both simultaneously, and judging them on picture quality, sound quality, features, usability, design and price.

This might not be a full RGB Mini LED vs OLED battle – the Hisense UR9 doesn’t represent all RGB Mini LED TVs, after all – but it is the opening skirmish in the broader TV tech war. And it's an eye-opening one at that.

Hisense UR9 vs Sony Bravia 8 II: price

The Hisense UR9’s pricing is interesting to say the least. In the UK, the 65-inch model we tested is priced at £2999, which places it in the same price category as brand-new flagship OLEDs.

In Australia, meanwhile, the UR9’s price of AU$3999 makes it slightly more affordable by local standards.

In the US, though, the pre-launch price of $3500 had dropped vastly to just $2000 by the time the TV actually hit stores.

Things are much more straightforward with the Sony Bravia 8 II, the 65-inch version of which launched at £2999 / $4000 / AU$5295, but can now be bought for £2299 / $2798 / AU$4995.

The inconsistent international pricing of the Hisense UR9 makes it a little tricky to judge this round, but seeing as we’re a primarily UK publication, and that we reviewed a UK sample, we’re going to prioritise the UK pricing and call this it in favour of the Bravia 8 II.

WINNER: Sony Bravia 8 II

Hisense UR9 vs Sony Bravia 8 II: design

The Sony Bravia 8 II and Hisense UR9 are both smart-looking TVs, but they take rather different approaches to design.

Sony has essentially carried over the styling of the A95L, resulting in a TV that looks purposeful, premium and monolithic. While it lacks the ultra-thin glamour of some rival OLEDs, the Bravia 8 II still feels like a flagship product, with its clean lines and understated aesthetic giving it a suitably high-end appearance.

The feet can be installed in either a low-profile position that leaves the bottom edge of the screen sitting just millimetres above your furniture, or a raised position that creates space for a soundbar. The downside is that those feet can only be positioned at the furthest extremes of the chassis, meaning you'll need furniture that's at least as wide as the TV itself.

The Hisense UR9 is a more practical proposition. At 4.5cm thick, it's chunkier than the Sony and doesn't have quite the same premium flair, but it is solidly built and neatly finished, with slim bezels and a restrained dark metallic finish.

Hisense has also made a couple of sensible usability-focused decisions. The centrally mounted pedestal stand occupies a footprint of only around 42cm, making the TV much easier to place on narrower furniture, and it too offers two height positions so that a soundbar can be accommodated beneath the screen.

The UR9's integrated Devialet sound system is more visually obvious than Sony's Acoustic Surface Audio+ setup, with perforations running down the sides of the chassis and across the top edge to house the side- and up-firing speakers. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does contribute to the TV's more functional, engineering-led appearance.

Ultimately, neither of these TVs is likely to be bought primarily for its styling, but the Bravia 8 II's cleaner, more premium design gives it the edge. The UR9 is practical and perfectly attractive in its own right, but it lacks the sense of sophistication that Sony's flagship delivers.

WINNER: Sony Bravia 8 II

Hisense UR9 vs Sony Bravia 8 II: features

The biggest difference between these two TVs is, of course, their panel technologies.

The Sony Bravia 8 II uses Samsung Display's latest QD-OLED panel, paired with Sony's XR processor and a custom heatsink. Because OLED technology is self-emissive, every pixel can be controlled independently, with no need for local dimming zones.

Sony doesn't publish specific brightness figures for its TVs, but the Bravia 8 II is estimated to hit around 1900 nits in small highlights, making it one of the brightest OLED TVs currently available.

The Hisense UR9, meanwhile, uses an RGB Mini LED backlight with 980 local dimming zones. Rather than relying on a conventional white backlight shining through colour filters, it uses separate red, green and blue Mini LEDs to generate colour directly. Hisense claims a peak brightness of up to 3500 nits for the 65-inch model we tested.

On paper, then, these TVs take radically different approaches to creating their images. We're not going to award points for one technology over the other here, though, because what ultimately matters is how those technologies perform in practice. We'll get to that in the picture quality section.

There are other differences in the feature sets of the two TVs worth highlighting, though.

Hardcore gamers are generally better served by the Hisense. All three of its HDMI sockets are full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports, with support for 4K/170Hz, 4K/120Hz, VRR and ALLM. It also features a DisplayPort connection, which remains extremely rare on TVs and could prove useful for committed PC gamers.

The Sony supports 4K/120Hz, VRR and ALLM, too, but still offers only two HDMI 2.1 sockets, one of which doubles as the eARC connection. That limitation remains one of our biggest frustrations with Sony's flagship TVs.

That said, we'd probably take the Sony's two HDMI 2.1 sockets and two additional standard HDMI inputs over the Hisense's three HDMI sockets and DisplayPort arrangement. The latter will be useful to a niche audience, but many buyers are more likely to benefit from having an extra ‘standard’ HDMI connection available.

HDR support favours the Hisense, though. The UR9 supports every major HDR format currently in use, including HLG, HDR10, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. The Bravia 8 II supports Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HLG, but, as is customary for Sony TVs, HDR10+ is absent.

The Bravia 8 II fights back with Google TV, which remains one of the stronger smart TV platforms available and features excellent app support. The UR9's VIDAA operating system is fast and responsive, but there are some notable omissions.

Most significantly, while the Apple TV app is present, it lacks access to the Apple TV Store and users' purchased libraries. That's a genuine disappointment, as Apple's movie store remains the best pay-as-you-go film streaming service available, particularly for 4K HDR movies.

Sony also offers IMAX Enhanced certification, its Studio Calibrated Modes for services such as Netflix and Prime Video, and Sony Pictures Core integration.

Ultimately, neither TV completely dominates on features, but the Hisense's broader HDR support, extra HDMI 2.1 socket and more advanced gaming specification give it the edge overall.

WINNER: Hisense UR9

Hisense UR9 vs Sony Bravia 8 II: picture quality

This is, of course, the section that really matters.

The Hisense UR9 makes an immediately strong impression. Once switched into either Filmmaker Mode or IMAX Cinema, it produces a rich, vibrant and remarkably composed image that rarely behaves like a traditional backlit TV.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the UR9 is how well controlled its RGB Mini LED backlight is. Throughout our testing, blooming is kept impressively in check, black levels are consistently strong and the TV almost entirely avoids the brightness pumping, flickering and shifting backlight behaviour that often gives Mini LED technology away.

Extra-bright HDR content is a particular strength. Movies such as Pan look spectacular on the UR9, with dazzling highlights and bold colours that comfortably outgun the Bravia 8 II for outright brightness. Sunlight bursting through clouds and glinting off fantasy scenery is delivered with real punch and intensity.

The UR9 is also a very accomplished motion performer, and it combines its brightness with rich colours, excellent shadow detail and a pleasingly cinematic warmth that stops the image from ever becoming gaudy or overblown.

In isolation, it's one of the best backlit TVs we have ever tested.

Direct comparison with the Bravia 8 II reveals why OLED remains the reference technology, though – at least for now.

Despite its impressive brightness and excellent local dimming, the Hisense simply can't match the Sony's pixel-level contrast control. Counterintuitively, some of the brightest highlights against the darkest backgrounds actually appear more impactful on the Bravia 8 II than on the much brighter Hisense, because the OLED can render them without any concern about blooming.

More significantly, the Sony produces a more solid and perceptually three-dimensional image. Objects and characters stand out from their surroundings with greater depth and dynamism, while subtle gradations within shadows, clouds and highlights appear more convincing and refined.

We've observed this extra solidity from OLED many times before, but the side-by-side comparison between these two TVs demonstrates it particularly clearly. Next to the Bravia 8 II, the UR9 simply looks a little flatter and less immersive.

The Sony also has the advantage when it comes to viewing angles. While the Hisense holds up better than many LCD-based rivals, the sweet spot in which it performs at its very best is still relatively narrow. Thanks to its OLED panel, the Bravia 8 II performs consistently from almost any angle.

And while blooming is rare on the UR9, it isn't entirely absent. Difficult scenes such as the bomb-test sequence in Oppenheimer or the opening starfield of Alien: Romulus reveal imperfections that even this highly accomplished RGB Mini LED set cannot completely escape.

The Bravia 8 II, meanwhile, is simply sensational. Its combination of dazzling brightness by OLED standards, vibrant colours, exceptional shadow detail and razor-sharp definition creates an image of astonishing depth and realism.

What impresses most isn't any single strength, but how naturally all of its strengths come together. The Bravia 8 II consistently delivers a picture that feels balanced, authentic and effortlessly cinematic, whether you're watching a pristine 4K Dolby Vision disc or a much more humble SDR stream.

The Hisense UR9 proves that RGB Mini LED can get surprisingly close to flagship OLED performance, and many viewers will adore its combination of brightness, richness and stability. But when viewed side by side, the Bravia 8 II remains the more complete and convincing picture performer.

WINNER: Sony Bravia 8 II

Hisense UR9 vs Sony Bravia 8 II: sound quality

Both the Sony Bravia 8 II and Hisense UR9 are unusually sonically accomplished by modern TV standards.

That's important, because while we always recommend pairing a premium TV with a dedicated sound system, for many buyers that’s either impractical or unpalatable.

The Hisense UR9 certainly doesn't disappoint. Its Devialet-tuned 4.1.2-channel sound system delivers a presentation that is impressively spacious and full-bodied, with particularly convincing width and height effects.

Dolby Atmos soundtracks benefit from a strong sense of scale, while bass is deeper and more substantial than most flatscreen TVs can manage. The overall character is smooth, rich and easy to listen to over extended viewing sessions.

The UR9's audio system isn't flawless, though. Dynamics can feel a little restrained during big action sequences, and dialogue doesn't always have the clarity and expressiveness we'd ideally like.

We also found ourselves preferring the Standard sound mode over the more expansive Theatre setting. While Theatre mode undoubtedly sounds bigger, it can introduce a slightly diffuse and faintly echoey quality to voices that makes dialogue seem less natural than it should.

The Sony Bravia 8 II takes a very different approach. Rather than relying on conventional speaker placement, its Acoustic Surface Audio+ system uses actuators to vibrate the screen itself, effectively turning the display into a speaker.

The result is one of the most cohesive and convincing audio performances we've heard from a TV.

Dialogue and effects are tied directly to the action on screen in a way that traditional TV speaker systems struggle to replicate, creating a stronger sense that sound is genuinely coming from the people and objects you're watching.

Like the Hisense, the Sony also sounds surprisingly spacious, with effects extending well beyond the edges of the screen. Detail levels are excellent, too, and the Bravia 8 II combines subtle dynamic nuance with enough punch to make action scenes engaging and exciting.

Bass depth isn't as generous as it is from the Hisense, but it's impressively controlled, and the overall tonal balance is exceptionally well judged.

Ultimately, these are two of the best-sounding TVs you can currently buy. The Hisense delivers scale, warmth and impressive Atmos effects, but the Sony's superior detail, greater dynamic expression and uniquely direct delivery give it the edge.

WINNER: Sony Bravia 8 II

Hisense UR9 vs Sony Bravia 8 II: verdict

The Hisense UR9 is a hugely important TV.

Not only is it the first mainstream RGB Mini LED TV we've fully reviewed, it's also the first serious attempt to take on flagship OLEDs with a fundamentally different display technology.

And the good news for RGB Mini LED fans is that, in some ways at least, it succeeds.

The UR9 is bright, vibrant and impressively refined. More importantly, it avoids many of the traditional pitfalls of backlit TVs, with excellent black levels, impressively restrained blooming and a consistency that often feels surprisingly OLED-like.

In several respects, it's one of the best backlit TVs we've ever tested.

But while the UR9 proves that RGB Mini LED is a genuinely exciting technology with enormous potential, it also demonstrates just how high the bar currently is at the top end of the OLED market.

Ultimately, picture quality remains the most important factor in any TV buying decision, and it's here that the Sony Bravia 8 II retains a clear advantage. The Hisense has the stronger gaming specification, broader HDR support and spectacular brightness, but the Sony's superior contrast control, greater three-dimensionality and more natural, cinematic image make it the more accomplished performer overall.

This isn't a verdict on RGB Mini LED versus OLED as technologies, and it certainly isn't the last battle in what is shaping up to be one of the most interesting periods in TV tech for years.

Instead, it’s the verdict on the very best OLED TV currently available versus the first mainstream RGB Mini LED model. And while the Hisense UR9 proves that RGB Mini LED is ready to compete with the very best, the Sony Bravia 8 II remains the TV to beat.

OVERALL WINNER: Sony Bravia 8 II

Here at What Hi-Fi?, we're no size snob. We review TVs of all shapes and sizes, operating purely on a performance-per-pound metric.

Usually, we're big proponents of getting the best-quality TV you can, and not getting swayed by big-screen bargains based on the size alone.

However, for an event such as the World Cup there are arguments to use your hard-earned budget to opt for size over quality – especially if you're hosting a watch party.

So where's the line? Can sheer size and spectacle make up for any shortcomings? Is it really worth the upgrade to OLED if it's on a small screen? Let's break down the pros and cons.

Size: the arguments for

Gigantic affordable TVs have been around for quite a while now, but it's only recently that they've actually started to become rather good. Case in point is the 70-inch Sharp GK4245K, which can be picked up for £420 and received four stars, or the monster 98-inch TCL 98C7K, which is now under £2000 and so impressive it won a What Hi-Fi? Award.

The benefits of a big screen are pretty self-explanatory. It brings the big-screen cinematic experience home and can help make your viewing experience more immersive. If you're lucky enough to own a very large living room and your sofa is far away, then an oversized TV becomes almost necessary – see our guide to TV sizes and calculating the right viewing distance.

A larger TV is, of course, preferable if you're having a World Cup viewing party, so everyone can see – as well as for bragging rights, of course.

Size: the arguments against

Giant TVs will, of course, require a giant amount of space, which can make installation and placement difficult, and may very well lead to the TV dominating your living room. If you can't sit far enough away, then eye strain is a very worrying possibility, and you'll also have to contend with higher energy bills.

Unless you're sufficently well off to afford the steep price increase that comes with mega-sized OLEDs, you'll likely have an LCD or Mini LED display taking over your living room instead. Now these panels are capable of producing some amazing pictures, but they do have their drawbacks compared to OLED, such as halo and blooming effects, slower response times and sub-par black levels.

All of these will be magnified on a bigger screen, especially with lower-resolution content.

Quality: the arguments for

If you want the best quality TV possible, you're still going to want an OLED (though there is a looming threat from RGB Mini LED). Our current benchmark TV, for example, is the Sony Bravia 8 II, a Quantum Dot OLED that delivers sizzling brightness, vibrant colours and terrific shadow detail.

Thanks to its pixel-level light control, OLED has several advantages that other panel technologies can't quite recreate – namely, perfect blacks, excellent contrast and thinner designs.

The faster response time will make them a great choice for sports in particular, as motion blur will be reduced, while the wider viewing angles will make them a great choice for viewing parties, especially if guests will be watching from the side.

Quality: the arguments against

The main downside of OLED is that it's currently more expensive than most other display types. So yes, those stretching to OLED might have to settle for a smaller screen size, when they could buy a much bigger LCD or Mini LED with the same budget.

OLEDs also struggle to go as bright as LCDs – though sets such as the LG G5 are bringing the technology to new levels of brightness – so a good Mini LED might be a better choice for a sunlit room. OLEDs also typically have a shorter lifespan than LCD alternatives as the organic materials degrade over time.

Size vs quality: verdict

So, should you go for size or picture quality for your World Cup TV?

The smart money says go for quality – if you can afford an OLED, then it offers a myriad of advantages that other panel technologies just cannot replicate, and will benefit your movies, games and other activities long after the World Cup has finished. OLED prices have also come down quite a bit over the last decade, with some rather reasonable prices for sizes up to 65 inches.

That being said, the best TV will depend on your budget, room size, desired features and several other factors. If you want to go for spectacle and go as big as your budget allows, that's absolutely fine – just make sure that any giant TV is good value, and not just cheap.

MORE:

Here are the ultimate World Cup tech deals

How to watch 2026 FIFA World Cup online from anywhere: free live streams for every match

Here are all of the best TVs you can buy right now

Apple held its annual WWDC press conference last night, and while iOS, MacOS and iPadOS stole the limelight, tvOS was barely acknowledged.

Despite that, Apple has officially confirmed that tvOS 27 will launch this year, and it looks to be a bigger upgrade than we were expecting.

The focus this year is speed, which means your ageing Apple TV box – need we remind you that Apple last refreshed its Award-winning streaming box in 2022 – is about to get more responsive.

Apple claims that app opening speeds are expected to improve by 30 per cent, and animations are set to become smoother too. Control Centre is also becoming more responsive and connecting to other Apple devices, be that streaming content to your TV from an iPhone or outputting TV audio to HomePods, will also be faster.

Two key audio apps are getting upgrades as part of tvOS 27 as well. Apple Music receives a major boost in the form of Hi-Res Lossless (24-bit/192kHz) support and faster playback, and the Podcasts app is getting a full redesign for both audio and video podcasts playback.

General updates come in the form of better Apple HomeKit integration (ideal for smart home users), reduced app file sizes, support for smart downloads, and the ability to view Apple Care coverage in the settings app.

The upcoming tvOS 27 update is expected to launch later this year – Apple tends to launch its updates in September to coincide with the annual hardware launch event – and it will be supported on the second and third generation Apple TV 4K boxes.

This marks the end of support for the Apple TV HD from 2015, as well as the first-generation Apple TV 4K from 2017.

While it's encouraging to see Apple release an update that improves general performance on the current-generation Apple TV 4K, we hope that this new version of tvOS is laying the groundwork for the much-rumoured fourth-generation Apple TV 4K. The update is expected to launch later this year with the new Siri AI features coming with iOS 27.

MORE:

Check out our full Apple TV 4K (2022) review

Here are our picks for the best streaming devices

As well as the best streaming services for TV shows and movies

The World Cup kicks off in less than a week, and we bet that plenty of people are making some last-minute upgrades to their set-ups, including splurging on a new TV.

TV shipments are up six per cent year on year, according to global technology market research firm Omdia, and while we hope that everyone buying a new set is consulting our carefully curated list of the best TVs, the likelihood is that there is a fair amount of impulse purchasing happening.

We don’t judge here, and we understand that many people will walk into a shop and pick the biggest and cheapest 4K TV that you can get, but we urge you to take stock before swiping your card and calling it a day.

The World Cup is running for just over a month, but your TV will last a whole lot longer; maybe not for life, but multiple TV manufacturers tell us that the average person replaces their TV every seven years.

With that in mind, I have devised a simple three-question system that anyone primed to make an impulse purchase this weekend should ask themselves.

Question 1: is this TV good value?

A cheap 4K TV is one thing; a good value 4K TV is something else completely.

Yes, we are seeing the likes of Hisense and TCL line shelves with super-affordable 4K sets, and some of them are truly great TVs – take the Award-winning, sub-£400 TCL C6KS, for example. But some of these super cheap sets can cut corners.

Panel technology becomes more basic at this level. That’s fine for those who want to catch the game, but for cinephiles who appreciate films as much as they do footy, you might want to consider looking up towards the mid-range Mini LED models at least.

Picture processing also tends to be more pared back at this level, too. Motion and upscaling are two processing factors to be mindful of – the former to accommodate fast-moving players springing across the pitch, while the latter can deal with sharpening up standard-resolution feeds from terrestrial broadcast channels.

Gaming specification also takes a hit here, with very few TVs at this level offering HDMI 2.1 support. While they are not entirely barebones, you can expect to miss out on high-framerate console gaming at 4K, and some budget 4K sets sport fewer HDMI sockets overall.

While opting for an affordable 4K set is by no means a bad decision, you also have to remember that you will be using this TV for plenty of years to come, so future-proofing is always advisable.

If you’re looking for TVs that tread the line of cheap and good value, you should check out our list of the best cheap TVs for some inspiration.

Question 2: will it stand the test of time?

Nearly every TV we see these days features a smart platform. Google TV is used by TCL and Philips, Tizen OS is featured on Samsung, webOS is on LG TVs, and Hisense uses its Vidaa platform on its sets.

Not all operating systems are made equal, and updates and app support can vary greatly between brands. While we are seeing decent coverage of the major streaming apps such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+, we have seen some worrying gaps.

BBC iPlayer, for example, is missing on Philips’s current suite of TVs, which is quite an issue when we take into account that a considerable number of World Cup matches will be streamed free on BBC iPlayer.

Longevity is also, once again, something to be mindful of. Notably, Samsung and LG have both committed to supporting their respective TVs with seven years of software support.

If you want a TV that lasts, and you rely on built-in streaming apps, then we recommend going for a TV from one of these brands, or instead investing in an external streaming device.

Question 3: am I leaving room in my budget for a soundbar?

Our advice to anyone buying a new TV is to budget for a soundbar to pair with it.

TV sound, unless you’re looking at the upper-echelon of OLED TVs that feature speaker systems tuned by notable hi-fi brands, is almost always a let down.

And if you’re preparing to listen to commentators for hours on end, the last thing you want is a built-in sound system that is thin, tinny, and fatiguing on the ears.

A good soundbar doesn’t have to cost the Earth. Take the Sony HT-SF150, which delivers a solid cinematic sound experience for less than £100; or the Award-winning Hisense AX5125H, which includes Dolby Atmos support, surround speakers and a subwoofer for under £200.

While a good sound system will undoubtedly give you a more authentic experience during the matches (think of audiences chanting and cheering), you will also find a range of benefits, including a better audio experience when it comes to music and movies.

MORE:

Here are the ultimate World Cup tech deals

Check out our picks for the best budget soundbars

As well as the best OLED TVs

It’s unmistakably another Leica: the Cine Compact 1 is marked out by its solid aluminium Bauhaus-style housing, while Leica starts bringing the glass right from the clear frontage and outer lens.

So this is projector number three from the Leica Smart Projection division, again leveraging the camera-maker’s special abilities with glass and lens manufacture. And the new model brings a new affordable entry point to the luxury line.

This is a smaller projector than the award-winning Leica Cine Play 1, and it is also far more affordable than either previous model at AU$2990. The Cine Play 1 is AU$5990, while the ultra-short-throw Cine 1 Cinema TV has recently been price-reduced in Australia from AU$13,990 to $7990.

This new sub-AU$3000 smart mini projector much resembles the larger Cine Play 1, but it is significantly smaller at 209 x 226 x 193mm, while promising output of up to 1700 lumens (the specs note this is in ‘Ultra’ mode, so standard use may be slightly lower) and to support projection sizes of up to 220 inches.

Inside the projector, Leica’s optical system includes a Leica Summicron zoom lens with aspherical elements, optimising the output of a 0.47-inch pico DMD and triple RGB lasers to promise pixel-shifted 4K images which further benefit from the secret sauce of the company’s proprietary LIO (Leica Image Optimization). Dolby Vision and HDR10+ are onboard to display such High Dynamic Range material to its maximum ability.

It has smart set-up features: zoom, autofocus, keystone correction and intelligent screen framing are set up automatically wherever you may choose to throw the image from the projector’s integrated “360° rotation system”, which Leica notes makes the projector a particularly straightforward solution for everyday use.

It has built-in sources as well as connections for external devices; crucially there is the VIDAA operating system onboard to access streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime, while we believe VIDAA now has all Australian catch-up services and Foxtel apps also running (we will check this when we review this projector in upcoming weeks).

The Leica Cine Compact 1 also has one HDMI input, which also has eARC so could be used to take streaming sound to an external audio system, should you wish to expand on the built-in stereo speaker system; there is no optical or analogue audio output available. There’s a USB-A slot, presumably for file replay, along with screen sharing via Wi-Fi, and audio streaming available via Bluetooth or Apple AirPlay.

One inclusion which may attract a particular sub-set of movie fans: there’s a 3D Mode here, compatible with DLP Link active shutter 3D glasses.

And while a screen is always best for best performance, Leica has optimised the Cine Compact 1 for real-world scenarios including projection on walls or ceilings, even in gardens or on terraces.

The mini projector comes with an eco-friendly transport case; there’s an optional Leica stand available, while the integrated tripod thread enables the projector to be mounted on the ceiling.

Leica is, of course, known to consumers primarily as a high-end camera maker, but in fact has multiple arms: it began in the German town of Wetzlar in the 1860s when a talented engineer called Ernst Leitz made initially telescopes and subsequently microscopes, before his son, Ernst Leitz II, famously committed the company to building Oskar Barnack’s revolutionary compact camera, with its idea of using 35mm cinema film, soon to become the standard for still photography.

So right from the offset, it was image quality which drove the company, and older readers may recall how Leitz/Leica home slide projectors were once the gold standard for home projection of still images (Leica’s first projector was released in 1926). So the company’s now three-strong smart projector range is extending their imaging expertise back into home projection after a few decades absence.

The Leica Cine Compact 1 will be available for demonstration in Leica Stores Sydney, Melbourne and Chadstone, and in authorised Leica Cine dealers.

• See all our Australian reviews from Sound+Image and Australian Hi-Fi magazines

Chinese brand Haier is launching its latest range of affordable TVs, all boasting 4K resolution.

The new release is being led by the flagship S90 series, which the brand claims will combine “dynamic visuals, immersive audio with ultra-reactive gaming experience”.

This “immersive audio” comes in the form of Dolby Atmos support, delivering “three-dimensional and cinematic audio quality”. The two 10W speakers are employing technology from British hi-fi brand KEF as well.

The S90 uses QLED panel technology with AI picture optimisation, with Haier saying this results in “rich tones and smooth colour transitions”.

In terms of physical connectivity, you will find four HDMI ports, with one supporting eARC. We assume that means the TV can handle 4K/120Hz signals, given its 240Hz DLG feature, but when we asked a Haier representative for confirmation, they couldn’t provide a clear answer.

Haier is also launching the entry-level K85 and the mid-range S80 models. These step-down TVs do not have Dolby Atmos, but they do offer Dolby Audio for “clearer voices and more balanced sound”. The S80 features a QLED panel, like the S90, while the K85 uses a 4K LED backlight.

All of the TVs come with Freely built-in. That gives you access to streaming services such as BBC iPlayer, Channel 4 and ITVX in the UK. Fire TV acts as the smart platform for all the models, offering access to Disney+, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

Each range offers slightly different sizing options. The S90 goes from 55- to 85-inches, with the latter being the biggest screen size across all the models. The K85 is available in 43- to 65-inch sizes, and the S80 from 43- to 75-inches.

If you want to get your hands on the 65-inch S90, it will set you back £580. That is certainly aiming at the affordable end of the market, so Haier has TCL firmly in its sights. The S90 is up against the likes of the TCL Q6C, which launched at £649 for the 65-inch model. When we had the TCL set in our test room earlier this year, we praised its excellent picture quality and gaming performance which meant we awarded it a five-star rating.

We are yet to see how the flagship Haier model compares, but its affordable price tag and comprehensive smart platform could spell trouble for the current market leaders.

MORE:

Check out our TCL Q6C review

These are the best budget TVs

And here are the best budget soundbars

It’s Awards time here at Sound+Image! Our Awards have been presented every year since 1989, so this is our 38th collection of winners, representing the stand-out products which have especially thrilled us with their performance over the last year of equipment reviews and tests for all our titles and reviewers across Sound+Image, Australian Hi-Fi, our special editions Audio Esoterica and Best Buys Audio & AV, both their print editions and up on our Australian corners of whathifi.com/au and techradar.

The crystal trophies were handed out at our Award cocktail evening during the recent Australian Hi-Fi Show in Sydney, and now it’s time to go fully public with the 40+ winners, listed in full here, and presented in our Special Awards Issue (available in print and digital) together with all their review-based details of strengths and any foibles to be aware of: sometimes a particular winner may not be for everyone – but it might be perfect for you!

It’s a celebration of the best and best-value consumer audio and AV products available in the Australian market today, and our top recommendations of the year. Let's get into the winners! (Use the side 'jump list' to get to the sections you want to see first!)

VINYL

TURNTABLE OF THE YEAR UNDER A$5000
Audio-Technica AT-LPA2
A$3199
Judges' comment: “An excellent moving-coil cartridge and an external power supply assist the fine performance here, while this turntable’s acrylic beauty is clear for all to see.”
See our full review here

TURNTABLE OF THE YEAR OVER A$5000
E.A.T. F-Dur / F-Note
A$18,999
Judges' comment: “F-Dur is German for F-Major. And this is a major turntable, especially with the full 12-inch F-Note tonearm, making for superb vinyl sound in every respect.”

PHONO STAGE OF THE YEAR
Musical Fidelity M8x Vinyl
A$7200
Judges' comment: “The M8x, dual mono and fully balanced from input to output, takes Musical Fidelity’s phono EQ to new levels of flexibility and performance.

DIGITAL

STREAMER OF THE YEAR
Silent Angel Bremen SL1 Plus
A$1690
Judges' comment: “A straightforward streamer with sound quality at its heart while bringing easy and neat app-based streaming from online sources and UPnP.”

STREAMER/DAC OF THE YEAR
Aurender A1000
A$6495
Judges' comment: "A preamplifier for digital inputs, a streamer for music services, a buffering server for your own music files, all at exceptional audiophile levels of music reproduction.”

RECORDER OF THE YEAR
Zoom H5studio
A$669
Judges' comment: "While we await the full resurgence of cassette tape, might we instead suggest this exceptional 4-track high-res recorder, with volume-free 32-bit floating recording. Zoom’s H5studio represents amazing value."

AMPLIFIERS

AMPLIFIER OF THE YEAR UNDER A$1500
Denon Home Amp
A$1199
Judges' comment: “In our recent group test of smart amps, the Denon Home showed clear value as a first ‘just-add-speakers’ streaming hi-fi, or the start of something bigger.”

AMPLIFIER OF THE YEAR A$1500-A$5000
Musical Fidelity B1xi
A$1600
Judges' comment: “Musical Fidelity’s most affordable hi-fi amp is reborn with modern looks, HDMI ARC and digital inputs, but still very much a classic stereo amp for great music.”

AMPLIFIER OF THE YEAR A$5000-A$10,000
Arcam SA35
A$6495
Judges' comment: “A fantastic streaming amplifier for a central hub role in a system, well-equipped and with 5th-generation Class G delivering a glorious, engaging sound.”

AMPLIFIER OF THE YEAR OVER A$10,000
Accuphase E-800S
A$26,000
Judges' comment: “A no-compromise amplifier, magnificent in every sense of the word: enormously powerful, totally silent when it needs to be, loaded with circuit features and options.”

PREAMPLIFIER OF THE YEAR
Marantz LINK 10n
A$19,000
Judges' comment: “This is pure Marantz, its Reference Standard preamp wildly versatile as a streamer plus DAC plus phono stage plus preamp plus TV audio hub... all in one chassis."

PREAMPLIFIER & POWER AMPLIFIER (COMBO) OF THE YEAR
Sugden Audio LA-4 / SPA-4
A$7495 / A$12,495
Judges' comment: “Both the LA-4 preamplifier and the SPA-4 power amplifier are gorgeously finished, clearly well-built in their UK base, and absolutely magnificent performers.”

SYSTEMS

STREAMING SYSTEM OF THE YEAR UNDER A$1500
Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Pro
A$1299
Judges' comment: “The Zeppelin is back flying high, the Pro’s sound boosted by new in-house drivers and pricing which these days looks like a bargain against more extravagant competitors.”

STREAMING SYSTEM OF THE YEAR OVER A$1500
Denon CEOL N12
A$1599
Judges' comment: “It looks like a traditional system, but Denon’s N12 is loaded with the latest HEOS streaming, CD player, radio, HDMI & phono inputs. It does the lot, and does it well.”

HEADPHONES

OPEN CABLED HEADPHONES OF THE YEAR UNDER A$250
Audio-Technica ATH-R30x
A$219
Judges' comment: “Full down low, airy up top, balanced overall, and light as a feather to wear – the R30x’s performance amazed us given their price of just $219.”

OPEN CABLED HEADPHONES OF THE YEAR A$250-A$1000
Audio-Technica ATH-R70xa
A$499
Judges' comment: “Forget the buttons, apps and Bluetooth, here’s a range-topping open-back headphone where you just plug in the cable and enjoy the magic.”
Read our full review

OPEN CABLED HEADPHONES OF THE YEAR OVER A$1000
Meze Poet
A$3550
Judges' comment: “Thrilling planar magnetics from Romania, the Poets deliver endless hours of delight and revelation.”

TV HEADPHONES OF THE YEAR
Sennheiser RS 275 TV Headphones bundle
A$549
Judges' comment: “The first practical Auracast product we’ve reviewed, extending Sennheiser’s successful TV headphones into a new era.”

TRUE WIRELESS EARBUDS OF THE YEAR
Nothing Ear (3)
A$299
Judges' comment: “They look unlike any pair of in-ear headphones on the market, but they also deliver an audio performance summed up in one word: fun.”

WIRELESS HEADPHONES OF THE YEAR UNDER A$500
Beyerdynamic Aventho 100
A$349
Judges' comment: “Beyerdynamic shows that on-ear noise-cancelling is not only a valid concept but can deliver a powerful-sounding pair of headphones at a nice price.”

WIRELESS HEADPHONES OF THE YEAR A$500-A$1000
Apple AirPod Max 2
A$999
Judges' comment: “The Mk2 of the new Apple overears are not so much different to the originals – but are still brilliant...”

WIRELESS HEADPHONES OF THE YEAR OVER A$1000
Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2
A$1299
Judges' comment: “Physical perfection in design, and performance that makes these headphones sound like the company’s legendary speakers.”

AUDIOVISUAL

AV PROJECTOR OF THE YEAR
BenQ W2720i
A$3299
Judges' comment: “Smart Android streaming in a full-size home cinema projector with a super long-life light source and very reasonable pricing…”
See our full review

MINI PROJECTOR OF THE YEAR
Leica Cine Play 1
$5990
Judges' comment: “Leica’s expertise in glass and design raises the Cine Play 1 above other mini projectors. Its imaging results are excellent, even from an off-axis position…”
See our full review

ULTRA-SHORT-THROW PROJECTOR UNDER A$5000
Epson EH-LS670B
A$4199
Judges' comment: “Epson offers a full ‘TV replacement’ ultra-short-throw projection, built-in streaming and sound, all backed by its projection expertise.”

ULTRA-SHORT-THROW PROJECTOR OVER A$5000
Leica Cine 1 ‘Cinema TV’
A$7999 (A$9999 with 120-inch ALR screen)
Judges' comment: “A previous winner at double the price, this gorgeous ultra-short-throw deserves repeat recognition now it has become such a high-value proposition.”

AV SOURCE OF THE YEAR
Kaleidescape Strato E
A$5299
Judges' comment: “With Kaleidescape now fully Australianised, this more affordable 4K player is the perfect introduction to this mega movie delivery system.”

AV AUDIO

AV RECEIVER OF THE YEAR
Marantz AV 20 / AMP 20
A$10,000 each
Judges' comment: “The channel counts don’t match, but the processing and performance are top-notch across both units, resulting in thrilling immersion.”

SOUNDBAR OF THE YEAR
Samsung HW-QS700F
A$999
Judges comment: "A high-performance bar and subwoofer for those seeking a simple Atmos-compatible solution. It benefits from key design input from Samsung’s California lab.”
See our full review

SOUNDBAR SYSTEM OF THE YEAR UNDER A$2500
JBL Bar 1300Mk2
A$2299.99
Judges' comment: “With lift-off ends to work as rears or separate Bluetooth speakers, JBL’s soundbar system gets key updates while maintaining the magic.”
Read our full review

SOUNDBAR SYSTEM OF THE YEAR UNDER A$2500
Yamaha True X Surround 90A package
A$4499
Judges' comment: “Yamaha brings back the beam-forming for this high-performance package with Atmos bar, subwoofer and versatile wireless rears.”
Read our full review

INSTALLATION 'GOLD'

These Gold awards recognise exceptional skills in custom installation, as demonstrated through the home cinemas and smart homes we feature in Sound+Image magazine.

INSTALLATION 'GOLD' AWARD
Hifi Hunter
Judges' comment: “This room shows the merits of Hifi Hunter’s planning
processes and the careful consideration of acoustic
priorities within a fully-immersive family movie space.”
Hifi Hunter is based in Perth.

INSTALLATION 'GOLD' AWARD
The Digital Picture
Judges' comment: “One key takeaway here is that this room was already a movie space, so it demonstrates how transformative things can become once you call in the experts.”
The Digital Picture is based in Brisbane & the Gold Coast.

INSTALLATION 'GOLD' AWARD
Wavetrain Cinemas
Judges' comment: “A well-engineered room is a given with Wavetrain’s thorough design processes. This cinema also shows their style, integrating the technology within a beautiful space.”
Wavetrain Cinemas is based in Sydney.

LOUDSPEAKERS

SUBWOOFER OF THE YEAR
Paradigm Defiance S12
A$2999
Judges' comment: “A well-priced and powerful subwoofer for both cinema and hi-fi, making it all easy with the dedicated and foolproof Paradigm app.”

STANDMOUNT SPEAKERS OF THE YEAR UNDER A$5000
VAF Research DC-2S
A$1699
Judges' comment: “Huge bang for your buck from VAF’s latest DC standmounts; it’s great to see Australian-made speakers competing on a global level.”
Read our full review

STANDMOUNT SPEAKERS OF THE YEAR A$5000-A$10,000
MoFi Electronics SourcePoint 8
A$5499 (joint winner)
Judges' comment: “Andrew Jones returns to ‘point source’ design with the MoFi SourcePoint range, and these large standmounters just knock it out of the park.”

STANDMOUNT SPEAKERS OF THE YEAR A$5000-A$10,000
Pylon Audio Jade 10
A$5999 (joint winner)
Judges' comment: “From Poland, the Jades combine classic looks with compression drivers in Tractrix horns, to hit impressive scale and dynamics.”

STANDMOUNT SPEAKERS OF THE YEAR OVER A$10,000
SpectraFlora Celata 88
$35,000
Judges comment: “The entry-price isn’t cheap for these large standmounts from Inverleigh in Victoria, but their jaw-dropping precision made them fully award-worthy.”

FLOORSTANDING SPEAKERS OF THE YEAR UNDER A$10,000
Richter Dragon S7 Special Edition
A$7999
Judges' comment: “The redesign and return of Richter’s famous Dragon has been delighting all who hear them; this first award for the S7SE shows great promise for the ongoing series.”

FLOORSTANDING SPEAKERS OF THE YEAR OVER A$10,000
Microphase Audio Design Tower 3 Signature
A$15,400
Judges' comment: “Superb driver integration with fantastic build quality, forgiving placement, and genuine musical engagement: French design, made in Australia.”

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Leon Suter & Lee Gray, Kyron Audio

Our Lifetime Achievement Award this year goes to not one but two people, joined in audio greatness by their creation of Kyron Audio. There are some quite deep ties between the Australian Hi-Fi Show and Kyron: the company’s first public launch was at Next Media’s 2011 Melbourne Hi-Fi Show, where they made quite the sensation, awarded Best Sound of Show, their first of several.

But it began at least eight years before that, when they were both serving musicians in the Royal Australian Air Force Band.

“Kyron did not begin as a business plan…” as they explained to us; rather, as with so many classic hi-fi companies, it began with the desire to build better speakers. On an Air Force flight, Leon was reading a loudspeaker design book, as you do, and announced he’d like to build a set of speakers, but didn’t have the practical skills. Lee said he would help… and by the time they landed, other band members had asked for a pair as well.

They built five pairs, and came up with the name Kyron not because they were launching a company, just so they could buy parts in bulk cheaper. But it stuck, and as a mythological figure associated with music and science, it proved their first strategic decision, even if largely accidental.

They kept going through the early 2000s, building systems for friends, mostly at cost, and in fact losing money fairly consistently, which they claim is “how you know someone’s taking it seriously”.

And they were now taking it seriously, deciding to see how far they could push it, to build the best loudspeaker system they could design. It was their background as musicians that led them. Rather than following hi-fi trends, they worked from their experience of playing and hearing music in real spaces. Leon focused on the electronics and system design, Lee on industrial design and construction. And all of it done while still in full-time service with the Australian Air Force.

They pioneered active hi-fi loudspeakers using Hypex Class D, and using Australia’s DEQX FIR technology in dipole designs.They came up with their famous no-enclosure ‘nude baffle’. They were among the first in the world to use aluminium and steel for main construction in a commercial home audio product.

And finally, that original Gaia system, their Best Sound of Show win in 2011, and even a rave notice from a visiting Michael Fremer then of Stereophile, boosting their ability to secure US dealer presence. Kyron has indeed now gained international recognition, through their releases of multiple reference systems – the Gaia, Kronos, the Phoenix, the Pythos Network Music Player, the Mercury Subwoofer, the new baby Palleon Micro.

All of these have been designed and built in Australia, maintaining their focus on engineering-led design, and becoming a key and collaborative part of the Adelaide high-end audio cluster. They even found time to upgrade the audio system of the Australian Army’s Air Defence Simulator.

For all this, and all still to come (for they are still so very young), and for being such excellent blokes, we are delighted to present our Lifetime Achievement Awards to Mr Leon Suter, and Mr Lee Gray, of Kyron Audio.

If you're looking for versatile desktop speakers that sound great as well as offering useful connectivity in an ultra-compact form, our advice for many years has been Ruark Audio's MR1 range of dinky, powered speakers.

The Ruark MR1 Mk3 is our current reigning champ in this field, but nipping at its heels is the Cambridge Audio L/R S, the first active speakers from the brand, offering a similarly compact form for the same price as the Ruarks.

For those who can't accommodate a full hi-fi system in their small spaces, or want to upgrade from a budget Bluetooth speaker for their home audio, these small-but-talented desktop speakers are an ideal solution. We've recently tested the new Cambridge L/R S and compared them with the Award-winning Ruarks to balance their strengths and weaknesses – let's find out which is the best pair for you.

Cambridge L/R S vs Ruark MR1 Mk3: price

In the UK, it's a dead heat with the Cambridge L/R S and Ruark MR1 Mk3 both costing £399. There's a bit more variation if you're in the US or Australia, as the Cambridge speakers will cost you $549 / AU$949, while the Ruark pair is yours for $579 / AU$899.

The Ruarks are available in two finishes: the rich walnut veneer of our review sample, or a more modern charcoal lacquer, with no difference in cost.

Cambridge Audio offers more colourful options with six finishes in total: black, white, green, orange and blue, which all cost the same amount. But if you opt for the walnut veneer finish of our review sample, you'll have to cough up a little extra as they cost £449 / $599 / AU$1049 per pair.

**Winner: Ruark Audio MR1 Mk3**

Cambridge L/R S vs Ruark MR1 Mk3: Build & design

Both speakers are pleasingly compact, making them ideal for small spaces, such as placing on your desktop and on either side of your computer.

The Ruark MR1 Mk3 are smaller than the Cambridge L/R S – they're certainly shorter, with the L/R S barely 2cm deeper. They're the same width, though, which makes both of them very appealing for fitting into spaces where traditional hi-fi or bigger speakers simply won't get a look in.

We love the build quality of both speakers, which is of a high quality for this price. Which style you prefer is a matter of taste: the beautifully curved cabinet of the Ruark or the crisp, clean edges of the Cambridge? Do you prefer the woven fabric grille (which isn't removable) on the Ruark, or the stark, no-grille, minimal aesthetic of Cambridge?

We like the walnut veneer's texture and finer details on the Ruarks, and equally like the way the logo is printed on top of the Cambridge speaker. Both are smart-looking and offer a lifestyle-friendly aesthetic compared with traditional designs.

Apart from the looks, there are practical considerations when making your choice. There are no on-unit controls for input selection or volume on the Cambridge speakers at all, in keeping with its pared back design. A colour-changing LED underneath the primary speaker indicates the input chosen and status, but that's all the feedback you'll get when facing the speakers.

Ruark, conversely, has its trademark RotoDial controller on top of the primary speaker, which lets you select the input and change volume with ease. It's a more tactile interaction with your speaker, and especially handy if the speakers are within reach on your desk.

If your speakers are placed further away or are being used as TV speakers, then you'll be glad to hear both sets come with a slim remote control. It's particularly crucial for the Cambridge, so don't lose it.

These are two-way speakers, with the Cambridge L/R S featuring a 21mm aluminium tweeter and 7.6cm mid/bass driver, with a bass reflex slot situated at the back.

The Ruark MR1 Mk3 features a 20mm silk dome tweeter with a bigger 8.5cm mid/bass driver, with a downward-firing bass reflex port.

Both use Class D amplification for greater efficiency and control, with the Cambridge claiming the more powerful 50W per channel, while Ruark goes for half that figure at 25W per channel. Numbers, of course, only tell half the story.

Both units house the main power, amplifiers and connections in one "primary" unit, which then feeds signal to the secondary unit with an interlinking cable.

The supplied 2m cable for the Cambridge speakers features bespoke 4-pin conductors at either end, with a neat locking mechanism that keeps the connection secure.

The 3m cable connecting the Ruark speakers (3.5mm connectors at either end) is a nicely braided affair that's sturdy and looks good, too. We found the supplied cables long enough for desktop use, but both brands offer optional longer leads (5m) if required, at extra cost.

**Winner: Draw**

Cambridge L/R S vs Ruark MR1 Mk3: connectivity

Titchy as they are, the Ruark MR1 MK3 is loaded with a variety of connections. The big news is the inclusion of a built-in moving magnet phono stage, which makes it easier to plug in turntables – such as the Rega Planar 1 or Pro-Ject Primary E – for a neat, affordable vinyl system. You also get a USB-C input for plugging in your laptop, and a combined optical/3.5mm aux input for other sources, with the adapter for the digital optical socket included in the box.

Ruark says that its customers have been perfectly happy with the optical input when using the MR1 speakers with a TV, and adding an HDMI input would increase the cost beyond its asking price, which the brand didn't want to do.

Cambridge's speakers similarly omit the HDMI input and feature a USB-C input and separate optical input, and opt for a pair of RCA line level analogue inputs for connecting a variety of sources to the L/R S. There's no built-in phono stage here, which we feel is a bit of a miss, but you can plug in a turntable with an integrated phono preamp, such as the Sony PS-LX3BT, via RCA.

For easy streaming from your phone or laptop, both speakers offer Bluetooth, with up to the aptX HD codec supported. Pairing is swift and easy in both cases, and streaming music from Tidal or Apple Music is fuss free.

Ruark says its internal DAC can handle up to 24-bit/192kHz hi-res audio files, although the USB-C input’s limit is capped at 96kHz. With Cambridge, the optical and USB-C both support hi-res files up to 24-bit/96kHz, but the speakers’ DSP will automatically downsample all files to 48kHz.

At this level, we find that such differences in file resolution aren't particularly obvious, with CD quality sounding more than good enough for these speakers. Considering the intended audience for these affordable, desktop speakers – and with no networked streaming on board – we imagine not being able to play full-fat hi-res downloaded tracks won't be a high priority for most listeners.

And finally, you get a single subwoofer output with both speakers, should you require more bass oomph.

**Winner: Ruark Audio MR1 MK3**

Cambridge L/R S vs Ruark MR1 Mk3: features

Ruark keeps things simple with the MR1 Mk3's plug-and-play, accessible nature, and around the back of the main speaker you'll find the ability to change the gain level for each input (and reset them). That's it.

Cambridge offers a fair bit more customisation, with the engineers taking into consideration any adverse sonic effects that might happen depending on your listening position and where you'll be placing the L/R S speakers.

You have three toggle switches at the back of the main unit: one to tell the speakers if they're placed on a desktop or not; one to tell the speakers if they are placed close to a back wall or in free space; and one to indicate whether the primary speaker (with the power cable) is the left or right channel.

These modes help to mitigate any booming you might get in the mid/bass when the speakers are backed up against a wall, reduce any unwanted reflections from the desk they are placed on, and to help with time alignment when your listening positioning is higher than the drivers' output when they're placed on a desk.

Cambridge also offers optional desk stands (£49 per pair) to help angle the speakers towards your listening position – we would recommend this for the clearest, most solid sound.

We would try all the different toggle modes to find out the best-balanced sound for your tastes and listening position, as some combinations might work better than you might initially think.

Did you remember to hold on to that remote control? Cambridge also offers three EQ modes – Normal, Voice and Movie – that you can choose using the remote. These are subtle effects worth experimenting with, although we preferred the balanced Normal mode overall with all kinds of media we played.

**Winner: Cambridge Audio L/R S**

Cambridge L/R S vs Ruark MR1 Mk3: sound

The Cambridge L/R S speakers offer a pleasing performance with their even-handed tone and refined way with detail.

Their smooth balance makes them easy to listen to for long hours, with no peakiness or hardness in the treble, nor any untoward flabbiness in the bass. Yes, we'd like to hear the lower frequencies plunge deeper and have more muscle, but they are otherwise taut and nimble.

There is a sense of orderliness to the way the L/R S delivers music, and we found during our review that there is "a good amount of detail on offer, thanks also in part to a clean, low-distortion background". Voices are nicely focused too.

That evenly balanced presentation is impressive, although it does mean some songs end up sounding quite cultured and reserved when they should be more gritty and brazen.

"On some tracks – such as on Eminem’s The Way I Am and Forget About Dre – we find ourselves willing the speakers on, to tackle the propulsive rhythm with more punch and panache," we said in our review.

These Cambridge speakers do spark into life with the volume turned up, and they can certainly go louder than you'd expect from their small stature. Just be aware that, as with most speakers, that lovely balance suffers at much higher volumes.

The Ruark MR1 Mk3 offer a more boisterous and more exciting presentation, with a more powerful, muscular bass that we wish was just a little more tuneful, but does dig impressively deep for such dinky speakers.

Even more impressive is how much bigger and more open they sound; they project sound into the room with greater power than the L/R S, and there is more space surrounding the instruments and voices.

Dynamic shifts are handled with greater authority and punch, and it's a more involving listen overall. "The speakers’ rhythmic drive remains excellent for such compact speakers," we said in the review. "They are full of propulsive momentum, grabbing us by the lapels with Eminem’s fierce delivery in Forget About Dre and delivering tracks from Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish and Macklemore with oodles of energy."

The Ruarks are still subtle and insightful enough when it comes to more delicate pieces of music, and voices are full of texture, nuance and personality. The MR1 Mk3 have traded a touch of their previous midrange sweetness for greater power in this third-generation model, but the mids are also clearer, more detailed and more expressive than the Cambridge L/R S.

Compared with the Ruarks, the Cambridge speakers sound a little muted when it comes to expressive voices, rhythmic punctuality and dynamic subtlety. There is what sounds like a "cloudy veil" over the midrange, whereas the Ruarks sound much freer, more confident and allow songs to luxuriate in a more layered soundstage.

The Ruarks' built-in phono stage is of a high quality too, and both sets of speakers have a consistent sonic character no matter which input you use.

**Winner: Ruark Audio MR1 Mk3**

Cambridge L/R S vs Ruark MR1 Mk3: verdict

There is plenty to like about the compact Cambridge L/R S speakers, from their crisp, clean aesthetic to the various modes that make them customisable to where you place them in the room. Their sound quality is easy to get along with, with a smooth, even tone across the frequencies.

But the Ruark speakers beat them for outright clarity, subtler insight and better dynamics. They offer a bigger scale of sound and simply sound more fun, even if the deeper low frequencies could be reined in a little. That built-in phono stage is a boon for first-time vinyl users, and using the MR1 Mk3 is just a little bit more convenient thanks to the handy, tactile on-unit controls.

For the same price, the petite Ruark speakers are the more entertaining and versatile pair. Our Award-winners keep their crown for another round.

**Overall winner: Ruark Audio MR1 Mk3**

MORE:

Our guide to the best desktop speakers we've tested

10 of the best Mogwai tracks to test your hi-fi system

1976 vs today: veteran audio experts discuss the biggest shifts in music and hi-fi during What Hi-Fi?'s 50-year lifetime

TCL has achieved phenomenal critical and commercial success over the past couple of years thanks to an (almost) unerring ability to deliver good picture and sound quality at prices so aggressive they’ve had rival brands quaking in their boots. And, on paper at least, the Q6C looks to keep the winning streak going.

After all, features such as Mini LED backlighting, local dimming and a Quantum Dot colour system all sound surprisingly close to the specs found in TCL’s What Hi-Fi? Award-winning C7K series – yet the Q6C costs significantly less.

We guess there must be a catch somewhere, but on TCL’s current form we wouldn’t be at all surprised if whatever catch we find really isn’t that big a deal.

Price

Normally, if you spend £650 on a 65-inch TV, you would expect to get… not very much. Not for the first time in recent years, though, TCL is here to rewrite the TV value rulebook.

The set in question this time is the Q6C, the 65-inch version of which usually only costs £649 yet manages to carry such features as 4K/144Hz gaming support, Google TV smarts, Quantum Dot colours and even a sophisticated Mini-LED backlight system with local dimming.

We’ve been around the block enough times to know that such specifications aren’t automatically a guarantee of great picture quality – but at the risk of showing our hand too early, in the Q6C’s case they really do add up to something pretty special for the money.

TCL also sells 55-, 75-, 85- and 98-inch Q6C models for £409, £819, £949 and £1499 respectively. These are all pretty remarkable prices for screens built on the same key specs as the 65-inch model, where the only major difference is the number of dimming zones (more for the bigger screens).

The Q6C’s main competition, really, is TCL’s own C7K step-up model, which costs £200 more at the time of writing.

TCL also sells a C6K model which, it says, is identical to the Q6C. However, further up the range, TCL's ‘C’ variants often have a different panel coating to their “identical” ‘Q’ counterparts. The fact that matte vs glossy coatings can make a significant difference to picture quality, and that we haven’t specifically tested the C6K, this review only applies 100 per cent to the Q6C.

Design

At first glance, the TCL Q6C looks like a chip off the old TCL block. A narrow black frame runs around the screen, boasting a reasonably premium finish, and the screen sits on a pair of simple arched blade-style feet. These angle out slightly, bringing more attention to themselves than they would otherwise, but this stance also helps the set feel pretty sturdy and wobble-free.

As you go about screwing on the feet in either of the provided wide or close position options, though, you can’t help but notice first that the set sticks out around the back quite a long way by today’s TV standards, and also that the screen is significantly lighter than TCL’s more premium sets.

Most folk don’t spend their lives looking at the back of their TV, though, and the rather lightweight and plasticky nature of its build quality isn’t something you really feel aware of once the TCL has been set in place.

The Q6C’s remote control apes the TV it partners by quite effectively disguising an essentially rather lightweight and plasticky build behind a cute brushed finish, a sleek, long, thin shape, and an ergonomic button layout. That button layout includes direct access buttons for Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, Disney+ and TCL’s own collection of live-streaming ‘channels’.

Features

Despite its aggressive price, the Q6C is built around a native 4K screen with Mini LED backlighting and a local dimming system that works, in the case of the 65-inch model we’re testing, across 242 independently controlled zones. At this price, local dimming of any kind is a rarity, so getting 242 dimming zones is a real treat. That said, the not vastly more expensive C7K features more than a thousand dimming zones.

The Q6C produces its colours using Quantum Dots, with which TCL claims to cover 93 per cent of the DCI-P3 colour spectrum used for most HDR mastering. The HDR support extends to both the Dolby Vision and HDR10+ premium formats, with their extra scene-by-scene image information, as well as the core HDR10 and HLG formats.

The set is also IMAX Enhanced certified, meaning it’s been judged capable of doing justice to the special noise-limiting IMAX Enhanced mastering system used on a few 4K Blu-rays and a fair number of films (especially Marvel releases) on Disney+.

Impressively for its money, the Q6C also gets one of TCL’s new HVA panels. These introduce a variety of innovations, including a faster transient response for enhanced clarity; a new light-emitting chip claimed to deliver 50 per cent brightness and 10 per cent efficiency boosts over its predecessor; and a new condensed micro lens system over the LEDs, that apparently focuses light better for greater backlight uniformity, optical stability and halo control.

Smart features on the Q6C, as with most of TCL’s current TVs, are provided by the Google TV platform. Unlike most other brands that use Google TV, though, TCL has managed to get BBC iPlayer on board alongside the other key terrestrial UK broadcaster catch-up apps, and all of the main global streaming services. The only things you don’t get that some rival smart systems offer are Freeview Play and Freely.

Gamers are exceptionally well catered for by the Q6C. It supports 4K/144Hz (and the console-friendly 4K/120Hz) gaming, and can even increase the frame rate to 288Hz if you’re prepared to accept a drop from 4K to Full HD resolution. VRR is supported, too, including in the AMD FreeSync Premium Pro format, and there’s even support for Superwide aspect ratios if you’re playing a PC game that supports them.

A special gaming menu becomes available when the TV knows you’re gaming, too, offering information on the incoming gaming signal as well as easy access to a selection of gaming aids that include a superimposed crosshair, the option to magnify part of the image to give, say, a mini-map more prominence, a couple of genre-specific picture presets, and an option to enhance shadow details in dark game sequences to make it easier to spot lurking enemies.

In a perfect world, all four of the Q6C’s HDMIs would support the full gamut of today’s gaming features rather than just two of them, but you don’t get perfect worlds on 65-inch TVs that cost this sort of money.

The Q6C’s sound system, finally, isn’t one of the Bang & Olufsen-designed systems found higher up TCL’s range. It’s still designed with another acclaimed audio industry brand, though, Onkyo, and still includes a couple of dedicated bass woofers on its rear panel to underpin the sound from its main stereo speakers. This sound system is capable of playing both Dolby Atmos and DTS Virtual:X sound formats.

Picture

While the Q6C doesn’t quite hit the giddy picture-quality heights of TCL’s C7K, it gets closer than the price gap would lead you to expect. This means that it also comfortably outguns pretty much every other 65-inch TV around at the same sort of price point – including Samsung’s recently reviewed U8000F.

The single most impressive thing about the Q6C's supposedly budget pictures is their black level performance. Once again, TCL’s particular combination of an HVA panel, local dimming, Mini LED lighting and local dimming processing results in excellent blacks in both dark scenes or dark picture areas and the black bars of widescreen content.

Hardly a hint of greyness slips into dark scenes, and backlight haloing around stand-out bright objects during dark shots is also remarkably well controlled for a 65-inch TV at the Q6C’s price point. We’ve seen 65-inch LCD TVs costing hundreds, even thousands, of pounds more than this TCL fail to deliver black tones so effectively.

As well as instantly giving the Q6C an outstanding foundation for the rest of its images to build on, its excellent black levels are also achieved without causing shadow details to become crushed out of the darkest areas. Dark scenes thus look as three-dimensional and immersive as bright ones, creating a sense of consistency that makes it easy to remain fully immersed in what you’re watching.

The Q6C’s remarkable freedom from the sort of hardware and/or processing issues that almost always to some extent plague the picture quality of other similarly affordable TVs continues across pretty much every other aspect of its picture performance, too. Images look crisp, clean and detailed enough to leave you in no doubt that you’re watching a native 4K screen, for starters – especially if you leave the set’s Precision Detail feature on (which you might as well, as it doesn’t seem to cause any negative side effects) and turn the Digital and regular Noise Reduction features off (at least when watching native 4K sources). Even the Q6C’s upscaling of HD sources is well above par for its level of the market.

Colours impress, too. There’s more vibrancy and lustre on tap than we usually see with such affordable TVs, yet at the same time, in most presets, the impressive vibrancy doesn’t look forced or unnatural. Skin tones look believable, there’s practically zero HDR colour striping, and subtle shading differences are rendered with enough finesse to ensure that even the most colourful images feel three-dimensional and realistic rather than cartoonish and flat. The nuance in the Q6C’s colours contributes in no small measure to the image's impressive sharpness, too.

The Q6C is not as bright as TCL’s step-up C7K model. It’s bright enough, though, to do arguably better justice to HDR images than any other similarly affordable 65-inch TV we’ve seen, combining good full-screen brightness with strong brightness peaks. All delivered alongside those excellent black levels we described earlier.

There are signs beyond its lower brightness that remind you that the Q6C is a step down from the C7K. While it’s faint, where backlight haloing does occasionally become noticeable, it spreads further beyond the bright highlight that’s causing it than it does with the C7K. That includes spreading very occasionally into the black bars of a movie if a really intensely bright object appears right next to them.

The very brightest highlights of bold HDR masters can also cause clipping, where subtle shading and colour details are lost in a sort of ‘white out’ effect, and skin tones can occasionally teeter on the edge of coarseness where they happen to catch bright sunlight, too – though they seldom if ever actually tip over into a distracting level of roughness.

Motion, once you’ve either turned the set’s motion processing off or left it on its low setting (to avoid unwanted over-smoothing or processing side effects), is marginally more prone to judder and blur with 24p movie sources than the C7K’s images are. But again, compared with the vast majority of rivals at its price point, the Q6C’s motion performance is actually pretty easy on the eye.

Colours can desaturate quite noticeably if you watch the screen from a steep angle of around 45 degrees or more, and blooming becomes slightly more noticeable. These problems are usually much more noticeable with budget VA LCD TVs, though, and from narrower angles.

To finish on the high note the Q6C’s pictures deserve, it’s a pretty stellar big-screen gaming display for its money. Graphics look crisp, bright and colourful, while the high frame rate support ensures gaming also feels fluid, smooth and responsive. The responsiveness is further bolstered by a measured input lag of just 13.1ms at 60Hz.

Sound

The Q6C’s Onkyo-designed sound system isn’t as ‘hi-fi’ in tone or as well-rounded as the B&O systems found higher up TCL’s current range. It’s not bad at all, though, for such an affordable TV.

Particularly surprising is the size of the soundstage it produces with DTS:X and, especially, Dolby Atmos mixes. Ambient effects and off-screen details appear well beyond the TV’s left, right and even top edges without the staging becoming incoherent or thin.

Dialogue seems to be coming from the screen rather than somewhere beneath or behind it, helping it sound impressively clear and clean. It still sounds contextualised enough, though, rather than bright or sharp.

Movie scores exist outside the scope of the main in-scene sound, just as they (usually) should, and sound effect detail levels are high enough to point to more quality in the speakers than you’ve any right to expect for this sort of money. Specific location details aren’t, to be clear, placed with the sort of accuracy you get with premium TV sound systems from the likes of Samsung, Philips and Sony, but the Q6C certainly does more with them than most similarly priced rivals.

There’s plenty of volume available, too, and while the sound density and power tend to level off during escalating action or horror scenes rather than continually expanding right to a scene’s climax, at least the sound doesn’t actively collapse under pressure.

Bass levels aren’t quite as rich and deep as we might have hoped, given the presence of two subwoofers on the set’s rear, which occasionally causes some high-pitched ambient effects to sound a little too dominant. Even the epic bass drops of Blade Runner 2049, though, don’t cause the bass speakers to seriously distort or drop out. In fact, the only distortion during Blade Runner 2049’s famous opening soundtrack dynamics comes from the treble, which causes a slight ‘buzzing fly’ effect when the speakers are under their greatest pressure.

The bottom line, though, is that, as with its pictures, the TCL Q6C’s sound is better than that of most, if not all, other TVs in its price class.

Verdict

If the Q6C cost twice as much as it does, we’d still class it as good. In fact, for a 65-inch TV at its price, it’s nothing short of ridiculous. If this is how TCL signs off its current range, we seriously can’t wait to see what the brand brings to the table next.

SCORES

• Picture 5
• Sound 4
• Features 4

Read our review of the TCL C7K

Also consider the Samsung U8000F

Read our Mitchell & Brown QLED1811 review

Best TVs: flagship OLEDs and budget Mini LED sets tried and tested

“What took you so long?”

It’s a fair question we might aim at Cambridge Audio, which, over its near-60-year history, has dabbled in almost every audio category: amplifiers, CD players, music streamers, turntables, subwoofers, wireless speakers… even a Blu-ray player.

The fact that it has taken the British audio brand 58 years to launch its first-ever active speakers is perhaps surprising, but we’ll allow them to be fashionably late. The brand’s new L/R range of active speakers comes in three sizes, and we’ve got the baby of the bunch on test here, the Cambridge Audio L/R S. Is this petite desktop speaker the beginning of a hit series? It certainly looks promising.

Price

The L/R S is the smallest and cheapest model of Cambridge’s L/R speakers, and costs £399 / $549 / AU$949 per pair. This puts it squarely in the crosshairs of the Award-winning Ruark MR1 Mk3 (£399 / $579 / AU$899) powered desktop speakers, while Onkyo’s five-star GX-30ARC can be yours for a little less at £299 / $349 / AU$649.

The L/R S are available in six finishes that include the standard black and white, as well as more colourful green, blue and orange finishes. If you opt for the walnut veneer finish of our review sample, you’ll have to pay a little more at £449 / $599 / AU$1049 per pair.

If you’ll be placing the L/R S speakers on your desk, it’s worth checking out the optional angled desk stands (£49) that tilt the speakers up so the sound is more directed towards you.

Build & design

If you’re working with limited space – small rooms, student digs, not a lot of surface real estate – then these active speakers will work a treat. Each cabinet is just under 23cm tall and about 13cm wide – no wider than your average paperback book – which means they’ll fit onto most desktops and even shelves, ideally perched on either side of a laptop or your TV.

The speakers themselves look neat and stylish, and we can imagine the minimal cabinet design fitting into most interiors, whether you want them to blend into a spartan layout or add a splash of colour with the punchier hues.

Build quality is of a high standard, with clean, crisp edges and a smooth finish. We particularly like how the Cambridge logo is etched into the finish at the top of the cabinet. It looks classy.

Each speaker is furnished with a 21mm aluminium tweeter and a long-throw 76mm mid/bass driver, with a bass reflex slot positioned at the rear of each cabinet. All drivers are powered by Class D amplification, and altogether, the L/R S claim to offer a mighty 100W of total output, split evenly between the two channels.

The tweeter has a large waveguide that, along with the mid/bass driver, occupies the majority of the ultra-minimal fascia, with the metallic orange colour of the dome peeking through to offer some visual interest. The speakers don’t come with a grille, but the tweeter’s phase cap doubles up as a guard to protect it from poking fingers.

This is a fully active design with all the amplification and electronics housed in the primary speaker. The supplied 2m connecting cable has a bespoke 4-pin conductor that carries the signal to the secondary speaker. This cable has a pleasingly secure locking mechanism at either end, too. If you need a longer lead between the speakers, a 5m cable is also available to buy separately.

Keeping things simple seems to be the main aim with these petite active speakers. There are no controls or dials on the speaker for choosing inputs or changing volume – which might irk some users who like having such controls within easy reach – but there is a colour-coded LED under the primary speaker which clearly indicates the input chosen.

A remote control is supplied, which takes care of input choosing, volume and power. It’s a slim unit made of light plastic, but it works well, and we would take pains not to mislay this remote.

You can place these small speakers pretty much anywhere, and, knowing this, Cambridge has taken steps to ensure the L/R S are able to sound their best wherever you place them. At the back, you’ll find a pair of toggle switches: one to indicate whether the speakers are placed on a desk or not, and another to indicate if they are positioned close to a wall (“near wall”) or out in “free space”. The “near wall” mode is straightforward. It reduces the mid-bass around 100Hz to account for any boominess that might occur when placing the speakers very close to a back wall.

The “desk top on” mode, meanwhile, deals with two issues at once – time alignment and desk reflection – and shows how much thought Cambridge’s engineers have put into this design. When the small speakers are placed on a desk, the drivers will naturally be physically lower than your listening height. This desk mode compensates for this effect, delaying the tweeter output and readjusting the top and mid frequencies so that music sounds “right” from your listening position.

Additionally, this mode also notches down the mid frequencies (around 700Hz, says Cambridge) to balance out the unwanted energy coming from the speakers’ sound being reflected from the desk.

We would try out the various combinations to see what works best for your speaker placement. We quite liked the combination of "free space" and keeping ‘desk top’ mode off for a richer and more solid sound overall, but the effect will vary depending on your room and the surface the speakers are placed on.

And finally, there is a third and very useful toggle switch that lets you assign the primary speaker as the left or right channel, giving you greater flexibility for placement.

Features

Whereas the bigger siblings – the L/R X and L/R M – boast full network streaming smarts, the baby of the family is once again keeping things pared down and uncomplicated by offering Bluetooth for streaming. Physical inputs on the L/R S include a pair of RCA line level, optical and USB-C, and there is a subwoofer output.

It’s worth noting that while the optical and USB-C both support hi-res audio files up to 96kHz, the speakers’ DSP will automatically resample/downsample all files to 24-bit/48kHz.

Perhaps surprisingly in this enduring age of vinyl popularity, there’s no built-in phono stage here, as you’ll find in the Ruark and Onkyo rivals. There’s no HDMI ARC input here either, which you will find on the cheaper Onkyo speakers.

Regardless, you can still connect a variety of products to these speakers, including a CD player, a TV, a smartphone/laptop, and even a phono stage-equipped turntable, such as the Sony PS-LX3BT. Bluetooth has the higher-quality aptX and aptX HD codecs on board, and pairing with our smartphone takes seconds.

Using these speakers is a cinch. Once connected, they’re easy to control using the supplied remote or with your paired phone when streaming from Tidal or Spotify.

Along with the toggles for adjusting the speakers’ sound depending on their position, there are also three sound modes to choose from: Normal (the default one), Voice (accentuates mids/voice) and Movie (increases in bass and treble frequency for more impact, and mids for clearer dialogue).

We appreciate that the EQ modes are rather subtle in action. Voices are a tad clearer and more prominent when deploying the Voice mode during podcasts, and the Movie mode doesn’t overdo the peaks in frequencies, but we prefer the more balanced, solid sound of the Normal mode for all kinds of audio.

Sound

We set up the L/R S speakers on the desk in one of our listening rooms, flanking our laptop, connected to Bluetooth, and leave them running in while we do some work. This allows us not only to run the speakers in, but also to gauge how they behave when used exactly the way we imagine most people will. Will the speakers sound too boomy on the desk? Will they sound too powerful and distracting, or will they fade into the background? Is there any peakiness in the treble to annoy us?

As we listen to Rosalia, Eminem, Waxahatchee, Geese, Rachmaninoff and more, we find ourselves living rather harmoniously with these compact Cambridge speakers. What’s impressive is just how nice and even they are throughout the frequencies – it allows for a very easy-going listen, and one you could listen to for hours without getting fatigued.

There is no discernible peakiness in the treble, which sounds rather civilised and cultured even when hitting the brash, brazen highs of Fontaines D.C.’s Starburster. The bass is rather taut and nimble but not overpowering, which is welcome if you’ll be listening to the speakers up close and on resonant surfaces. There is less bass weight on the L/R S compared with the more exuberant Ruark MR1 Mk3 rival, and it doesn’t sound as muscular when faced with the brooding bassline in Massive Attack’s Angel. But it nips along at a good pace.

There is a good amount of detail on offer, thanks also in part to a clean, low-distortion background. Whether we listen to these speakers using Tidal via Bluetooth or USB, or CDs on a connected Cyrus CDi disc spinner, the presentation is consistent. From Waxahatchee’s honeyed vocals to Geese’s more discordant and laconic tones, we find the speakers create a rather lovely solid sweet-spot for voices, too.

Listening at low volume doesn’t quite give us a full picture of the speakers’ abilities; turn up the volume, and you’ll find them spark into life. If you reach your smartphone device’s maximum Bluetooth volume limit and wonder if that’s all they can do, reach for the remote control and turn it up some more. These speakers can go pretty loud. Just be wary of going too high, as things do start to get unwieldy and shouty.

Even as we admire their evenness and orderliness, we find the L/R S speakers can be a touch reserved at times. On some tracks – such as on Eminem’s The Way I Am and Forget About Dre – we find ourselves willing the speakers on, to tackle the propulsive rhythm with more punch and panache. The piano notes in Game Of Thrones’ Light Of The Seven glide along smoothly, but they could do with a greater degree of precision and urgency to better impart the ratcheting-up of tension in the piece.

In comparison, the rival Ruark MR1 Mk3 speakers have the upper hand when it comes to rhythmic impetus and dynamic expression. They are able to deliver a bigger and more open sound too, with a greater amount of space in between the instruments and voices.

We find that the Ruark speakers sound clearer throughout the midrange, too, which reveals a greater degree of subtlety and insight. In comparison, the Cambridge sounds as though there is a cloudy veil over the mids, which we would love to hear scrubbed clean so that textures and subtleties can be unleashed. Bon Iver's voice on Exile is layered with rich textures and full of personality and emotion through the Ruarks – this effect is a little muted through the L/R S.

We would recommend investing in the optional desk stands for the L/R S, as physically tilting the speakers towards your listening position results in a clearer, more solid sound. Listening significantly off-axis changes the balance somewhat, so we would take some care when positioning the speakers and experiment with the various toggle modes to find the ideal sound for you.

Verdict

As Cambridge Audio’s first-ever active stereo speakers, the L/R S are off to a great start. It’s a confident design with thoughtful consideration for how people will use them in the real world. And they look stylish, too.

That even-toned, refined and easy-to-listen-to sound is impressive for a product of this type and price, and we think a sprinkle of energy, precision and insight could well catapult these compact Cambridge speakers to stardom. The Ruarks and Onkyos of this world might rest easy for now, but they’ll certainly be keeping an eye on this new contender.

Review published: 15th May 2026

SCORES

• Sound 4
• Build 5
• Features 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Ruark Audio MR1 Mk3

Also consider the Onkyo GX-30ARC

Our guide to the best desktop speakers for hi-fi fans, tested by our experts

Google has just made a handful of announcements regarding the future of Android at its "Android Show I/O Edition 2026" event, and while the redesigned emojis and smarter AI news are fun, there was surprisingly little in the way of AV announcements.

Google TV, in fact, didn't get so much as a shoutout, but another offshoot of Google's software ecosystem did get some unexpected picture and sound upgrades.

Android Auto, Google's smart automotive software experience, will soon support a more immersive audio experience, and for the first time, video too.

Dolby Atmos is the big news here, as Android Auto will finally deliver the immersive audio format in a forthcoming update, though there are some stipulations to be aware of. This comes a couple of years after Apple CarPlay began rolling out Dolby Atmos support in 2024.

Google's current list of automotive manufacturers that will support Dolby Atmos includes BMW, Genesis, Mahindra, Mercedes-Benz, Renault, Škoda, Tata and Volvo, so you'll need a supported vehicle from one of these brands to access the 3D audio format via the Android software system. We expect this list to expand in due course.

You'll also need a streaming app that supports Dolby Atmos playback, which currently rules out the likes of Spotify and YouTube Music. Ironically, Google highlights that these two apps in particular have been freshly redesigned for Android Auto to accommodate better ease of use.

Apple Music, Tidal and Amazon Music Unlimited should all deliver Dolby Atmos playback, but we're clarifying with Google to confirm if all of these services are supported.

And it's not just audio that's getting souped up on Android Auto. For the first time, users will be able to watch videos in full HD up to 60fps on their car's infotainment display through "apps like YouTube".

We presume that this means other video apps will be supported when this feature launches later this year, but we've reached out to Google to confirm which streaming apps will and won't be supported.

Videos on Android Auto will be supported in vehicles from BMW, Ford, Genesis, Hyundai, Kia, Mahindra, Mercedes-Benz, Renault, Škoda, Tata and Volvo.

Watching videos while driving is, of course, a no-go, but Google has thankfully thought ahead. Video apps that support background audio will seamlessly transition into a podcast-style audio experience when you begin driving, meaning you can continue listening to what you were watching while you were parked.

These updates are both expected to roll out later this year, alongside a more customisable user interface and improved Google Maps experience.

With more in-car audio systems now supporting Dolby Atmos – Dolby itself made a big push for immersive in-car audio at CES 2026 earlier this year – it's encouraging to see Google make the necessary steps to upgrade Android Auto to support the latest in-car entertainment features.

MORE:

Read our full Sonos Premium Sound System (2026 Audi A3) review

I just had my favourite Dolby Atmos experience in years, and it had nothing to do with home cinema

Find our picks for the best music streaming services here

Here it is, folks: our first full review of an RGB Mini LED TV.

We have previously run extensive hands-on tests of a couple of RGB Mini LED TVs – most notably the huge Hisense 116UX – but, due to their astonishing sizes and prices, we’ve had to do the testing outside our own facilities. In our world, that’s not a full review, so those TVs haven’t received star ratings.

The 65-inch Hisense UR9 we have before us today is designed to address the size and price issues that have until now prevented more people from hopping on the RGB Mini LED bandwagon.

This set, then, is leading the mainstream RGB Mini LED charge. And, while it’s a fair way short of perfect, particularly next to a flagship OLED TV, the UR9 is an impressive TV in its own right and a tantalising glimpse at the technology’s long-term potential.

Price

Price is always a hugely important factor whenever we test a product, but it’s particularly crucial to how the Hisense UR9 will be viewed.

In the UK, the launch price of £2999 places the 65-inch UR9 in the same category as flagship OLED TVs such as the new LG G6 and last year’s Award-winning Sony Bravia 8 II.

In Australia, though, the AU$3999 price puts the Hisense UR9 up against step-down OLEDs such as the LG C6.

Most interestingly (and confusingly), while the announced launch price in the US was a super high-end $3500, when the TV actually arrived in shops, the tag was a vastly cheaper $2000, placing the UR9 in an entirely different category, below even step-down OLED models.

Essentially, then, this Hisense is a rather different proposition in each of those three regions. Seeing as we are UK-based and it’s a UK sample we’re reviewing, though, it’s the UK price that we are primarily working with here. And that means the UR9 is going to have to face off against the mighty Bravia 8 II QD-OLED.

Design

The Hisense UR9 is not one of those modern flagship TVs that disappears into your living room.

At 4.5cm thick, it’s decidedly chunky by current premium TV standards, particularly next to the impossibly slim OLED models with which it competes on price.

The rear panel is completely flat, though, which makes the UR9 fairly tidy for wall-mounting, and the overall build feels solid and substantial.

The TV’s general styling is perfectly pleasant, too, though it stops short of being genuinely luxurious. Bezels are slim enough, the dark metallic finish is smart, and the overall aesthetic is clean and restrained, but the UR9 lacks the slick elegance and premium flair of rivals such as the Sony Bravia 8 II and Samsung S99H/S95H.

Hisense has made some nice, practical decisions, though.

The centrally mounted pedestal stand has a relatively narrow footprint of around 42cm, making the UR9 easier to place on narrower furniture than many similarly sized rivals. It also offers two height positions, allowing you either to keep the screen sitting low and tidy or raise it slightly to create extra clearance for a soundbar.

Rows of tiny perforations run down both sides of the set, while larger openings line the top edge. These house the UR9’s side- and up-firing speakers, which form part of its integrated Devialet sound system.

Overall, then, the UR9 is more functional than fashionable – a practical, purposeful TV rather than a particularly glamorous one.

Features and specs

The headline feature here is, of course, the UR9’s RGB Mini LED backlight.

Unlike a conventional Mini LED TV, which uses a white backlight shining through a colour filter layer, the UR9 instead uses separate red, green and blue Mini LEDs to generate colour directly. In theory, this approach allows for both greater brightness and more precise colour reproduction.

Hisense claims peak brightness of up to 3500 nits for the 65-inch model we’re testing here, alongside 980 local dimming zones and a native 170Hz panel, all driven by the company’s Hi-View AI Engine RGB processor.

Gamers are generally very well served – with one unusual caveat. Unlike most premium TVs, which have four HDMI sockets, the UR9 has just three. These are accompanied by a PC-gaming-friendly DisplayPort connection – something that remains extremely rare on TVs.

Is a DisplayPort connection more valuable than a fourth HDMI socket? We have our doubts, but to a small number of very committed PC gamers, it may be very useful.

All three of the HDMI sockets are 2.1-specified, though, with support for 4K/170Hz (and the console-friendly 4K/120Hz), VRR and ALLM. Some brands, including Sony, still offer just two HDMI 2.1 sockets on their TVs.

The UR9’s input lag is decent rather than exceptional. We measured 32.5ms at 60Hz in the standard Game mode, though enabling the Refresh Rate setting reduces that figure to a more respectable, though far from groundbreaking, 24.6ms.

The UR9 supports every significant HDR format currently in use – HLG, HDR10, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision – plus the intelligent Dolby Vision IQ and HDR10+ Adaptive variants that respond to ambient room lighting conditions.

It is also IMAX Enhanced certified, and the UK version of the TV features an anti-reflective, anti-glare screen coating that proves fairly effective at combating bright-room reflections.

Audio specifications are unusually ambitious by TV standards, too. The UR9 features a Devialet-tuned 4.1.2-channel speaker system with dedicated up-firing drivers, plus support for both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks.

In the UK and Australia, the UR9 runs Hisense’s own VIDAA smart platform, while the US version instead uses Google TV.

VIDAA still isn’t the prettiest smart system around, but it’s fast, responsive and logically laid out. App support is broadly very good, too, with all of the major streaming services and UK catch-up apps present and correctly supporting the relevant picture and sound formats.

There are, however, a few frustrating omissions. Most notably, the Apple TV app lacks access to the Apple TV store and users’ purchased libraries, so it can’t be used for movie purchases and rentals. That’s a real disappointment, as Apple’s pay-as-you-go store is the best around.

While far less important for a TV, it’s worth noting that music streaming support is sparse, too, with Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music and Qobuz all absent. There are no cloud gaming apps, either.

The inclusion of Freely is welcome, though, as it allows live TV channels to be streamed over the internet without an aerial connection.

Picture quality

The Hisense UR9 makes a superb first impression. In fact, perhaps the most impressive thing about it is just how rarely it behaves like a traditional backlit TV.

Before getting into that, though, some setup advice is required, because the TV’s default HDR settings do it few favours.

When first fed HDR10 content, the UR9 automatically switches into its HDR Energy Saving mode which, despite its name, is surprisingly aggressive. Colours skew cool and bluish, motion processing is overly intrusive, and the overall image looks unnatural and overcooked.

HDR Standard and HDR Dynamic are similarly best avoided, both pushing sharpness, brightness and processing much too hard.

Thankfully, Filmmaker Mode proves far more successful. It delivers the most accurate and balanced picture of the available presets, and it quickly becomes our preferred overall option.

Interestingly, though, IMAX Cinema is also unusually compelling. While its underlying settings appear almost identical to those of Filmmaker Mode, it consistently produces a noticeably brighter and punchier image without obviously compromising balance or naturalism.

As a result, we would stick with Filmmaker Mode for dark-room and purist viewing, but happily switch to IMAX Cinema during the daytime or whenever we fancy a little extra visual intensity.

Once properly configured, the UR9 is an extremely accomplished performer.

Play 1917 on 4K Blu-ray, and the opening logos immediately demonstrate just how well controlled the TV’s backlight system is. Blooming around the bright white text is minimal, black depth is strong, and colours look rich, warm and nicely cinematic.

More importantly, the local-dimming system generally goes about its business without drawing attention to itself. Throughout our testing, the UR9 almost never exhibits the flickering, brightness pumping or visibly shifting backlight behaviour that can make many Mini LED TVs distracting.

That consistency quickly emerges as the UR9’s defining strength. While many bright Mini LED TVs constantly remind you that they are dynamically manipulating a backlight behind the scenes, the Hisense instead achieves a broadly very composed, stable and natural delivery that often feels surprisingly OLED-like.

Blade Runner 2049 showcases this particularly well. Black depth is consistently strong, shadow detail is excellent and subtle blooming is tightly controlled. There’s also impressive richness and stability to colours, especially reds, which look wonderfully pure and saturated without drifting into pink or magenta tones.

Extra-bright HDR material suits the UR9 especially well, too. Pan looks spectacular here, with dazzling highlights and bold, vibrant colours that comfortably outgun the Sony Bravia 8 II for outright brightness in many scenes. Sunlight bursting through clouds and glinting off the fantasy scenery of Neverland is delivered with real punch and intensity.

Crucially, though, the UR9 generally achieves this brightness without sacrificing balance. Skin tones remain natural, and there’s a pleasing cinematic warmth to the image – and it doesn’t drift into gaudiness.

Motion handling is strong, too. The default Film setting is decent enough, but switching Motion Enhancement to Clear results in noticeably smoother pans without introducing the distracting soap-opera effect or processing artefacts that such systems often create.

The notoriously difficult Matera cemetery and chase sequence from No Time To Die is handled particularly well, with impressively little judder to the panning shots and clean rendering of drifting smoke and rapid camera movement.

Dropping down to standard-def and SDR, our Kiss Kiss Bang Bang DVD is reproduced with pleasing warmth, strong detail and impressively clean upscaling. Colours are arguably pushed a touch too hard at times, but the overall presentation remains highly enjoyable and consistently cinematic.

For all of the UR9’s strengths, though, direct comparisons with a top-tier OLED TV still reveal the limitations of even this undeniably refined RGB Mini LED model. Despite its impressive local-dimming system, the Hisense simply cannot match the pixel-level contrast control of the Sony Bravia 8 II.

Extremely bright highlights against deep black backgrounds are sometimes handled slightly conservatively, presumably to avoid blooming. Perhaps counterintuitively, those bright white logos against pitch-black backgrounds appear more intense and impactful on the Sony OLED than on the much brighter, on paper, Hisense.

More significantly, the OLED TV produces a more solid and perceptually three-dimensional image across the board. Objects and characters stand out from their surroundings with greater depth and dynamism, while subtle gradations within clouds, shadows and highlights appear more convincing and refined, creating a more rounded look.

This isn’t a new phenomenon: we have documented that extra solidity you get from OLED plenty of times previously, most notably when we used the Sony Bravia 8 OLED as a comparison in our Bravia 9 Mini LED review. But it bears repeating for those who are choosing between an OLED and a backlit TV.

Viewing angles are another clear OLED advantage. While the UR9’s picture performance doesn’t entirely fall off a cliff when you move off-axis, the sweet spot in which it performs at its very best is surprisingly narrow.

And while the UR9 usually keeps blooming impressively well controlled, especially for a backlit TV, particularly torturous scenes can still expose its limitations.

The bomb-test sequence in Oppenheimer is a great example. From the UR9, there’s a slight general greying to the image, plus some visible glow around isolated spotlights in the darkness. The opening starfield of Alien: Romulus, meanwhile, reveals that the UR9 cannot simultaneously maintain truly inky blacks and perfectly intense star highlights in the way an OLED can.

To be clear, the Hisense performs well in these scenes by LCD standards, and many owners may never notice such shortcomings during normal viewing. But they do prevent the UR9 from truly matching the effortless contrast precision and dimensionality of the best OLED TVs.

Sound quality

Developed in partnership with Devialet, the UR9’s 4.1.2-channel speaker system delivers a surprisingly expansive and full-bodied presentation by TV standards, with particularly impressive width and height effects.

The Theatre sound mode is the most immediately striking of the available presets, producing a presentation that extends well beyond the physical boundaries of the TV and creating a convincing sense of spaciousness with Dolby Atmos soundtracks.

There’s decent bass depth, too, and the UR9 maintains good composure at high volumes, avoiding the harshness and distortion that can afflict many flatscreen TVs when pushed hard.

The overall presentation is smooth and rich in character, which makes the UR9 an easy and enjoyable listen over long viewing sessions.

It isn’t perfect, though. Dynamics are a little stunted, and action scenes lack some of the punch and excitement they deserve, while dialogue could be projected with greater clarity and emotional expression.

The Theatre mode also slightly overplays its hand at times. While its extra spaciousness is undeniably appealing, it introduces a faintly diffuse and echoey quality to voices, along with a slight sense of delay that makes speech sound less natural than it should.

As a result, we find ourselves preferring the Standard sound mode for most content. It still sounds pleasantly spacious and open, but delivers dialogue with greater focus and cohesion while maintaining good weight and scale.

Ultimately, while even a modest dedicated soundbar will comfortably outperform it, the UR9’s audio system is better than that of most TVs, even at this lofty level.

Verdict

In several ways, the Hisense UR9 is one of the best backlit TVs we have ever tested.

Most of the time, you’re not even made aware that it is a backlit TV, so good are its black levels, its control of blooming and its consistent, flicker-free contrast.

While it is possible to trip up the backlight, it’s quite hard to do so, and many buyers may never see an unsightly bloom in their period of UR9 ownership.

But while this first mainstream RGB Mini LED TV is broadly mercifully free of the flaws that generally afflict backlit TVs, it still can’t match the overall picture quality of the best OLED models.

The pixel-level contrast control of OLED brings benefits in several areas. There are the notably brighter highlights on very dark backgrounds that even accomplished backlit sets, such as the UR9, are too cautious to go all guns blazing with for fear of blooming. There are the almost flawless viewing angles, too, which the UR9 is a long way from matching.

The biggest thing, though, is the generally more solid, more perceptually three-dimensional image that OLED provides. Next to the Bravia 8 II, the Hisense UR9 simply looks flatter, less dynamic and less impactful.

Ultimately, as enjoyable and technically impressive as the UR9 is, we can’t think of a good reason you would buy it over a flagship-grade OLED, and that’s the level at which Hisense is pitching it – at least in the UK.

Of course, if you are someone who has a flagship-level budget for their next TV and a general aversion to OLED, the Hisense UR9 should be right around the top of your list.

If you’re a UK buyer, it’s probably a good idea to wait and see if we get a massive US-style discount before placing an order, though.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 4
• Features 4

MORE:

Also consider the Sony Bravia 8 II, LG G6 and Sony Bravia 9

Here are all of the best TVs you can buy right now

If you are looking for a soundbar system, one of the names you will keep seeing in your search is Samsung. And that's for good reason, as it has delivered plenty of strong contenders to our test room over the years.

And one of the top-performing models comes in the form of the Samsung HW-Q990F, which holds a place on our best soundbars guide. The soundbar system consists of a main soundbar, wireless subwoofer and two surround speakers.

But the newest version of the bar, the Samsung HW-Q990H has now leaped onto the scene. We put the two systems head to head in our test room, so we know how they compare. Let's see which model is the overall winner…

Samsung HW-Q990F vs HW-Q990H: price

The Samsung Q990H launched at £1599 / $2000 / AU$1999, placing it in the high-end soundbar category. It’s still a new addition to the market so we don’t expect any notable discounts just yet, but these are likely to come later down the line.

We can say that with a reasonable certainty, as that’s what happened with the Samsung Q990F. It launched at £1699 / $1999 / AU$1999, which is slightly more pricey in the UK and the US than its successor.

Since its release, the system has seen significant discounts and is regularly available for around £999 in the UK.

That means that, although the Q990H launched at a lower price initially, the Q990F’s cheaper price tag now makes it the winner in this category.

**Winner: Samsung HW-Q990F**

Samsung HW-Q990F vs HW-Q990H: design

Side by side, you would be hard-pressed to tell the two soundbar systems apart. Both of the main soundbars measure 7 x 123 x 14cm (hwd) and weigh in at 7.3kg.

You’ll find a selection of buttons on top to change source, mute the onboard microphones and adjust the volume, with a dot-matrix display on the front displaying corresponding information.

The subwoofer with both models is a cube measuring 25 x 25 x 25cm and weighing 8.3kg. Finally, the surround speakers are also the same, featuring a boxy, angular design that includes a handy cable channel on the bottom edge. They also carry identical dimensions, measuring 20 x 13 x 14cm.

Both are well-built and feel premium with everything constructed from aluminium or a sturdy, high-quality plastic. But overall the design is starting to get a little tired, especially considering the previous Q990D and Q990C models look practically identical.

The brand bundles a remote with functions to change the input, sound mode and EQ for the system, as well as adjusting the subwoofer level.

There’s not much to compare here as they are basically twins, so it has to be a tie.

**Winner: draw**

Samsung HW-Q990F vs HW-Q990H: features

It’s a familiar story when it comes to the features. Both Samsung systems offer an 11.1.4 channel configuration, with an impressive total of 23 individual drivers on board. This includes 15 drivers in the main soundbar, three in each of the wireless surround speakers, and two 8-inch woofers (in a push/pull configuration) in the wireless subwoofer.

Both the soundbars and surround speakers feature upward-firing drivers, which brings us neatly onto the immersive sound formats that the systems support.

They both support three immersive-audio formats: Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and Samsung’s Eclipsa Audio. The last of those hasn’t been adopted by any other services aside from YouTube so far, but it’s nice to be future-proofed in case that changes.

To adjust settings for both systems, the Samsung SmartThings app is on hand to help. With both bars, we find this is the preferred way of interacting with the settings menus, thanks to the snappy connection and easy-to-understand menus.

You can also control your source from this app, including music streamed wirelessly to the system. Both the Q990F and Q990H support Spotify Connect, Apple AirPlay, Google Cast, Tidal Connect and Bluetooth; they are even Roon-compatible.

But what about physical connectivity? The soundbar has three HDMI sockets in total. This includes an HDMI eARC for connecting to your TV, alongside two full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 passthrough sockets, which support up to 4K/120Hz signals with VRR and ALLM, as well as HDR10, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision (a nice touch, as Samsung TVs don't support Dolby Vision).

Samsung’s SpaceFit Sound Pro feature, which is essentially this soundbar’s calibration system, is also present in both bars. The optional feature utilises the built-in microphones to constantly monitor and adjust the soundbar and subwoofer to accommodate your viewing space.

There are four sound modes with each bar: Standard, Surround, Game and AI Adaptive. With both soundbars, Surround mode is the best for movies and TV shows, as the wider sound field means all components hang together in a more sonically cohesive way. Standard is our preferred preset for music, as it features minimal processing and a more focused sound.

One of the few differences here between the two bars is the Q990H’s inclusion of Samsung’s new Sound Elevation feature. This is designed to raise the audio upwards to match the position of your screen.

Samsung hasn’t given a clear indication of how it determines where to place the audio, and for us it seems to overshoot slightly, placing the sound towards the top edge of our reference TV. This setting may appeal more to those who wall-mount their TV and leave a gap between it and their soundbar.

On top of that, Q Symphony – in which your Samsung TV’s speakers work in tandem with the system – is also supported.

Although the Q990H offers the new Sound Elevation feature, it is not impactful enough to sway the result, so we are once again looking at a tie.

**Winner: draw**

Samsung HW-Q990F vs HW-Q990H: sound

Both soundbar systems are five-star performers, delivering a rich and engaging sound that is a huge improvement on the vast majority of TV speakers.

Vocals sound natural and detailed while carrying plenty of subtle inflexion. With the Samsung Q990H, this system manages to unearth subtler sonic nuances, which results in a slightly more natural sound than the Q990F. It’s not a night-and-day difference, but the newest model is the slightly better performer in this area.

The Q990H continues just to get the edge on its predecessor when it comes to height effects. When watching Chapter 2 of Blade Runner 2049 with the two models, both place the sound of the holographic announcements near Officer K’s apartment with excellent precision. But the newer model takes this even further than the Q990F, offering a greater sense of accuracy and spaciousness.

Continuing with Bladerunner 2049, both soundbars show off their excellent bass performance. With the famously tricky chapter two sequence, both systems deliver rich and powerful bass sounds that are controlled and dynamic, as we gain a sense of mounting tension as K approaches the police precinct.

But how do the two bars perform with music? With both systems, most, if not all, of the positive attributes from our movie testing are present and correct for music. We play a range of tracks, and the Q990F and Q990H both offer a clear-cut sense of timing and rhythmic drive. Vocals continue to sound clear and emotive, while instruments have depth and texture.

While they are both excellent-sounding systems, Samsung’s subtle upgrades to the HW-Q990H make it the better of the two soundbars.

**Winner: Samsung HW-Q990H**

Samsung HW-Q990F vs HW-Q990H: verdict

Each Samsung system is very well matched in design and features, offering ample surround sound options and a sturdy build.

The Samsung Q990F is a top-performing system when it comes to audio, but the Q990H takes everything we love about the previous generation and delivers it with even more nuance, detail and scale.

The Q990H is the more expensive option right now, but we expect the price to drop soon, as we have seen with its predecessor. If your budget cannot stretch to the newest model, however, the Q990F is still an excellent-sounding alternative.

**Overall winner: Samsung HW-Q990H**

MORE:

Check out our full review of the Samsung HW-Q990H

And here is our Samsung HW-Q990F review

These are the best Dolby Atmos soundbars

As we hurtle past spring and into the early days of summer, our test rooms are overflowing with new products from the world of hi-fi, headphones and home cinema.

We have the very first RGB Mini LED TV from Hisense in for testing and ready to take on OLED; Anker’s mid-priced, feature-packed wireless ANC headphones vie for a place in a hugely competitive market; Dali’s new slimline floorstanders aim to make a big impact from a small footprint; and Naim’s flagship, four-box amplifier combination want to showcase the very best of hi-fi separates.

If you have any questions about the products we have in for testing, drop us a comment below or send us an email to whathifi@futurenet.com, and we’ll endeavour to get back to you with an answer.

Naim NAC 552/NAP 500DR pre/power amplifier

The pinnacle of Naim’s separates hi-fi is the Statement amplifier, which will cost you just shy of £235,000. The next step down from that is the brand’s flagship 500 series pre/power amplifier combination that consists of four – yes, four – imposing black boxes.

We’ve got the NAC 552 preamplifier and the hefty NAP 500DR power amplifier, each with its own power supply, which combine to serve as “a remarkable showcase of Naim Audio amplifier technology” and aims to deliver the very best sonic performance at this high-end level (just over £50,000). We can’t wait to hear how it sounds, especially when paired with our reference ND 555 music streamer.

JBL Xtreme 5 Bluetooth speaker

JBL’s line of portable Bluetooth speakers are on enviable form, with one of its beefiest – the Xtreme 4 – nabbing a What Hi-Fi? Award win two years in a row.

Its successor, the JBL Xtreme 5, doesn’t rest on its laurels. There are upgrades to make the burly speaker even more drop-proof and rugged, refined cosmetics to make it more user-friendly, while the acoustics have been overhauled for a deeper, louder and clearer sound. If that wasn’t enough, it now has customisable ambient lights, a real-time smart EQ Mode, lossless audio playback via wired USB-C, and you can use it as a powerbank for your phone. That’s a lot of speaker for £330.

Dali Sonik 5 floorstanders

Dali’s new Sonik range effectively replaces the much-loved Oberon speakers, and we have the smallest of the three floorstanders – the Sonik 5 – in for review.

Promising “a significant leap in detail, dynamics and musicality”, the Sonik 5 features an ultra-light 29mm soft-dome tweeter and two 13.3cm mid/bass drivers that use Dali’s Clarity Cone structure with patented SMC Essential Magnet System – a technology originally seen in the more premium Epicon speaker range.

Standing just 82.6cm tall (under three feet), this slimline floorstander is yours for £899 / $1800 per pair, which puts it up against ferocious competition from the Award-winning Fyne F501E.

Soundcore Space 2 wireless headphones

Anker’s range of wireless headphones has caused quite a stir with their blend of good features and sensible pricing, so we’re keen to find out how well the new Soundcore Space 2 over-ear cans perform.

They feature active noise-cancellation, hi-res LDAC codec support over Bluetooth, a massive 70 hours of battery life (50 with ANC on), and customisable audio tuning based on your hearing. All for just £130 / $130? That seems quite exciting, and we hope its audio claims live up to the competition, especially from the likes of five-star Sony and Austrian Audio rivals.

Hisense UR9 RGB Mini LED TV

The first RGB Mini LED TV to hit our test room, the Hisense UR9 is out to prove that a backlit TV can beat a flagship OLED. The £3000 launch price for the 65-inch model puts it in direct competition with OLEDs such as the LG G6 and Sony Bravia 8 II – and, indeed, we will be comparing it side by side with precisely those models.

Can its RGB LEDs and extreme brightness trump the pixel-level contrast of its OLED rivals? We’ll know soon enough.

Hisense XR10 projector

If an RGB Mini LED TV isn’t quite cinematic enough for you, this alternative Hisense product might be right up your street.

The XR10 is what we like to refer to as a ‘coffee table projector’, but its £5000 launch price and 6000 ANSI lumens of claimed brightness mark it out as a very different beast to other models in that category.

Q Acoustics 3050C 5.1 speaker package

Q Acoustics has an enviable track record where it comes to wallet-friendly speakers and speaker packages, so we are excited to start listening to the 3050C 5.1 system.

As the name suggests, the system is built around 3050C floorstanders, which perform front-left and front-right duties. A pair of 3010C bookshelf speakers work as surrounds, and you also get a 3090C centre and 10-inch Q SUB100 subwoofer.

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Now Playing: check out the five blockbuster test tracks we’re using this May

“They fully deserve their legendary status” – listening to Wilson Audio’s The WATT/Puppy speakers, a resurrection with a modern twist

This premium CD player has caught my eye – is this what my beloved disc collection has been waiting for?

BenQ is one of the busiest projector brands around, producing models of all shapes, sizes and prices.

The TK705i successfully finds another little twist to add to the current projector range by combining a solid picture performance with an aggressive price, built-in smarts and arguably BenQ’s cutest design to date.

Though as we’ll see, offering so much for its price tag hasn’t been a completely compromise-free process.

Price

At £1199 / $1799 / AU$2199, the TK705i sits towards the lower end of the lifestyle projector market – yet it has some promising specifications and features to its name. These include built-in Google smarts, 3000 lumens of claimed peak brightness, 4K HDR playback and an integrated sound system.

Key rivals in this space are the Award-winning Hisense M2 Pro, and the super-stylish Epson EF-72.

Design

The TK705i is the latest example of a rapidly expanding trend for roughly cubic projectors. Its take on this trend, though, is actually one of the most attractive to date.

Apparently inspired by dappled sunlight filtering through layered leaves (yes, really), the TK705i features a bluish-grey fabric front and sides finished in a nicely contrasting hard plastic grille with some interesting spots of solid smooth grey finish over clusters of the grille holes.

Rounded corners soften the projector’s presence to complete the living room-friendly feel, and you can attach its strikingly compact form to a mounting foot if you want to add rotating and tilting flexibility to its design charms. It’s even possible to use the projector inverted and tilted on a shelf if such positioning suits your room layout.

At which point we’re feeling pretty confident that our inadequate words really aren’t doing the TK705i’s prettiness justice, and refer you to the photographs accompanying this review.

The TK705i ships with a full-sized remote control featuring large, clearly labelled buttons in a sensible layout that makes its key mic, home screen, auto picture adaptation, YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video and Live TV buttons suitably prominent with an eye-catching white backing.

Features

The TK705i’s eye-catching design is built around a DLP optical system illuminated by LED lighting. It can play 4K sources and high dynamic range in the HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ formats, but not Dolby Vision. The 3000 lumens of claimed peak light output is reckoned to be capable of driving screens as big as 120 inches across.

The 4K support is achieved using Texas Instruments’ XPR pixel shifting technology rather than the sort of native 4K pixel counts you get with much more expensive projectors from Sony and JVC, but unlike other pixel-shift technologies, DLP’s approach has been deemed ‘true 4K’ by the Consumer Technology Association group in the US.

Connections on the TK705i comprise two HDMIs (one with eARC support for passing audio out to a soundbar or AVR), two USB-C ports, a 12V trigger port for powering up or down a motorised screen or curtains system, and a 3.5mm audio output. Plus, there’s wi-fi, of course, to support the projector’s built-in smart features.

The TK705i’s HDMIs don’t support 4K resolution at 120Hz. The best we could get was 4K/60Hz, in fact, complete with HDR resolution. No higher frame rates were showing as available, even if we lowered the resolution output from our Xbox Series X.

The projector does have a few helpful gaming features up its sleeve, though, including dedicated HDR RPG and FPS gaming modes designed to give the best experience for those sorts of games, and an impressively low standard input lag time in its Gaming mode of just 12.2ms.

While we didn’t find a way to achieve the 5ms of lag quoted as possible for the projector by BenQ, we did get it down to an extremely low 9.3ms by activating Gaming Boost mode. Note that this mode, however, turns off all of the image placement corrections you likely made during set-up – even the manual zoom function. So, unless you’re very lucky and the TK705i delivers a perfect image at just the right size and in just the right place in your living room with no corrective measures required, you’ll probably prefer to live with the extra 3ms of lag required to keep image set-up corrections intact.

Talking of set-up, the TK705i features a sophisticated Smart Image Adaptation system to help you get images appearing with the correct geometry and proportions with the minimum of manual intervention. This includes automatic 2D keystone adjustment, auto focus, automatic screen fit (provided your screen has a clearly defined border), auto obstacle avoidance that can shift pictures around objects that might sit between the projector and your screen, and automatic eye protection that turns the brightness down if you get your head too close to the lens.

There’s even an Auto Cinema Mode that can adapt the image’s tone and brightness based on analysis of both your wall colour and ambient light levels.

In the unlikely event that you still feel you need to fine-tune the image after the auto set-up features have done their thing, optical zoom, manual focus and digital image shift features are all provided in motorised form via the remote control.

The TK705i’s menus and smart features are delivered, as usual for BenQ, by the Google TV system. Which is mostly fine, except that the BBC iPlayer still refuses to play ball with it. Just about every other app is there, though, including the other key UK terrestrial broadcaster catch-up apps.

BenQ’s CinematicColor system for delivering ‘true to life’ colours is present and correct on the TK705i, and claims to be capable of covering 98 per cent of the Rec 709 standard dynamic range colour spectrum.

One final positive feature of note is the projector’s ability to run very quietly – as little as 24dB – for such a compact 3000-lumen-capable projector, even when showing HDR video.

Picture

While the TK705i’s pictures are unsurprisingly (given its price) not quite up there with the very best projectors in BenQ’s current range, they’re still enjoyable enough to make it look pretty good value.

The first thing that strikes us about the TK705i’s pictures is how bright they are. That 3000 lumens brightness claim feels slightly pessimistic, in fact, as the projector both punches through quite high levels of ambient light without its pictures feeling flat or washed out, and delivers intense, luminous-looking pictures in dark-room conditions.

The high brightness helps it deliver compelling HDR pictures by such affordable 4K projector standards, as well as allowing BenQ to provide a reasonable amount of flexibility over your preferred HDR ‘look’; in particular, how much the presentation favours brightness vs detail in bright areas.

Initially, we felt that the TK705i’s brightness seemed to be running slightly ahead of its colour performance, leaving tones feeling a little faded. A Dynamic Colour feature, though, does an excellent job of injecting more vibrancy into proceedings, resulting in a punchy, potent image with both SDR and HDR sources. This extra colour punch is delivered while retaining impressive levels of blend and tone subtlety, too.

No colour – not even skin tones – looks flat or plasticky under the Dynamic Colour regime, and while tones don’t look quite as uniformly natural and accurate as they do with BenQ’s finest projectors, no particular tones stand out too starkly from the rest.

In fact, it’s ultimately the balance and nuance the TK705i’s pictures retain despite their high brightness and Dynamic Colour vibrancy boost that most stands out against much of the competition at this level.

Motion looks clean and natural on the TK705i, even with 24p films, without any need to engage the motion processing options, and DLP projection’s rainbow effect issue, where red, green and blue stripes can flit over bright highlights, is controlled well enough not to become a serious distraction even to What Hi-Fi? team members who are particularly susceptible to seeing it.

There are a couple of areas, though, where the TK705i’s relative affordability shows through. First, its pictures aren’t quite as pin-sharp and detailed-looking as some of the best sub-£1500 projectors around. Pictures still look 4K, to be fair, regardless of whether you’re watching native 4K or HD sources, but they lack a little of that snap and crispness that we know DLP projectors are capable of (despite not using truly native 4K optical systems).

The biggest limitation of the TK705i, though, is its handling of dark scenes. While dark areas of mostly bright pictures look reasonably convincing and create a decent sense of contrast and depth, fully dark sequences look rather grey and flat as the projector struggles to resolve the sort of black levels movie fans love – and which BenQ is usually so good at producing.

Setting an Adaptive Luma feature to its Medium setting enhances the projector’s dynamic range and gives the image a bit more punch, which at least helps to hide the black level shortcomings – but it doesn’t completely solve the problem, and can cause some shadow detailing to go missing in the darkest corners.

To be fair, the TK705i’s black colour limitations are much less noticeable if you’re watching the projector in a non-blacked-out room – and relatively ‘lifestyle’ projectors such as the TK705i are much more likely to find themselves operating in ambient light than dedicated home cinema models. So, if your likely use case for a TK705i is going to be almost constant regular living room viewing, where removing all ambient light is pretty much impossible, its pictures could seriously work for you.

For a projector to bag that elusive fifth star, though, it needs to be able to adapt to serious movie nights a little better than the TK705i can.

Sound

Given that the TK705i’s cubic design is down at least in part to a desire to include decent integrated speakers, its sound performance comes as quite a disappointment.

Particularly troublesome is how bright and harsh high-pitched sound effects and voices are, especially at the sort of relatively high volumes many home cinema fans will want to push towards for movie nights.

Dense soundtrack moments also sound thin and sibilant at any sort of volume, and the tendency to exaggerate treble isn’t helped by the integrated 2 x 8W sound system’s bass limitations. The movie world’s deepest rumbles lack potency and presence relative to the rest of the sound presentation, can succumb to sort of whistling distortion at times, and can even just drop out of the sound presentation entirely when the going gets really deep.

The pity is that aside from the one-sided nature of the sound, there are signs of promise in the TK705i’s audio. Despite not being one of BenQ’s most powerful projector sound systems, for instance, it still manages to project elements of the sound beyond its bodywork, getting some value out of Dolby Atmos soundtracks and reducing the common projector sound sensation that what you’re hearing isn’t connected with the pictures across the room.

The harshness reduces substantially if you’re in a small enough room not to need the volume to be cranked high, too.

In the end, though, while the TK705i can get pretty loud and detailed for such a compact projector, that loudness just isn’t fun to listen to.

Verdict

The TK705i’s uniquely cute, living room-friendly design and bright, vibrant images will deservedly win it plenty of fans.

Rather lacklustre black levels for dark room viewing and a surprisingly bass-light and brittle sound system, though, mean that the TK705i ultimately falls short of becoming another five-star BenQ projector masterclass.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 2
• Features 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Epson EF-72

Also consider the Hisense M2 Pro

Read our BenQ W2700 review

Best projectors: the best options tested by our home cinema experts

Building a family of great-sounding home audio products that can be used in isolation or together as a system is a tricky task. Bose will be hoping its new Lifestyle Collection can succeed where many have tried and failed.

Consisting of a Dolby Atmos soundbar, wireless subwoofer and wireless speaker, the new range was demonstrated at a special press preview where we could see and hear what it has to offer.

During the event, we got some hands-on time with the flagship Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar. We were able to hear it both in isolation and with the rest of the family in a full-blown Dolby Atmos surround sound system. Here are our initial thoughts.

Price

The Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar is priced at £1000 / €1000 / $1099 / AU$1800, which places it firmly against the Sonos Arc Ultra (£999 / $999 / AU$1799).

The Sonos rival is not only a five-star product, but it’s also the current class-leader, having picked up a What Hi-Fi? Award in 2025 for its troubles. If you want the best Dolby Atmos soundbar we’ve tested at this level, the Sonos is the one to beat.

Another close rival is the Sony Theatre Bar 9, which started life a little more expensive than the Bose when it launched a couple of years ago, but has dropped from £1399 / $1400 / AU$1795 to around the £999 mark if you shop around online.

Design

It’s fair to say that soundbars don’t tend to be the most attractive pieces of tech. Credit to Bose, though – it has done a good job trying to elevate the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar’s appearance above the long plastic rectangles we tend to see dominating the category.

The ’bar is covered in a textured-knit fabric (available in either black or the white smoke finish, above), which feels relatively premium and is nice to the touch.

Stretching out across the ’bar is an attractive, sleek glass top, built into which is a circular touch-sensitive control panel. This allows you to control music playback and volume via a combination of tapping and sliding your finger around the inner edge clockwise (volume up) ot anti-clockwise (volume down).

That glass top stops short of the edges of the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar because it needs to leave room for its full-range up-firing drivers to do their work.

There’s one of these at either end of the bar, firing sound up at 90 degrees to add height and immersion to movie soundtracks. Note that this means the bar isn’t suited to being under a shelf with a TV above, as this will block the sound.

Across the front of the bar are four ‘racetrack’ drivers (the far left and right ones are full-range) and two of Bose’s PhaseGuide drivers, which use special processing to spread sound to areas where there aren’t actually any speakers.

On the rear, you’ll find two of Bose’s QuietPorts, which work with the company’s CleanBass technology and internal digital signal processing (DSP) to deliver low frequencies in a deep, controlled way with minimal distortion.

The soundbar’s dimensions are 6.7 x 111 x 12.5cm (hwd), and it tips the scales at just less than 7kg. For comparison, the Sonos Arc Ultra is a little bigger, measuring 7.5 x 118 x 11cm although it’s also a little lighter at 6kg.

For our demonstration, the Bose was used with a 75-inch flatscreen TV, but it would look equally at home with a 65-inch or 55-inch model. It can be wall-mounted, although the mount itself is optional and costs £34 / €39 / $49 / AU$69.

Features

Physical connections are limited to ethernet and a single, eARC-compatible HDMI socket. It’s a shame Bose hasn’t seen fit to include any additional HDMI 2.1 inputs – the Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 includes one, although the Sonos Arc Ultra doesn’t.

Wi-fi is onboard, and streaming comes via Google Cast, Apple AirPlay or Spotify Connect. The soundbar also supports Bluetooth 5.3. Tidal Connect isn’t supported by the soundbar (or Lifestyle Ultra Speaker) at launch, but we have been assured that it’s in the pipeline.

To set the bar up, you’ll need to head into the Bose app, which has been given an overhaul to make things more intuitive, with fewer button presses required to get up and running.

As mentioned previously, Dolby Atmos is supported, but DTS isn’t. This doesn’t come as a huge surprise – the Sonos Arc Ultra is in the same boat – but it’s worth noting that Sony did find room to include it on its Bravia Theatre Bar 9, and Disney+ does now offer a DTS:X audio option for some of its content.

To calibrate the soundbar for your particular room layout, Bose’s CustomTune technology works with the microphone in your smartphone (iOS or Android) and analyses your room dimensions, surfaces and furniture placement.

In the app, you can also dive in and alter sound levels manually if you think they require a bit of extra tweaking. You are likely to find yourself in the app quite a bit, as you don’t get a physical remote control supplied with the soundbar.

Sound

As with any product listened to only briefly at a press event, it’s tricky to nail down exactly how the unit performs – especially in a room that is completely new to you.

Our demo took place in a space that should really play to the strengths of the Bose: a relatively simple square room, with bare walls and little in the way of soft furnishings to stop reflections and the spread of sound.

We start with a clip from the epic sci-fi movie Dune, and the Bose gets to work immersing us in the middle of a violent sandstorm. As the soundbar starts whipping up particles above and around our seating position, it seems to do a good job of spreading the effects across the soundfield.

We are listening at quite a high volume, and the soundbar seems to handle the pressure of the scene and the drama without showing too many signs of stress. As the on-screen action goes from all-out chaos to relative calm, the bar seems to communicate the switch in dynamics relatively well.

We switch to a scene from Ray to showcase the Bose’s Speech Clarity mode, which claims to be able to boost dialogue but not any other effects. Without the mode on, as Ray Charles crosses the road deep in conversation with his manager, it sounds more like a mumble.

Then, with Speech Clarity mode switched onto its highest setting, the dialogue does seem to be lifted out of the hustle and bustle of the effects around it, with the edges of words a little clearer and better defined. This could come in handy during late-night viewing, where you don’t want the surround effects boosting but need a bit of a dialogue boost.

To showcase the Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer and its impact on music, Bose plays Mi Corazon by Jacob Collier in stereo. There’s a decent spread of percussion, and when the sub kicks in, there's an injection of extra weight, and those low-frequency bass kicks are reinforced with a greater sense of solidity. Adding the soundbar, they immediately hit harder with more heft and body behind them.

Bose then adds a pair of Lifestyle Ultra Speakers as surrounds, so we are listening to a 7.1.4 Atmos system, and plays a clip from 6 Underground by Michael Bay.

As Ryan Reynolds is chased through Florence by the mafia and Italian police, effects are flying in all directions, with screeching tyres, gunshots, and a deep, pulsing heartbeat, all vying for your attention. And the system seems to do a good job of immersing you in the action. Detail levels seem ok, but we need to spend more time testing the bar to hear the true extent of its abilities.

The last scene we are shown is Queen’s Live Aid performance from Bohemian Rhapsody, which sounds relatively punchy and powerful through the soundbar. It’s hard not to hear the impact of the roar from the crowd as they explode into life when the band appears and they eagerly lap up Freddie’s direction. There seems to be a good, expansive spread of sound as they sing along with the frontman while he shows off his impressive vocal range.

When Hammer To Fall kicks in, there seems to be a decent amount of energy and life to the guitars and drums – but again, we really need more time with the soundbar to hear just how musical it is and how well it sticks with the tempo and rhythm of a range of different tracks.

Initial verdict

In a market still dominated by Sonos, it's good to see the arrival of a potential new rival from Bose, and we are being promised a big overhaul in terms of design and technology in an attempt to position itself as a serious rival.

Bose’s previous flagship, the Smart Ultra Soundbar, struggled to impress our review team, so we hope this new model is much more competitive when it arrives in our test room for a thorough evaluation.

MORE:

Read our Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar review

Our pick of the best Dolby Atmos soundbars for all budgets

Sonos Arc Ultra vs Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9: which flagship Dolby Atmos soundbar is better?

Sydney turned up the sunshine and the sound quality for a spectacular Australian Hi‑Fi Show 2026, held in the heart of the city, near Central Station and Chinatown. The boutique Sydney Central Hotel opened up four floors to the Show’s systems and sounds over three days, from official firing-up time at 2pm on Friday 1st May, until the volume pots dipped their last at 4pm on Sunday 3rd May.

Rooms and suites were filled with hi-fi systems combining sculptural speakers and high-end stacks with streaming simplicity and intuitive phone-based control. Especially welcome was a new ‘Homegrown Hi-Fi’ area for the Corridor of Sound up on the ninth floor, showcasing a serious selection of Australian-made audio – which proved to include several of the Show’s top attractions.

There was also a strong home cinema contingent this year, covering both the affordable and the aspirational, with a pair of full big-screen projection rooms offering action on Level 1, plus immersive soundbar demonstrations up in the Corridor of Sound, and a special basement theatre showcasing Leica’s award-winning projection skills. We’ll start our coverage down there at the bottom of the Sydney Central, working our way through the four floors to the top.

Lower Ground

Leica Camera Australia

Leica’s bright, colourful and comfortable lower ground cinema room was packed when we entered, with three different demonstrations running. Two of these used the ultra-short-throw Cine 1 ‘Cinema TV’, a gorgeous object in itself, while gaining from Leica’s skills in glass making to deliver edge-to-edge sharp imaging, less aberrated than rival lenses. The Cine 1 has been in the market for a few years now, but has recently been slashed in price almost by half, making it far more competitive against rivals (and prompting us to ‘renew’ a Sound+Image award originally presented at the higher original price).

Leica had one Cine 1 projecting onto the 120-inch Leica ambient-light-rejecting screen which can be purchased for an extra $1000 with the Cine 1.

To the right, projecting onto a bare white wall, was the Leica Cine Play 1 mini projector, which was deliberately set up off-axis to show how it can nevertheless use its built-in smarts to deliver a bright and colourful large-screen image.

One clever demonstration trick invoked by Leica’s Shaun McMahon was to pop on a few spotlights to mimic ambient daylight. While this caused significant wash-out on the two projectors that directly illuminated the walls, it had almost no discernable effect on the ALJ screen image – showing how valuable such a screen can be when considering these systems as replacements for TVs, including use in daytime environments.

Mcleans Smarter Home Entertainment

The distributing retailer, now based back in Long Jetty between Tuggerah Lake and the Pacific Ocean, provided another oasis of calm in the Lower Ground, with tall Magnepan MG2.7X planar-magnetic loudspeakers rolling out what are always top tunes under the control of Bill and Margaret Mclean, on this visit including Dr. John’s 2022 kick-arse I Walk On Guilded Splinters and Mary Gaultier’s Falling Out Of Love. Both served to highlight the delicious delicacy of the Magnepan full-range dipole speakers, which are a three-way design with 101cm true ribbon tweeters supported by foil bass and midrange. Yet as both the Dr John and later billie eilish’s My Strange Addiction proved, they could also grab a bassline and run tight and strong with it. Impressive stuff at $16,990 a pair.

In support of the speakers were an Innuos Pulsar music streamer streaming Qobuz and Tidal via via Roon, into Audio Research’s REF6SE preamplifier via a massive $55k LampizatOr Pacific 2 valve-based high-res DAC, and on to Pass Labs’ X350.8 stereo power amplifier, with FoilFlex cables and IsoTek power conditioning.

Ground Floor

Bowers & Wilkins / Marantz

In one of the big ground floor suites, the ex-Masimo now-Harman brands put on a grand display around the main system of Marantz 10 series electronics driving the Turbine-Headed Bowers & Wilkins 802 D4 from the current B&W 800 Series Diamond.

While Marantz’s Model 10 amplifier can operate as a standard integrated amplifier, this system had the Link 10n preamplifier driving two separate Model 10s in what the company now calls a “leader and member” arrangement, which can address up to four Model 10s switched into mono mode.

The fourth box on the Atacama rack was the system source, Marantz’s SACD 10 flagship SACD/CD player and DAC, which the company says was “designed to be the best disc player in the company’s history”. This combination was playing some right doof-doof when we entered but soon settled into a glorious delivery of Anders Gaardmand’s saxophone and Bruce Katz’s close-miked piano on Ronnie Earl’s Kansas City Monarch, sounding great in a well-treated room, with power conditioners secreted behind the system.

Around the sides of the room were some spectacular extras. To the right was a history of classic B&W speakers, featuring the DM3 (1968), DM6 (1975), the 802 Series 80 (1980s), the DM100 (1986) and the 803 D2 (2010).

To the left were two of Bowers & Wilkins’ most spectacular ever designs. First was the current ‘Abbey Road x Bowers & Wilkins 801 D4 Limited Edition’ speakers, featuring a specialised Vintage Walnut finish and red Connolly leather on top, referencing Abbey Road and their 45-year partnership with Bowers. These were limited to 140 pairs worldwide, and this single speaker comes from the last pair available in Australia, we gather (hasten to Len Wallis Audio if you’re interested).

Even more spectacular was a rare showing of the Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus, $165,000 of flagship snail curves in bright red, quite the sight!

Synergy AudioVisual – Sonus faber, McIntosh, REL, Rega, ATC

As ever, Synergy’s room was constantly packed: seats full, standing at the rear. And there was a lot going on, with multiple systems available for demonstration.

The main attraction was the central system (total value around $716,000), with Sonus faber Amati Supreme speakers in ‘Terra Rossa’ red (the only pair currently in the Southern Hemisphere, according to the team), supported by no fewer than six REL S/550 subwoofers configured as two three-high line arrays at the back of the room, receiving their signals at speaker level chained through them all, as is REL’s way: so no crossover reducing the bass to the Sonus fabers, which continue to run full-range.

Four McIntosh power amps were driving the Sonus fabers in an interesting biamping arrangement selected by Synergy guru Jack Sarkissian. Each channel had an all-valve MC3500 monoblock driving the highs and mids, while the bass drivers were driven by solid-state MC1.25KW monoblocks (1200W into any impedance, THD 0.005%). So solid-state grip for the bass, a certain valve sweetness for the ‘voice of Sonus faber’ mids and tweeter, though Sonus faber is famously pretty sweet up top anyway (and Mr Sarkissian admits his personal choice might be for solid state all over).

These four giant monoblocks, together with the McIntosh MCD1200 DAC/SACD player and C12000 preamp and controller, created a wondrous wall of McIntosh blue-teal to keep the visitors visually delighted while being audibly thrilled by the music selected by Synergy MD Philip Sawyer. Responding to audience requests, he showed the effect of the RELs by taking them out of circuit while playing Steely Dan’s I.G.Y. It was an effective dem, but we were informed later that we had visited rather too early, on the first day of the Show: the RELs were still being tuned perfectly to integrate perfectly with the Amati Supremes.

So we returned the next day to hear the RELs working with more subtlety. Without them the speakers alone sounded, well, more speaker-like, less real, less depth of soundstaging. With the RELs in circuit the room was fully excited, the delivery larger, and rather smoother-sounding and real all over. Since some of these characteristics require more than the bass spectrum, the exercise is interesting in showing how bass frequencies may affect our perception across the rest of the spectrum.

The entire demo was also a spectacular advertisement for the source, which was vinyl, being played on Rega’s range-topping $22,000 Naiad turntable; we have rarely heard vinyl so immaculately rendered through a system not exactly short on resolving power.

A second system in this room was also demonstrated, using loudspeakers by ATC, renowned in both pro and hi-fi circles for making everything from drivers to cabinets at its base in Gloucestershire, UK. Their speakers come in somewhat bewildering combinations: these were the three-way SCM50 ASLT from the company’s Tower series. ATC’s late founder Billy Woodman was always keen on perfecting piano tone, we were told, and a demonstration using a Prague Piano Duet of Chopin’s Polonaise in E Flat Major proved his success nicely.

Yamaha Music Australia

Next door Yamaha, which also had a room up on the ninth floor, was running a relaxing and well-treated room, doused in the company colours. A guitar display at the back reminded visitors of Yamaha’s musical heritage (complete with Wayne’s World signs saying ‘No Stairway to Heaven’), while Pink Floyd’s Us & Them drifted effortlessly from the NS-2000A speakers under the control of the company’s R-N2000A network hi-fi receiver. New Order’s Blue Monday later showed how the system could punch as well as roll out the relaxant.

The source here was a streaming laptop playing into the USB-B input of the R-N2000A, but you could equally stream using the amplifier’s own MusicCast platform, so that this system also represented excellence value – $9999 speakers, $5299 amplifier, plus cables, all done.

Level 1 Mezzanine

Wavetrain Cinemas / Elementi

You don’t win CEDIA Global Home Cinema of the Year just by putting a few speakers and a projector in a room, as Wavetrain’s David Moseley clearly demonstrated with his uber-powerful display in one of the First Floor Mezzanine ballroom suites.

On speaker duties was Moseley’s own Elementi Audio, with the Air series being used this year, notable for its use of ribbon tweeters. David says this design is more “relaxed” compared to some of his other systems that use compression tweeters, which are more “in your face”.

Two 18-inch and two 24-inch subs (the latter two receiving 10,000W each!) were on bass duties, although his front and rear LR speakers were also on the LFE channel.

A Christie Digital RGB laser projector served up scintillating visuals, with a full Kaleidescape system providing the source material.

And what a joy it was to admire. Iconic scenes from Sinners and Top Gun: Maverick delivered detail in spades, and a whole lot more power to boot. Meanwhile scenes from Planet Earth revealed the Elementi system could be delicate when required.

We always expect big things from the Wavetrain room, and as ever David didn’t disappoint. We heard countless exclaims of “amazing” and “wow” during our rounds at the Show.

BenQ + Oceanic

Oceanic Distribution also ran a full cinema demonstration on Level 1, leading with the projection prowess of the BenQ 5850W home cinema front projector with its usefully short-throw abilities, 2600 lumens output, and the claimed ability to deliver 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut for its DLP 4K images created by the CTA-approved version of DLP pixel-shifting. Its high dynamic range includes HDR10+ dynamic tone mapping alongside standard HDR10 and HLG.

The sound in the room was produced via the new AudioControl Hyperion APR-16 immersive surround processor, a 16-channel platform which incorporates ESS Sabre digital-to-analogue conversion and supports high-resolution audio formats up to 24-bit/192kHz.

Craig Hicks, manning the room, told us they are particularly excited about the imminent Dante models from AudioControl: Dante sends audio over IP cables (Cat 6 Ethernet-style), which allows signals to remain digital all the way. With no analogue stage or DACs required, the processor is expected to be more affordable, while also making great savings in cables, of course, with Cat-6 used instead of potentially pricey audio signal cables.

Also in the room was a display of Stealth speakers, installed invisibly within dry wall, and some super-comfy and colourful Manhattan cinema seating.

Meridian / Cogworks

Notably and bravely providing a buffer space between the two home cinemas on Level 1 was Cogworks, demonstrating the marvellous minimalism of Meridian’s $138,000 DSP9 Digital Active Speakers, performing in front of the rather smaller Meridian Ellipse wireless speaker. At one point we wondered if they were doing a 'Bose', ready to whip away large cardboard DSP9s to reveal that we had been listening to the little wireless speaker all along.

But no, a beautifully-rendered version of Shine on You Crazy Diamond by Christy Moore, and an impressively dynamic delivery of Phil Collins’ chestnut I Don’t Care Anymore showed the quality of the large white and very solid DSP9s. These were the second speakers to emerge from the company’s ‘Extreme Engineering Programme’, gifted ellipse-based design curves and endless proprietary technologies… such as (brace yourself) the Atlas Software Core and R1 Electronics Platform, Force-balanced bass configuration, Digital Precision, Q-Sync, True Link, True Time, E3 Bass, Image Focus… and we're just getting started.

The irony is that operation is simplicity itself, with just a Meridian 218 Zone Controller providing the streaming tunes and control over this zone of high-resolution audio playback.

beyerdynamic

The German headphonemeisters were back with a strong line of latest headwear and current classics, including the award-winning Aventho 100 wireless noise-cancellers, along with the Aventho 200 ($449).

Of particular interest were two new awareness-based wireless earbuds, the Amiron 200 Sport ($299) and the Amiron Zero ($199). The Zeros clip either side of the outer lobe and sit far off the actual ear canal (see ear picture) whereas the 200 Sport has a much larger driver and is rather closer.

Syntec’s Wayne Farran, manning the stand, promises that this is an ‘awareness’ product which sounds good – “one of the first open-earbuds that doesn’t treat 'open as a built-in excuse for mediocre sound!” as the company’s website says. We’ll tell you more in the magazine when we’ve played with a pair!

RokBox / Top Shelf Records

The racks of vinyl this year were brought by Top Shelf Records based out of Balmain; check their Facebook page for their ongoing events across the Sydney area.

Alongside the vinyl was RokBox, a brand-new offshoot of Melbourne-based groovinandgrain.com.au focusing on cardboard boxes and packaging for your precious vinyl records. Owners Lorinda and Michael talked us through the ranges which include large sturdy boxes for transporting vinyl – a key focus for these might be sellers who attend record fairs, suggests Lorinda. But they also plan a series of stylish consumer boxes to “recreate what our parents did,” says Lorinda, “visiting friends and taking not only food to share but a box of records to play.”

The greater 'Groovin' and Grain' operation also deals in furniture for vinyl records and music media, as well as vintage radiograms which have been been restored and modernised, something made possible by Michael’s dual skills as upholsterer and electronics boffin.

Secret Chord Analogue

Along with his signature product, the Record Restore cleaning system, SCA’s founder Stephen Price was showing a collection of Canadian-designed/made archival record sleeves, including handy dual-pocket and gatefold covers, as well as inner and outer sleeves in a variety of sealable, foldable or lipped options.

Our eyes were drawn to a black unit on the stand which was the Flat Duo from AFI, described as a groundbreaking innovation in the world of record care. It is a record flattener/relaxer, using heat to remove either warps or more serious disc distortions; it can treat two LPs at once, and the flattening technique uses a high temperature for a short time, while the relaxer takes longer (three hours, says Stephen) at a lower temperature.

This also has the effect of ‘tempering’ the vinyl, he says; during vinyl pressing LPs are rapidly and often unevenly cooled after high-temperature pressing, with material stresses frozen in the material – and audible. Tempering apparently allows the molecules to align themselves naturally, making the material harder, more robust and providing more accurate playback. It’s the vinyl tool you never knew you needed…

Sydney Audio Club

The Sydney Audio Club hosts monthly listening sessions and tech talks for members and guests alike; it’s a great way to keep up on new developments and to hear new equipment from around the world as well as Australia.

Talking to the SAC’s coordinator John McEvoy, he expressed a desire that in our coverage we might include a picture of their banner thanking those who have presented to the club in recent times, and we are happy to here (above) oblige.

Corridor of Sound!

Pantheone Audio

The Sydney company returned to the Show with its uniquely-crafted high-end wireless speakers – 'part sculpture, all sound!', as the company says.

Pantheon’s egg-like Pantheone I active speakers can operate alone or paired in stereo, either way aiming to create an individual room-filling 360° experience from four silk-dome tweeters in each unit, with twin 4-inch midrangers, two 6.5-inch high-excursion bass drivers, and a total of 400W of Class-D power. They can stream with AirPlay 2, Bluetooth, high-res Wi-Fi streaming or can play via a minijack input.

There are also smaller active speakers, the Obsidian (inspired by volcanic stone), also streaming via WiFi or Bluetooth with these models able to operate on battery power (15-hour life is quoted). These were playing as a pair when we visited the room.

These very different speakers continue to generate great word of mouth; we saw them last year at the UK Hi-Fi Show Live, displaying their proudly Australian philosophy of ART + FORM + SOUND.

Microphase Audio Design (M.A.D.)

Jean-Marie Lière’s speakers are “handcrafted in Australia with French flair”, their cabinets made from inert marine-grade birch plywood handcrafted in Australia and fitted with bespoke drivers, including bass units often hidden away to face sideways or rearwards, making for highly slim towers with surprising performance.

The newly award-winning 120cm-high Tower 3 Signatures present as slim frontages displaying an AMT ribbon from Mundorf, and midrange made specially for M.A.D. by Audax in France, but firing from the side of each speaker is a 31cm bass driver from SBA Acoustics.

We don’t recall ever hearing any of M.A.D’s speakers sounding as outstandingly good as the Microphase Tower 3 Signatures on demo in the room this year, powered by Holton Audio amplification and playing from WiiM sources. They sounded entirely clear, pure and balanced from top to bottom, and our listening session was only enhanced by Jean-Marie introducing us to Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin and the 2017 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra recording under Benjamin Northey for her piece Golden Kitch – Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra.

But there was more, with a static display of a new design intended for professional use, though Jean-Marie confirmed to us that he’s happy to sell to consumers also. This is an active sealed monitor, the Pro 1 (with a smaller Pro 2 also planned): the Pro 1 is a 3-way design with again an AMT tweeter, 13cm bespoke midrange and a 21cm carbon-fibre bass driver, powered by a pair of 100W MOSFET amplifier modules.

While M.A.D.’s birch plywood is the consumer finish of choice, such pro gear for studio use is necessarily black!

Lenehan Brothers

A brand-new design from a new Australian company which is building on the legacy of Mike Lenehan’s 'Lenehan Audio' operating since 1995, with the company now undergoing a rebirth as Lenehan Brothers under the auspices of brothers Russell and Martin.

Russell had long been involved with Mike’s designs, and with the brothers now taking over from Mike there is the brand-new System One (a system courtesy of their matched dedicated stands and isolation pods), which was playing at the Show. Handbuilt on the Gold Coast using local hardwood timbers including spotted gum and Merbau, these speakers were sounding excellent in this ninth-floor hotel room, all very natural up top and with some substantial bass down low.

We enjoyed a couple of quality covers: Christy Moore’s Shine On again, and a most unusual take on Hey Joe by markusphilippe, streaming from a Bluesound Node into a Gustard preamp. The power amplification in our Friday visit was a Monarchy SM 70 Pro, a highly regarded 25-year-old zero-feedback 70W Class-A amplifier, but on Saturday we gather they were switching to the Purifi Eigentakt-based power amplifiers from March Audio.

The speakers sell at $14,500 complete with the isolation stands, the speakers only at $13,150. A great Sydney debut for this ‘new’ Australian brand.

March Audio

Always a show highlight, March Audio’s room this year presented the latest version of the Western Australian company's Kuoro floorstanding speakers, continuing the company’s line of dynamite boxes incorporating drivers from Purifi, which are becoming widely renowned for their meticulous approach to eliminating traditional distortions through patented innovations like constant Sd surround and low magnetic hysteresis motors.

March Audio shows what these can achieve in a carefully-designed system, the Kuoro (Finnish for “choir”) incorporating twin Purifi 6.5-inch aluminium cones and an aluminium dome tweeter in a 90cm-high cabinet – smaller, then, than March’s 105cm-high Ukkonen floorstanders, which use a single 8-inch bass driver and the extra cabinet volume to push just slightly deeper., though Alan March rates the Kuoros as achieving lower distortion through the use of the dual woofers.

The Kuoros have been recently amended with a new larger waveguide following collaboration between Alan March and Purifi in Denmark, improving the sound dispersion into the room and potentially slightly improving sensitivity as well. Powered by March’s stereo P482 power amp, they were certainly on song when playing Doug McLeod’s Too Many Misses For Me, delivering an incredible soundstage, including remarkable depth, the drums playing from the back of a triangle extending behind the speakers. Magic stuff.

Richter

A huge moment for Richter, bringing to the show two of the Sydney-based company’s brand-new Series 7 SE range – the standmounting Aurora S7SE ($3999), and the floorstanding Richter Dragon S7SE ($7999).

The development of the new series saw Richter’s long-time acoustic engineer Dr Martin Gosnell working closely with industrial designer Adam Hobbs to create a softer, more contemporary form – Richter’s Brian Rodgers says this new Series was conceived “to bridge aesthetic sophistication and acoustic performance”. It’s a clear success visually, with less black (anthracite-grey baffles with optional mottled-grey cloth grilles), a lovely non-gloss Natural Walnut veneer finish, and cabinets which gracefully curve to the rear: “quality furniture pieces”, as Brian describes them.

But for the visitors it was the sound of the new speakers that was knocking them out: “the best speakers we’ve ever heard under $10,000” was the comment of one experienced hi-fi listener who had already heard them at a recent meeting of the Sydney Audio Club. The new Dragons in particular just did everything right, from delicacy and detail to scale and punch. We were thrilled by their rendition of Mark Knopfler’s Sailing To Philadelphia, on which he trades vocals and shares guitar with James Taylor; this was in-the-room presence with not a frequency out of place. Power was from a Musical Fidelity M6si, fed by a Bluesound Node Icon streamer.

Among the secrets of the new speakers, whispered Mr Rodgers, are far better damped cabinets, which he says improved performance even before the latest drivers were installed: these are a massively constructed 165mm high-excursion bass cone, twin 165mm midranges and perhaps the most obvious addition – the ‘teardrop’ module with a dome tweeter and dome upper midrange. Brian was sharing response charts showing how this dome mid fills the crossover gap that can occur between conventional tweeters and mids. Of course this requires a 4-way design, with commensurate complex crossovers, but the proof is in the pudding, and the Dragons certainly sounded good enough to eat.

Dana Electro Acoustics

Dana (Dan A. Digital) is a New South Wales-based manufacturer specialising in active valve loudspeakers, isolation platforms, and interconnects; last year we had enjoyed a pair of the company's 'act:eve' speakers, which have valve amplifiers built into the speakers.

But this year we sat before tall thin ‘infinite baffle’ rectangles of a rigid composite material, screen-printed with Earth-from-space images, and apparently presenting just a single 54mm driver. Designer Goran Velimirovic was on hand to show us around the back of the speakers, where a 12-inch driver fires up and to the rear, but again without any large enclosure to support it.

As is Dana’s preference, these Omnis are active speakers with Class-D power inside, while equally remarkable is their price: $4200, plus just $200 to have your own choice of picture on the front panel.

There will also be a Class-A power version with an external amp, raising the price to $8500. No mention yet of these new speakers on the company's website yet, so apply directly for more information.

SpectraFlora

SpectraFlora had its award-winning Celata 88 standmounts on static display in its room (among the Homegrown Hi-Fi section of the Corridor of Sound), making room for this year’s main attraction of the new ‘Pendula 8 TL’, the first of a new architectural series of in-wall/on-wall designs.

Company founder Dr Steve Van Sluyter was on hand to demonstrate the remarkably slim new towers, which are two-way models using the eight-inch graphene-coated-magnesium woofer from SpectraFlora’s Aphelia 8 model, and a compression-driver tweeter here with a new inhouse-designed constant-directivity waveguide, fitted in a slim transmission-line cabinet which is sized to fit within 450mm or greater stud spacing.

The Pendula 8s looked luscious in their customisable timber detailing with SpectraFlora’s signature floral laser etching (grilles are available), and we liked how the central equipment rack was softened by flanking bouquets of Heliconia parakeetflowers (we think). Nice.

The Pendula were also sounding beautifully open and airy, playing Swedish saxophonist Arne Domnérus’ Antiphone Blue and Livingstone Taylor’s take on Isn’t She Lovely, being driven from a Gustard digital front-end through an Audio Research Reference One preamp and an Aurora Audio S2 power amplifier (by Damian Ware, president of the Melbourne Audio Club). Though sounding light on the very low-end, it was a slow roll-off, and the Pendula were far out into the room’s free space. As Dr Steve confirmed, wall-positioning will raise the bass response; there are also differently tuned Pendula variants for free space use, if required. They will sell at around $12k per pair.

Serhan Swift

A great reveal from Morris Swift and Brad Serhan on the ninth floor of the Show: a new active version of the universally-acclaimed mμ2 standmount.

This has been a long time coming; Morris reminded us that he had originally joined forces with Brad intending to develop active speakers, but they had decided the market preferred passive. But this latest creation was prompted by a specific request and deadline for a standalone active studio monitor; it goaded them into action.

Since it was a big call to cram all the required electronics inside the cabinet of the mμ2, the new active versions have a module clamped to the back, with only the toroidal transformer inside the cabinet – which, says Morris, conveniently took up precisely the same volume as the no-longer-required passive crossover. The module has a single XLR input, with an XLR chain out.

But there’s more to this new ‘Analogue Active mμ2’ than a two-way active standmount. The back active section actually has three Class-AB amplifiers within, one of which can power an extension cabinet (the ‘mμ2 Ex’) to go under the standmount, connected from a SpeakON output socket on the power module, thereby creating a three-way floorstander – which is then pretty much an active version of the Serhan Swift mμ3 floorstander. Were they just chopping up mu3s to make these, we asked? Not at all, replied Morris, as the mμ3 is already built as two separate enclosures.

This was a prototype, then, sometimes playing on the mμ2 Ex box (first picture), sometimes alone on stands (third picture). And we gather that they completed this only days before the Show, doubting whether they should reveal it yet.

And yet this was undeniably one of the best sounds in the Show, a presentation of outstanding realism, thrilling us with the bass line and sax on Peter Weniger’s Half-Life, among others. Production and pricing is a way off, but is expected to be between $10,000 and $12,000.

Avantgarde, Scheu, Fezz, MaxMedia

MaxMedia had two systems in one: during our visit we enjoyed the Scheu Diamond Maxi and Muarah turntable package playing through a COS Engineering D10v4 SE preamp, having its first-ever world reveal at the show; it sells at $9990 with DAC on board, with optional streaming and phono stage modules available at $1990 each.

COS Engineering’s S6 with LPS1 high‐performance HiFi Ethernet switch was also in the system for streaming but we listened analogue. The Scheu Diamond turntable is huge: there is a choice of base heights and platter heights (50mm weighing 4.5kg or 80mm weighing 7.5kg); this package version maxes out on both, at $13,000 including the Polish-made Muarah 9-inch tonearm and a Benz Micro cartridge, with the turntable’s base finishes in a choice of clear, black or granite.

Receiving the signal from the preamp were the stars of the room: tall and white-horned Avantgarde Acoustic Opus 1 fully active speakers, active two-way designs priced at $23,990, and the most compact horn system Avantegarde has ever built. It uses 13.8-inch wide-band spherical horns to cover midrange and treble (700Hz–20,000Hz) backed by a low-mid 10-inch driver with an inverse natural-fibre cone, along with 250W of built-in dedicated bass amplification.

Through all this MaxMedia’s Cameron Keating played New Order and Kraftwerk on vinyl, to the general delight of room visitors.

The second system played through the award-winning Pylon Jade 10 speakers and Arylic LP100 preamp/DAC/streamer, with power through another debut: Fezz Audio’s magnificent-looking Titania Mk2 valve amplifier, a new design from the Polish company which they hope will democratise valve amplifiers by making them more robust and easier to use — we have a review coming up, so will confirm this later!

Yamaha Music Australia

Yamaha (see also Ground Floor) had a second room up on the ninth floor with a triple demonstration under way.

At the front of the room a comfy couch was the perfect position to enjoy the Atmos-capable and Sound+Image award-winning True X Surround 90A soundbar package, complete with versatile wireless rears, rolling out an immersive presentation of the final Mission: Impossible movie.

The company’s high-end headphone collection was at the rear, an opportunity to compare the YH-4000 open Orthodynamic (planar magnetic) headphones with the YH-C3000 closed-back dynamics, along with the HA-L7A headphone amplifier.

But the big news was a world-first appearance of Yamaha’s new active standmount speakers, which will make their European debut at the new Vienna High End show in June.

Although their information cards were partially redacted for secrecy (!), our spies established that these may or may not be called the NX-70A, and that they use the same Zylon-spruce-based material for their ‘Harmonious Diaphragm’ 3cm tweeter and 13cm mid-woofer as do the company’s premium and hi-fi speakers right up to the top NS-5000 speakers.

But these are active streaming standmounts, with Class-D amplification, MusicCast streaming and multiroom built in, and inputs which include HDMI from your TV, optical and 3.5mm minijack analogue. The communication between speakers is wireless, but a cable can be used for higher-resolution linking.

All this with sexy copper highlights and a small display screen at the bottom for instant feedback. Pricing? That’ll have to wait…

Krispy Audio

A late but pleasing addition to the Show was this system from Berowra-based Krispy Audio, which brought together EgglestoneWorks Kiva 2 speakers ($47,000) with Bricasti’s M25 stereo power amp ($25,000) and the Esoteric N-05XE streamer/DAC/preamp ($17,000), connected with colourful Vermouth Cables from Bali, about which Krispy’s owner Cameron Pope was quite effusive, saying he used to make his own cables before finding he couldn’t do it cheaper or better than Vermouth were already doing.

The Kiva 2 speakers are equipped with new carbon-fibre tweeters, a switch for the company from beryllium, which is notoriously toxic to work with, and so limited to a very few suppliers globally. The new Kivas also now put the tweeter at the top, more traditionally, with two 6.5-inch mid/woofers and two 7.5-inch woofers below in a three-way system.

The system delivered a finely-etched and deep soundstage with a classical music demonstration, before showing their chops with the bouncy blues of St Paul & The Broken Bones playing Sanctify.

Vivid Audio – Avation

We visited Vivid’s room just as they had switched the standmount little Vivid Audio Kaya 12s for the larger floorstanding Kaya 90s – “I haven’t even fully positioned them,” warned Avation’s Mark Hamilton, yet the curvy South African speakers were sounding better to our ears than they had last year in a rather larger room: we loved the way they presented Bob Dylan growling through Man in the Long Black Coat.

The Kaya 90 is the top-of-the-range Kaya model, and carries much of the DNA from Vivid's higher Giya range – the tapered tube loading pioneered by Vivid’s Laurence Dickie (also on show in the Bowers Nautilus on the ground floor, an early Dickie design), as well as the company’s patented reaction-cancelling drivers, here a 26mm alloy tweeter dome, 100mm alloy midrange dome, and four side-facing force-cancelling 125mm alloy-coned woofers.

Perhaps contributing to the magic were a new pre and power amp combo from Ultrafide, a company based in Worcestershire’s Stourport, UK, with its factory down in Devon – the Class-A Ultrafide U4PRE preamplifier, and the U500DC power amplifier, offering 250W into 8 ohms (or 500W into the Kaya 90’s minimum 4 ohms). Together at $8000 a piece, these form Ultrafide’s ‘Ultra Sigma’ combo, something we think worth investigating further.

Stax - Audio Marketing

Audio Marketing went all Stax in their room this year, with a rare opportunity to hear every Stax earspeaker and every Stax driver (except the portable one), so you could hear exactly how the sound progresses and refines as you move from the SRM-D50 ($2200, the only earspeaker with non-Stax drivers, made by parent company Edifier) up to the SR-X9000 flagship ($10,750) with Stax’s own cutting-edge MILER-3 four-layer fixed electrodes, under the high-voltage excitation of the SRM-T8000 driver ($10,500).

Comparisons were easy thanks to a common source being fed to all the different models and drivers, from what must qualify as one of the most upmarket headphone source stacks seen at a show. It offered digital streaming via a Musical Fidelity MX-Stream and M8xDAC, or analogue sound from the award-winning M8xVinyl phono stage receiving its signal from the clear acrylic Musical Fidelity M8xTT turntable, itself benefitting from a new power supply, the X-Power TT, in one of MF’s gorgeous ‘X’-style tube chassis, which the company is in the process of reviving.

Also attracting attention were reference vinyl recordings from cable company inakustic, plus a range of cool Stax t-shirts!

Denon / Polk / Marantz

In the second and smaller room for the newly Harmanised ex-Masimo brands, Adam Prangell again excelled in his goal of demonstrating far more affordable systems which can deliver great entry to mid level hi-fi.

In this the Marantz or Denon / Polk combination is powerful: pairing the slimline 75W-per-channel Marantz Stereo 70s (HEOS streaming onboard) with the excellent Polk R200 speakers (award-winners from back in 2022) makes a fine $3000 system. On the other side of the room a Denon Home Amp and Polk R100 speakers hit a perfect small-room system price of $2300.

The other trick under the control of Adam’s smartphone was to use HEOS to send the sound to whichever speakers you might like. A Denon Bluetooth turntable, the DP-500BT, could Bluetooth its vinyl playback to one of the new Denon Home speakers on display; Adam could then pair up two Denon Home 600s (or 400s or 200s, all playing in the room), or to either of the Polk-ended systems, or to everything at once, with no noticeable latency between all the systems. What’s more, it worked nearly every time he did it, which gets you kudos in a hotel show situation where the Wi-Fi may not be 100% reliable.

A smorgasbord of kit in this small room, then, but all integrated under HEOS control, showing how a whole home could be similarly connected using the wide array of HEOS products. A great dem.

Best sound of the Show?

With pretty much every room on song this year, the decision for 'Best Sound of the Show' will not be an easy one! We had favourites among our team, with some variation of opinion but some definite common ground. Thankfully the final decision is made by the public through the voting and competition cards distributed at the Show. Counting will take place soon – watch this space!

• See all our Australian reviews from Sound+Image and Australian Hi-Fi magazines

• Keep an eye on all the developments for the Australian Hi-Fi Show 2027 here!

It may be a Bank Holiday in our native land, but that hasn’t stopped our ardent team of hi-fi and home cinema experts from bringing you a fresh entry into our weekly news digest, Rewind.

Despite our heartfelt pleas to the audio-visual gods, it was another busy week for the team. Over the past seven days, we have covered everything from new CD spinners to Big Tech attacks on lossless audio.

If you have struggled to keep on top of it all, don’t panic, you’re definitely not alone. Here’s everything you need to know.

Apple thinks lossless audio is kind of pointless for most people

Lossless audio, like speaker cables, seems to be a hot topic. In one camp, you have people such as veteran rocker Neil Young, who famously called for “real” fans to listen to his music on services that support it, so they can hear “everything” he recorded.

Others are convinced it doesn’t make a difference. We have heard arguments from both sides for years, but last week, we were surprised to hear Oliver Schusser, vice president of Apple Music, throw shade at lossless audio. Specifically, while on the Billboard's On The Record podcast, he suggested that most people can’t hear the difference between standard and lossless streams.

The statement is a little odd, given Apple Music offers tiers with hi-res streaming, and the firm makes a robust library of HomePod smart speakers, Apple TV streamers and iPhones that support the technology. But hey, each to their own, we guess. As we’ve said before, if you really can’t hear the difference, fair enough. You have probably just saved a lot of money in the long run…

Read the full story: Apple Music exec: “Most people can’t hear the difference with lossless audio”

NAD’s got a new “precision-engineered” CD player

If you’re a fan of CDs, have cash to spare and want a “life-like” sound from your shiny discs, then NAD’s new C 589 may be the player you’ve been waiting for.

NAD unveiled the new CD player last week, promising its use of high-end parts and a clever Qrono D2a filtering technology, developed by reader favourite MQA Labs, will let it offer unparalleled levels of performance and a holistically more natural, life-like sound.

Considering our experience with the filtering technology on the Award-winning Bluesound Node Icon last year, the pairing piqued our interest. Here’s hoping we get the new player in for testing soon, to hear how it performs in the real world.

Read the full story: NAD’s “precision engineered” CD player uses advanced digital filtering to deliver a lifelike and precise sound

We reviewed a Product of the Year winner’s floorstander sibling

The Acoustic Energy AE309 Mk2 are the floorstander sibling of the AE300 Mk2 standmounts we reviewed last year, which gives them some pretty big shoes to fill. Not only did the AE300 Mk2 earn a five-star rating, they also went on to win a Product of the Year accolade at the 2025 What Hi-Fi? Awards.

The AE309 Mk2 share a lot of common DNA with their standmount siblings, using the same drivers and having a similar (albeit larger), understated look. They also deliver the goods sonically.

Matched with price-appropriate hardware, such as the Arcam A15+ we used during testing, the speakers deliver a wonderfully natural, balanced sound that’s full of detail and insight. So much so that our reviewers didn’t find themselves pining for our current recommendation at this level, the Award-winning Fyne Audio F501E.

As we say in our Acoustic Energy AE309 Mk2 review: “Credit to Acoustic Energy, we now have another member of its 300 Series that comes highly recommended by our test team. The compact AE309 Mk2 stand tall in a tough sector of the loudspeaker market, but their superbly balanced and musical sound is a match for any rival. These are speakers that definitely deserve your time and, potentially, money.”

Read our full Acoustic Energy AE309 Mk2 review

Our senior staff writer saw Samsung’s next-gen TV

There’s been a lot of chat about RGB Mini LED TVs recently – including from us – we have our first set with the tech, the Hisense UR9, in for testing right now.

This is a new panel technology being pitched by numerous companies, including Hisense, Samsung, Sony, TCL and more, as the future of premium TVs. Philips is also using it in some sets, but was more reserved with its performance claims when we spoke to the brand last month.

While we are too early in our reviewing journey with the tech to confirm if it is the “OLED-killer” that companies are promising, based on our senior staff writer Lewis Empson’s latest hands-on experience with Samsung’s R95H, which uses its RGB Micro LED version of the tech, it’s certainly interesting.

Seeing the set next to Samsung’s latest OLEDs at a press demo, including the Samsung S95H, it was the R95H his eye kept coming back to. So much so, that he reported:

“Using a medley of reference clips we often use for testing, from films including Oppenheimer, Blade Runner 2049 and Pan, I got a flavour of what this TV can do. It’s safe to say that I walked away rather impressed.”

Read the full story: I’ve seen Samsung’s 2026 lineup early: there’s one TV I can’t stop thinking about – and it’s not an OLED

Our other senior staff writer went to a Dolby Atmos music mixing studio

While Lewis was having fun with Samsung, our other senior staff writer, Harry McKerrell, was jetting off to LA.

As well as taking some personal time to try to sell his screenplay, Harry also managed to visit Larrabee Sound Studios, to find out how Dolby Atmos music is mixed and why so many new artists are obsessed with it.

Featuring Studio 4, a specially designed room, the tour gave him a fly-on-the-wall look at how mixing maestros leverage Atmos’s ability to create a dome of sound to help make music “more immersive”. And it’s not as simple a process as you might think.

Read the full story: I heard a Dolby Atmos mix in a professional recording studio – and it has changed my view of spatial audio

MORE:

These are the best TVs we have reviewed

We rank the best floorstanding speakers

Our picks of the best stereo amplifiers

If you’re researching portable projectors, it’s very likely that you will have come upon offerings from the brand Xgimi.

The China-based company offers a range of products, from premium 4K projectors to the smaller portable models we are looking at here.

The Xgimi MoGo 4 is a small cylindrical model that has featured on our best portable projectors and best outdoor projectors guides since we reviewed it last year.

The Xgimi Vibe One, on the other hand, is the first product from Xgimi’s new budget-focused ‘Vibe’ sub-brand, which targets budget buyers even more than the MoGo 4.

We have pitted the pair head-to-head in our test room to see which is the best one for you to spend your money on.

Xgimi Vibe One vs Xgimi MoGo 4: price

Both of these Xgimis target the budget end of the projector market, of course, with affordability and portability their USPs.

The Vibe One is the cheaper option of the two, having launched at £219 / $269 / AU$599. It hit the shelves only late last year, but discounts are already available at various retailers, making it even more affordable.

Going for a slightly more premium audience, the MoGo 4 also boasts a slightly more premium price tag. It has an official price of £509 / $499 / AU$1399, but you can find it cheaper in the UK if you look around. We have often seen it drop to £399.

Despite this discount, the Vibe One still comes out on top in terms of pricing.

** Winner: Xgimi Vibe One **

Xgimi Vibe One vs Xgimi MoGo 4: build

Both projectors are compact and easy to carry, and you shouldn’t have an issue putting either in a bag to take it on the go.

They each weigh about the same, too, with the Vibe One coming in at 1.4kg and the MoGo 4 at 1.3kg. So there’s no need to worry about lugging around a bulky projector for a garden movie night.

The MoGo 4 is slightly more petite than the Vibe One, measuring 21 x 10 x 10 cm (hwd), which is about the same size as a large water bottle. The cheaper model is a little larger (31 x 12 x 14 cm), but it’s still easily portable – indeed, the Vibe One has a useful handle at the top which makes it even easier to carry around.

Both projectors are activated in the same way: you tilt the body up from the bottom to face your screen or wall (a screen is highly recommended for a better picture). The MoGo 4 offers an extra feature as the hard plastic on the side transforms into a nifty stand.

The Vibe One comes in two colour options: blue spark or cloud ash. You can also personalise your model with the included stickers, which should please kids or whimsical adults. The MoGo 4 is available in just one finish: silver with orange trimmings.

The projectors offer almost identical remote controls, which let you control volume, output, auto-focus, and the settings menu. There are also shortcuts for a few streaming services to speed up menu navigation.

The Vibe One’s remote does not have a backlight, but the MoGo 4’s does.

With the MoGo 4, there is an additional mini-remote that hangs from a rope on the side of the body. This remote keeps things extremely minimal with just controls for volume, a D-pad to navigate the menu and a back button.

While both models offer a solid and compact build, the MoGo 4 takes the prize here for its sturdy stand and more premium overall feel.

** Winner: Xgimi MoGo 4 **

Xgimi Vibe One vs Xgimi MoGo 4: features

Both the Vibe One and the MoGo 4 have a built-in battery, but this good news comes with a caveat: the models offer a claimed 1.2 hours and 2.5 hours of battery life, respectively.

And that is when they are in Eco mode, which dims the brightness in order to preserve energy. In our preferred Standard mode, that estimated figure reduces a fair bit. This is less of an issue for the MoGo 4, as it can be plugged into a power bank using the USB-C connection, but there is no such feature with the Vibe One.

On each model, you will find one HDMI port, although ARC is supported only with the MoGo 4. Bluetooth 5.1 is available with both Xgimi projectors.

Both models deliver a 1080p Full HD image. The Vibe One is claimed to offer up to a 150-inch picture, while the MoGo 4 offers slightly less at a claimed 120 inches. Xgimi says you can take the screen size up to 200 inches with the MoGo 4, but you won't be getting the best display quality available.

The MoGo 4 can go half as bright again as the Vibe One, with the projectors producing a claimed maximum brightness of 450 and 300 ISO Lumens, respectively. The MoGo 4, then, has a better chance at delivering a punchy picture in well-lit settings.

You also get access to the Google TV smart platform through both models. This includes the usual streaming suspects such as Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV. There is, however, no BBC iPlayer on the cards. There is the option to use Google Cast from a smart device, but it would be nice to have native app support.

From the remote control or settings menu, you can access the auto-focus and auto-keystone correction. This works pretty well in our test room to adjust to the space, although we find ourselves using the manual features to fine-tune.

There is a range of picture modes, but for each unit, we settle on Movie mode with a bit of further adjustment in the settings menu.

Thanks to its better battery life, the MoGo 4 takes this round as well.

** Winner: Xgimi MoGo 4 **

Xgimi Vibe One vs Xgimi MoGo 4: picture

Despite their small statures and budget price tags, both models are surprisingly cinematic performers with plenty to like.

The Xgimi MoGo 4 provides a punchy yet detailed picture. When watching Knives Out: A Glass Onion Mystery on Netflix, for example, we say in our review: “It, of course, does not have the detail of bigger, more expensive projectors such as the Nebula X1, but for such a small piece of kit, the MoGo 4 manages to portray a nicely balanced picture, with the branches of trees in the background appearing crisp.”

Colours are incredibly punchy as well, to the extent they sometimes verge towards being overexuberant. This is probably a decision Xgimi has made to compensate for when users are watching films outdoors, but it's certainly noticeable when viewing in a dark room.

When we switch to the Xgimi Vibe One, we don't find the colours to be too vivid. They are, rather, better balanced – which results in a surprisingly cinematic picture.

Projecting Alien: Romulus, the Vibe One shows off its abilities with dark scenes. As a ship floats through the depths of space, the projector presents the dark abyss with an impressively deep black by budget projector standards. Still, the MoGo 4 goes a fair bit darker and manages to dig out more subtlety in the levels of black during the same scene.

Motion handling is better done with the Vibe One. It makes movement feel more natural compared with the MoGo 4, which can smear slightly during fast-paced action.

The MoGo 4, as you would expect considering its higher lumen count, looks brighter and more vibrant than the Vibe One. The latter will be fine for a spot of sunny sport viewing, but expect to lose a fair bit of detail, especially when compared with its more expensive cousin, when watching in a well-lit environment.

While the Xgimi Vibe One nails the basics in terms of motion handling and natural colours, the MoGo 4 is the better performer overall with its brighter picture and deeper blacks.

** Winner: Xgimi MoGo 4 **

Xgimi Vibe One vs Xgimi MoGo 4: sound

Neither projector manages to blow us away in the audio department. The MoGo 4 features two 6W speakers, while the Vibe One offers two 3W speakers, with both built into their small bodies.

They struggle to push sound far enough to create an immersive audio experience, which results in a rather localised performance.

The MoGo 4 offers voices that are clear and reasonably crisp. It also delivers the upbeat soundtrack to Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny, for example, with the right level of expression.

The Vibe One, on the other hand, has a harder time making voices audible. Continuing with Alien: Romulus, we say in our review: “As the android Andy and his human sister Rain rush through the bustling mining colony, their conversation gets muddled with radio chatter in the background, which makes it hard to decipher at points.”

And that’s in a quiet test room – it will be harder to hear during an outdoor viewing with a few guests.

With each model, we recommend investing in a Bluetooth speaker to get a clearer, louder audio experience. Still, the MoGo 4 is the more expressive and clear option, so it is the winner here.

** Winner: Xgimi MoGo 4 **

Xgimi Vibe One vs Xgimi MoGo 4: verdict

The Vibe One is the more affordable of the two projectors here, and its balanced yet detailed picture means it is the winner on a picture-performance-per-pound basis.

But the MoGo 4 delivers a more cinematic image with greater brightness and contrast, making it better suited to use in a bright room – or even outside.

On top of that, the Vibe One's disappointing battery life and inexplicable lack of support for USB-C battery packs mean it's much less practically portable than its more expensive sibling.

So, while the Vibe One's picture performance is very impressive for its low price, the MoGo 4 is worth stretching to for the even better picture quality and much greater practicality.

**Overall winner: Xgimi MoGo 4**

TCL has announced its latest answer to the art TV craze, and it's packing an upgrade that could see it produce a better quality picture than most of its rivals.

The A4000 Pro NXTVISION blends style and substance, with a frame-like chassis that challenges Samsung's super popular The Frame and Hisense's Canvas TV.

It's designed to blend seamlessly into your living room environment, and when paired with the Art Gallery mode (which features curated artwork and AI-generated content) and included walnut woodgrain frame, it doubles as a versatile piece of wall art when not in use.

Sounds familiar so far, right? Well, TCL hopes to set its offering apart by bringing the picture quality up to standard, as some of the frame TVs on the market sacrifice panel tech for the sake of design.

Not TCL, though, as it has included its precise QD-Mini LED backlight on this TV, and paired it with a matte HVA panel, which should improve viewing angles. That's quite a step up over Hisense's edge-lit QLED Canvas TV.

TCL claims to have included up to 488 dimming zones (presumably this refers to the largest 75-inch screen size), and the A4000 Pro also supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10+.

Furthermore, this TV can support gaming signals up to 4K/144Hz over HDMI 2.1, with VRR and ALLM supported, making this a solid choice for gamers and home decor aficionados alike.

TCL has also included the Google TV smart platform and an Onkyo-tuned 2.0 channel sound system, which supports Dolby Atmos and DTS Audio. It says that "dialogue is clear and immersive without requiring an external audio set-up" on the A4000 Pro NXTVISION, which will appeal to minimalists who don't want trailing cables.

This TV comes in four sizes, starting at 43 inches, and it undercuts both of the rivals we've mentioned above. The 55-inch model starts at £899, which seems like a bargain compared to the equivalent Hisense, which we reviewed at £1099.

Samsung's 2026 Frame Pro (which is also billed as a Mini LED art TV), comes in at a staggering £1699 for the 55-inch model, which makes the TCL also look like a steal by comparison.

The TCL A4000 Pro NXTVISION is set to launch later this year, and you can see pricing for all sizes below:

• 75A400 PRO-UK – £1,399
• 65A400 PRO-UK – £1,099
• 55A400 PRO-UK – £899
• 43A400 PRO-UK – £599
  

MORE:

Read our full Hisense Canvas review

Check out our picks for the best Mini LED TVs

And read our full TCL C7K review

As the large-screen trend continues, many people are looking at investing in a projector, rather than the 100-inch-plus TVs on offer from the likes of Hisense, TCL and Samsung. And, to furnish that desire, we are seeing more ultra-short throw (UST) projectors hit the market than ever before.

Acer is the latest brand to jump on the trend with the catchily named PD1520Us projector. It boasts an affordable price tag and the capability to project a huge image without taking up much space.

Weighing just 740g, this UST projector seems to join Samsung’s The Premiere 5 and Optoma’s Photon Go projectors in this quirky new category of compact UST projectors.

It features an LED light source, with a claimed 2000 LED lumens of brightness, and a reported lifespan of 30,000 hours. Setup should also be easy, thanks to the auto focus and an auto 2D keystone feature for an easy setup.

Acer also touts wi-fi, Bluetooth, and screen-mirroring functionality built in, allowing users to beam content from a phone or tablet. There is also a smart platform built in, which supports Netflix and YouTube, although it appears to be a proprietary operating system rather than Google TV or Android TV.

Despite its small footprint, this projector can beam a 100-inch Full HD image onto your wall, and it needs to sit only a few centimetres from your wall, to do so according to Acer.

The company says that it has specifically designed this UST projector to be “light enough to move from the lounge to the bedroom”, and “for UK homes where space is at a premium”. The built-in battery, which Acer says is rated to last around two hours on a single charge, means it can even be used outside.

Acer also says that this projector has “4K support”, which we presume means that it can accept 4K signals, but outputs them in 1080p. We have reached out to Acer for confirmation.

Much as with the Samsung Premiere 5, you can change the orientation by standing the projector in an upright position to beam a 23-inch interactive surface onto a table, worktop, or even the floor.

Acer even has a variant that includes the same touch-screen-style interface, although that is being sold only through commercial channels currently.

Priced at £550/€650 (or £650/€700 for the Touch variant), the Acer PD1520Us sits below the Samsung and Optoma rivals mentioned above, making it a tempting choice for those looking for a UST on a budget.

MORE:

Read our full Optoma Photon Go review

As well as our Samsung The Premiere 5 review

And check out our picks for the best portable projectors

We get the impression that Samsung’s audio division might be one of the hardest-working teams in the AV industry. Delivering a new soundbar lineup every year is no mean feat – especially when they’re this good.

While the likes of Sonos, Sony and JBL tend to refresh their models every few years, Samsung somehow always manages to have a fresh set of soundbars ready every year, though that can lead to some generations having quite subtle differences from their predecessors; case in point, the HW-Q990H.

Last year’s HW-Q990F wowed us with an impressive new subwoofer that was built from the ground up to deliver punchy, musical and controlled bass from a surprisingly small package.

The HW-Q990H, which we have before us in our home cinema testing room, seems like a much more modest upgrade on paper – but when we take a listen, it turns out that there are a few more changes under the hood.

Price

Samsung has decided to launch the HW-Q990H at roughly the same £1599 / $2000 / AU$1999 price as its predecessor (that's actually £100 cheaper than last year here in the UK).

While that might sound like a lot to pay for a soundbar system now, we need to keep in mind that, traditionally speaking, Samsung's annual system tends to tumble in price fairly quickly and consistently throughout the year.

Last year’s HW-Q990F, for example, has dropped well below the £800 mark at various points since its launch – and especially during the major sales events such as Black Friday.

In fact, there is still plenty of Q990F stock around with huge discounts, and that is going to make it hard for the new Q990H to justify its high launch price.

Some more affordable all-in-one soundbar options have scored highly in our test room recently, including the Sonos Arc Ultra (£999 / $999 / AU$1799) and Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 (£1399 / $1400 / AU$1795), which may appeal to those wanting a neater solution.

However, none of these come with dedicated surround speakers or a subwoofer in the way that the Samsung does. You’ll have to cough up some extra cash to create an HW-Q990H adjacent system with these bars.

Design

If you were to put the soundbar portion of the HW-Q990H system in a lineup next to the Q990F, Q990D and Q990C, we’d seriously struggle to pick it out as the latest model. Looks-wise, this soundbar is practically identical to its predecessor, which is both good and bad news.

This is a very well-built and premium-feeling system. Everything is constructed from aluminium or a sturdy, high-quality plastic.

The main soundbar measures 7 x 123 x 14cm (hwd) and weighs 7.3kg, whereas the surround speakers are 20 x 13 x 14cm and weigh 3.4kg each.

The subwoofer, on the other hand, is a cube measuring 25 x 25 x 25cm and weighing 8.3kg. Those measurements are absolutely identical to the HW-Q990F’s.

This design is starting to look quite tired. The sharp, elongated hexagonal design is a touch brutalist (especially compared to Samsung’s sleek OLED TVs), and while the metallic grey finish is sleek, we think that the edgy soundbar and rounded cuboid subwoofer are at odds with one another aesthetically.

We prefer LG’s handsome (but sonically flawed) Sound Suite H7, or the smooth curves of the Sonos Arc Ultra. That being said, this isn’t a beauty contest, so we’re more interested in its features and sound performance – though we also need to remember that this bar will constantly be in your eyeline, and the surround speakers will be permanent fixtures in your living room.

Features

As with every Samsung product we test these days, from TVs to mobile phones, the HW-Q990F is feature-packed. There is, of course, a healthy dose of AI inclusions, but we’ll start with the hardware configuration.

This is an 11.1.4 system, with an impressive total of 23 individual drivers on board. This includes 15 drivers in the main soundbar unit, three in each of the wireless surround speakers, and two 8-inch woofers (in a push/pull configuration) in the wireless subwoofer.

Both the soundbar and surround speakers feature upward-firing drivers, which brings us neatly onto the immersive sound formats that this system supports.

The Q990H features support for three immersive audio formats: Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and Samsung’s Eclipsa Audio. Having full coverage of the available formats is a bonus, and while Eclipsa hasn’t been adopted by any other services aside from YouTube so far, it’s nice to be future-proofed in case that changes at some point.

In order to achieve the best surround sound experience, Samsung recommends placing the rear surround speakers at a 135-150-degree angle behind the listening position. Thankfully, Samsung’s SpaceFit Sound Pro feature, which is essentially this soundbar’s calibration system, can accommodate if your space doesn’t allow for this placement.

Interestingly, unlike most soundbars we test, which tend to take one set of measurements to map your room and adapt the sound, Samsung’s version is a clever, constantly running system that monitors your listening space at all times to make adjustments in real time.

On top of this, Samsung supports four sound modes: Standard, Surround, Game and AI Adaptive.

Standard takes a straightforward approach in which signals are directly reproduced (two-channel recordings are presented in stereo, for example), whereas Surround broadens the soundfield by introducing audio upscaling processing.

The Game setting reduces latency, and the AI Adaptive mode will, as the name suggests, employ artificial intelligence to analyse your content and adjust the sound to suit.

Another layer of processing is Samsung’s new Sound Elevation feature, which is new for this model. It’s designed to raise the audio upwards to match the position of your screen.

Samsung hasn’t really given a clear indication of how it determines where to place the audio, and for us, it seems to overshoot slightly and place the sound towards the top edge of our reference TV. This setting may appeal more to those who wall-mount their TV and leave a gap between it and their soundbar.

There is also a new Auto Volume feature that controls sudden loud spikes in volume when switching between different channels, applications or sources.

All of these sound settings can be applied via the included remote, and the dot-matrix display on the front of the soundbar is fairly useful for telling you which setting you're adjusting.

However, the Samsung SmartThings app is the preferred way of interacting with the settings menus, thanks to its snappy connection and set-up time, easy-to-understand menus, and generally solid stability.

You can also control your source from this app, including music streamed wirelessly to the system. The HW-Q990H supports Spotify Connect, Apple AirPlay, Google Cast, Tidal Connect and Bluetooth, and it’s even Roon Ready.

Samsung also allows you to connect the Q990H wirelessly to many of its compatible TVs, and Dolby Atmos is even supported here – though for the sake of getting the best audio quality and reduced latency, we recommend sticking with a wired connection.

While we’re on the topic of the Samsung ecosystem, Q Symphony – in which your Samsung TV’s speakers work in tandem with the system – is also supported here. It's worth trying, but don't assume that using Q Symphony will produce better sound than using the Q990H's speakers alone. Many TVs will bring down the overall sound quality rather than improve it.

Wired connectivity is equally impressive, as the soundbar has three HDMI sockets in total. This includes an HDMI eARC for connecting to your TV, alongside two full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 passthrough sockets, which support up to 4K/120Hz signals with VRR and ALLM, as well as HDR10, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision (the last of which is especially nice as Samsung’s own TVs don’t support Dolby Vision).

Sound

We’ll be the first to admit that we weren’t expecting much of a change from last year’s Q990F, and yet the HW-Q990H has a few surprises up its sleeve.

We’ve hooked the soundbar package up to our reference TV (the Sony Bravia 8 II) and 4K Blu-ray player (the sadly discontinued Oppo UDP-203), and raided our library of reference discs to assess the system’s sound performance.

As with the previous model, the Surround mode proves to be the best for movies and TV shows, as the wider sound field means that all components hang together in a more sonically cohesive way. The Standard preset, meanwhile, is better for music, and those who prefer minimal processing, or perhaps want a more focused sound, may prefer it for movies and TV shows.

Overall, the improvements to this generation from the HW-Q990F (which we have on hand for direct comparisons) can be distilled into this: the Q990H takes everything we love about the last generation, and delivers it with even more nuance, detail and scale.

Starting with Civil War, we watch the section leading up to the climactic final battle, and we find that this soundbar package excels in practically every aspect. As Lee goes to comfort Jessie in a serene woodland area, we’re totally immersed in the environment thanks to the soundbar’s excellent placement of cinematic effects.

Birds chirping in trees overhead and the subtle crackling of twigs and leaves breaking underfoot are realised with superb accuracy, and the river trickling in the background is packed with sonic nuance; it all sounds genuinely alive.

As the two characters have a heart-to-heart conversation, we find that the tonality and emotions of their voices are captured thanks to the Q990H's rich sonic characteristics and deft handling of low-level dynamics. Vocal clarity is also excellent, as the system has no problem delivering crisp and detailed, yet full-bodied, dialogue, and we find little in the way of sharpness or sibilance in any of the characters’ voices.

As the Western Forces prepare to deploy, the thunderous rumble of helicopter blades is delivered with a crisp leading edge to each swoop, and is rounded out with a thickness, weight and richness that gives a genuine impression of heavy-duty metal blades chopping through the air.

It should come as no surprise that bass is handled very well, considering how much of a step up the HW-Q990F was with its redesigned subwoofer. The HW-Q990H seems to carry across the same, or at least a very similar, subwoofer, which brings an equally impressive dose of low-end weight.

We switch to Blade Runner 2049’s infamously tricky chapter two, and find that the bass builds nicely, peppering tension throughout. It refuses to distort or warble, and yet it reaches plenty deep, and there is a sense of tonal variation within the bass, which makes it sound tuneful and dynamic.

We find that the system’s previously established strengths are also on show. The way it projects height effects and places them – especially the announcements of the holographic advertisements near Officer K’s apartment – is impressive indeed. While this was a strength of the HW-Q990F, the Q990H takes this even further, with a greater sense of accuracy and spaciousness.

This system captures the bustle of the dystopian street and the buzz of K’s crowded apartment complex with a level of finesse and detail that seriously sells the atmosphere of each scene. It cleverly picks up background sounds and weaves them into the soundfield without making them sound forced or intentionally singled out.

Rounding out our film testing with Thunderbolts, we start the scene in which the team of anti-heroes makes a daring escape from a compound surrounded by military personnel. The tapping percussion featured throughout this sequence feels agile and snappy, conveying excitement and energy while easily keeping pace.

Dialogue is once again a highlight here; Yelena Belova’s dry wit is captured differently from John Walker’s stoic inflexion, thanks to the system’s ability to capture finer details. It’s not a night-and-day difference compared with its predecessor, but once we notice it, it becomes clear that the Q990H is the better of the two at unearthing subtler sonic nuances.

Moving on to music, we try a range of tracks, including Harry Styles’ Carla’s Song, Heavy by The Marias, and tracks from Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar OST in the system’s Standard mode. This sound mode removes the rear speakers from the equation and lets the main soundbar unit and subwoofer shine for stereo music reproduction.

The good news is that most, if not all, of the positive attributes from our movie testing are present and correct for music, too. Vocals are warm and detailed, bass is taut, deep and keeps pace, and there is a general sense of naturalism and balance to the sound.

While the Sonos Arc Ultra is our preferred soundbar for music, thanks to its richer, more rounded and smoother sound, the HW-Q990H is still a seriously talented performer.

Verdict

While it may look like a subtle upgrade on paper, and it even looks borderline identical to its predecessor when we unbox it, Samsung has made some worthwhile under-the-hood refinements with this soundbar package.

Its ability to capture a touch more detail and nuance, and place spatial sound effects with even greater precision, makes this system another step up in a lineage of soundbars that have improved year-on-year.

SCORES

• Sound 5
• Features 5
• Build 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Samsung HW-Q990F

Also consider the Sonos Arc Ultra

Read our Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 review

Best soundbars: options for every need, recommended by our experts

Xgimi’s latest bid to turn the world’s living rooms into cinemas is its most all-round spectacular projector yet.

The Horizon 20 Max’s eye-catching design is out to make light of the often complicated job of projector set-up.

Its retina-challenging claimed brightness of 5700 ISO lumens is out to cut through ambient light like a knife through butter.

Its claimed 20,000:1 contrast ratio is out to suggest the projector might actually be able to turn itself into a proper home cinema machine for movie nights.

And its claimed 110 per cent coverage of the AV world’s most extreme BT.2020 colour gamut is out to make it look locked and loaded for whatever video challenges the future might bring.

Exciting stuff indeed. Unless it’s all just hype, of course.

Price

The Horizon 20 Max’s price puts it in arguably the single most competitive projector space right now.

Around its level can be found all manner of weird and more or less wonderful serious home entertainment projectors, all keen to combine lifestyle convenience with genuine performance skills.

Key rivals, for instance, would be BenQ’s X3100i and the recently reviewed Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2, both of which back up their on-paper appeal with the real five-star performance deal.

Despite still being relatively new to the projector scene, though, Xgimi has already proved capable of staking a strong claim to even the most competitive projection turf, so we can’t see any reason why the Horizon 20 Max can’t also at least keep up with the Joneses. Especially given the sort of on-paper features and specifications it boasts.

Design

While projectors that join the Horizon 20 Max in adopting a roughly cubic shape are pretty common these days, Xgimi’s model still manages to stand out from the crowd for two main reasons.

First, it hangs its cubic form in a distinctive cradle stand, within which the projector can be effortlessly tilted up and down to get its pictures in the right place on your wall or, ideally, screen.

The hinge mechanism that makes this possible is outstanding, supporting the meaty projector body as if it’s no heavier than a handful of candy floss, while at the same time allowing you to adjust the projector’s angle of attack over clearly defined and well-calibrated steps.

The whole cradle rig can be rotated left or right on the unit’s circular base, too, with the rotating movement again impressing with how smooth and clean it is.

The other unusual feature of the Horizon 20 Max’s design is the leather-like texture of its ‘elephant grey’ finish. This soft finish creates an unusual combination of tactile warmth and premium quality that’s unique in even the Horizon 20 Max’s relatively design-led part of the projector market.

The Horizon 20 Max is joined by a crisp, button-lite remote control that combines a smooth metallic finish element for its bottom half and side/rear elements with a matte black-backed button section offset by a gleaming black metallic-looking navigation circle at its heart. The key buttons on the remote are helpfully backlit, too.

Features

While the Horizon 20 Max’s design is flexible and innovative enough to be classed as a feature in itself, its attractions run much more than skin deep.

For starters, its triple-laser 4K DLP optical engine is claimed to be capable of blasting out a monumental 5700 ISO lumens of peak brightness. That’s one of the highest brightness figures we’ve seen from any projector, and it seems like it should be impossible from a projector as compact and affordable as the Horizon 20 Max.

Other big Horizon 20 Max numbers include a claimed 20,000:1 contrast ratio courtesy of the projector’s dynamic light control systems, claimed coverage of 110 per cent of the extreme BT.2020 colour spectrum (most HDR content is mastered in the much narrower DCI-P3 spectrum), and the claimed ability to satisfy a screen as big as 300 inches.

Gamers will be pleased to learn that the Horizon 20 Max can handle refresh rates all the way up to 240Hz. Those refresh rates can be variable, too, and unlike some rivals, the Horizon 20 Max can retain 4K and HDR when you’re gaming at 120Hz.

The Horizon 20 Max’s operating system is built around Google TV. This brings with it most of the world’s most popular streaming services, including Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV, as well as most of the UK’s main terrestrial broadcaster catch-up services.

The only things missing are the BBC iPlayer, which hardly ever appears on Google-based products, and both the Freeview Play and Freely services.

It becomes apparent while exploring the Horizon 20 Max’s smart features that it impressively supports both the Dolby Vision and HDR10+ premium HDR formats. After years of projectors not supporting either of these formats, with their extra scene-by-scene HDR image information, we’ve now tested two in a row.

The Horizon 20 Max’s connections include a pair of HDMIs (one of which supports eARC for shipping sound through to a connected AVR or soundbar), two USB ports, an optical digital audio output, a 3.5mm audio line out, as well as the now pretty much obligatory Bluetooth and wi-fi streaming options.

The Horizon 20 Max’s attempts to make itself easy to set up and adapt to different room arrangements don’t stop at its unusual cradled design. It also offers motorised horizontal and vertical optical image shifting, and motorised zoom. All of which are delivered via outstandingly refined and smooth mechanisms. Plus, there’s auto keystone correction, intelligent obstacle avoidance and screen alignment systems, an autofocus system, and even the facility to adjust the projector’s colour to compensate for different wall colours.

The words 'Sound By Harman Kardon’ at the bottom right of a grilled area over the bottom half of the Horizon 20 Max’s fascia alert you to the presence of a potentially unusually powerful sound system by projector standards. This turns out to comprise a 2 x 12W speaker arrangement with DTS Virtual:X and Dolby Audio decoding – with the cubic design providing more room for sound to breathe than regular projector designs do.

Picture

The Horizon 20 Max is capable of being a seriously enjoyable watch across a surprisingly wide range of room conditions.

It’s great to discover, for starters, that Xgimi seems to have taken on board past criticisms that its projectors can be a little too interested in aggressive spectacle over the naturalism and balance that more serious AV fans desire. Basically, the Horizon 20 Max not only now provides easy-access presets that cater sensibly for both bright and dark room set-ups, but it’s clearly worked hard to make sure that its newly diverse range of preset options are actually quite thoughtfully calibrated.

There’s even a Filmmaker Mode on the Horizon 20 Max, in fact, designed to produce pictures that get as close as the projector can manage to the look of industry video mastering standards.

Unusually, though, the Horizon 20 Max only seems to let you access Filmmaker Mode if it’s triggered by a flag in the content you’re watching. There’s no manually selectable Filmmaker Mode in the list of different presets the projector lets you choose between. Which means, essentially, that while Filmmaker Mode may trigger with some streamed content, you can’t apply it to 4K Blu-rays given that no 4K Blu-rays, so far as we’re aware, have been mastered with the Filmmaker Mode flag embedded.

It’s fortunate, then, that the Movie preset that the Horizon 20 Max does provide is very effective, injecting a level of warmth, subtlety and balance into the image that old Xgimi would not have done so well.

Colours – even skin tones – look believable and balanced, and there’s enough subtlety in the rendering of the image’s colour tones to ensure that nothing looks plasticky, flat, garish or cartoonish. Nor is there any significant evidence of colour striping over colour blends.

This welcome new interest from Xgimi in creating a picture that’s built around immersion, balance and refinement is joined by outstanding sharpness, too. Truly native 4K projection still isn’t yet an option at the Horizon 20 Max’s price level, but the crispness and sense of detail and texture in this Xgimi’s pictures look at least 4K adjacent. Without, crucially, anything feeling over-sharpened.

While the Movie preset is an overall great option for watching movies and premium TV shows in a relatively dark or fully blacked-out room, viewing in such conditions does reveal slightly raised black tones during dark scenes. This issue is nothing like as bad as we might have expected from a projector with 5700 ISO lumens of claimed brightness in its locker, but there’s certainly a slightly greyer look to dark areas than we experienced with a well-set-up Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 – though that Valerion model doesn’t look quite as bright and punchy as the Horizon 20 Max.

The Xgimi’s brightness really is impressive. As well as helping images retain enjoyable punch and dynamism even in quite high levels of ambient light, this brightness is also put to excellent use by Xgimi’s dynamic tone mapping system in creating a genuine HDR ‘feel’ to the presentation of HDR sources. This includes some proper intensity in bright peaks, such as sunlight reflecting on metal or glass.

Having said all that, you shouldn’t expect to get anything like the Horizon 20 Max’s full claimed light output while still watching enjoyable pictures. This is because you can only access the projector’s full light output by switching the projector to a High Brightness picture preset which, while undoubtedly almost unbelievably bright, also does some very strange things to the image’s colours, leaving them looking washed out and excessively ‘cool’ in tone, to a degree that still looks off even in the relatively high levels of ambient light this setting is presumably designed to fight against.

Happily, though, the Standard or even Vivid presets are both fantastically punchy by projector standards if that’s the look you’re after, or you’re wanting to use the projector in ambient light without suffering such blue-dominated colour shifts. In fact, these two modes actually look extremely vibrant, giving you easy access to Xgimi’s fun, if occasionally OTT, vibrant side.

Xgimi’s new willingness to cater for a wide variety of image tastes is further expanded by the Horizon 20 Max’s ability to play Dolby Vision and HDR10+ content, and the addition of an IMAX Enhanced mode as another very watchable, if slightly more muted, film enthusiast’s alternative to the Movie mode.

Bright Dolby Vision scenes look particularly gorgeous in the Dolby Vision Dark setting – though even with Dolby’s extra help, dark scenes still look a little washed out.

While the Horizon 20 Max makes its biggest mark against the competition with HDR content, it is able to adapt its output very successfully to the much milder demands of SDR, retaining the necessary colour balance and refinement that AV fans look for with SDR playback.

The Xgimi’s brightness and vibrancy contribute to a seriously fun gaming performance that does substantially more justice than most projectors to the HDR graphics that pretty much all AAA games now deploy. No other projectors in the Horizon 20 Max’s class look crisper, brighter or more vibrant in their game modes, in fact. The projector’s 4K 120Hz HDR gaming support delivers a really responsive experience, too, backed up by input lag that measures just 11.1ms with 1080p/60Hz feeds.

Figuring out what gaming features the Horizon 20 Max supports does bring up our toughest battle with its bizarrely over-complicated picture set-up menus, though.

These menus contain an impressive number of tweaks and options, but some are confusingly named, and worse, there appear to be some seriously complex and typically unexplained inter-relationships between some of them. Choosing one option can cause another to become greyed out and inaccessible, for example, and you’re not even always clear about whether a particular feature is actually working or not.

When it comes to gaming, there’s a Game setting in the basic presets section – but this doesn’t introduce any sort of low-latency features. In fact, the lag if you just choose this option is well over 100ms – far too high for a responsive gaming experience.

It turns out that you need to manually select a separate Game option buried deep in the All Settings/Display Settings sub menu, and then additionally select a Boost option within that Game submenu before lag gets down to the 11.1ms figure noted above.

Even weirder, if you turn the Boost mode on, but then turn the ‘secondary’ Game mode off, the Boost mode remains active, even if you’re no longer playing a game. Thankfully, the projector does tend to remind you that Boost mode is active, but then you have to remember how to navigate the tortuous route back to the option that switches it off.

Another issue is that some of the Horizon 20 Max’s picture adjustments are very unrefined, only making coarse, extreme changes to the image when much finer levels of adjustment are needed.

So complex and ‘raw’ are the Horizon 20 Max’s settings, in fact, that we suggest you pretty much just stick with the two or three picture presets you like the most for different light levels rather than getting involved with much fine-tuning. The only exception to this 'leave well alone’ advice, aside from the low lag situation for gamers, concerns the projector’s motion processing. The default setting of this MEMC feature turns films into over-smooth soap operas in its default setting with most picture presets, so you should switch it into its relatively gentle Real Cinema mode, or just turn motion processing off entirely.

Aside from its slightly grey black levels and brain-bending picture set-up options, the one other issue we have with the Horizon 20 Max’s pictures is the rainbow effect. The distracting tell-tale stripes of red, green and blue flit over the image consistently enough to become at least a low-level distraction to most viewers – never mind those people who are particularly prone to seeing this common DLP issue.

Sound

The Horizon 20 Max’s built-in sound system is impressive in many ways. Bass, in particular, is much more present, deep and free of distortions than it is on the vast majority of integrated projector sound systems. The sound also projects forward from the projector very handily, and spreads out rapidly in the process, achieving that very rare projector sound system feat of making its sound appear at least vaguely connected to its pictures.

The integrated speakers are powerful enough to get pretty loud without starting to distort, too, and consistently manage to shift smoothly through a good few gears when playing action scenes without starting to sound muddy or constrained. Especially with low-end sounds kicking in so enthusiastically.

The speakers are sensitive enough to portray plenty of subtle details from busy film soundtracks, too, while the projector’s sound processing manages to place location effects with likeable accuracy. Dialogue remains locked at the heart of the soundstage, though, as it should. In fact, dialogue can go a little far in this respect at times, to the point where it can start to sound a little trapped inside the projector’s belly, especially with male voices.

The only other issue with the Horizon 20 Max’s sound is that the very deepest extended bass rumbles can sound a bit coarse and unrefined compared with the rest of the audio profile. Though the speakers seldom if ever lose their integrity to such an extent that they flat out distort or crackle.

Verdict

There’s a ton of stuff to like about the Horizon 20 Max. Its design is cool, tactile and user-friendly; its feature count for movie fans and gamers is long and useful, and its pictures are fundamentally strong and adapt well to a much wider range of room set-ups than the vast majority of other projectors can.

Dark scenes can look a touch grey if you fancy a serious dark room movie night, though, and the rainbow effect can be hard to ignore. Its set-up menus are bizarrely inscrutable at times, too.

With some impressive sonics to keep its generally good pictures company, though, in the end, the Horizon 20 Max is impossible not to like.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 4
• Features 4

MORE:

Read our review of the BenQ x3100i

Also consider the Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2

Read our Hisense C1 review

Best projectors: budget, 4K and ultra-short-throw

I am a huge fan of Dolby Atmos music. I play it every day and I often carve out a few hours specifically to enjoy myself immersed in this spatial format which can place music elements both behind me and above.

But not on headphones. I play my Atmos music on what might be described as an upper midrange speaker system, delivering 5.1.2 channels – that’s five speakers on the floor, including surrounds out wide behind me and a subwoofer up the front, plus two speakers in forward height positions in order to deliver Atmos’ famous hemisphere of sound. (Yes, just a hemisphere; I’m still waiting for someone to realise they’re missing a trick with not yet embedding speakers in the floor to create a real sphere of sound. But perhaps I shouldn’t encourage them.)

Atmos on a full system

My sources for playing Atmos music are two-fold. My subscription to Apple Music allows access to a great many tracks mixed in Atmos, or Spatial Audio as Apple sensibly prefers to de-brand it. This can be served from an AppleTV 4K into my AV receiver. Tidal and apparently Amazon Prime Music (though not the free version) can also serve Atmos, but Apple is usually my server of choice for streaming Atmos.

My main source, however, and particularly at the moment, is Atmos music on Blu-ray – discs with no video on them, but multiple mixes of an album, usually in Dolby Atmos, with some form of 5.1 or 7.1 surround as well, and high-res stereo. Sometimes instrumental Atmos mixes are also included as a bonus.

In fact over the last year I have developed a hair-trigger form of 'new-formatitis', an addiction to buying Atmos music discs which is costing me, well, not a huge amount of money, but has certainly upped my casual expenditure on music significantly. And mainly buying albums that I already have either on vinyl, CD or digitally. Doesn’t matter: when the latest Atmos Blu-ray release is announced, I’m clicking that email link and slapping my money down without a second thought.

It began with Morten Lindberg (38 Grammy nominations and counting) and his work for Norway’s 2L label; my early Atmos disc collection was dominated by his extraordinary in-the-moment Atmos recordings, and I’ve twice raved about them here on What Hi-Fi? (this one partly because of heartstopping performances by the wildly magnificent Catalina Vicens, and this one as being the most gorgeous of Christmas albums; there are plenty of others).

But of course surround discs had been around for a good while before Atmos arrived. For video discs, a surprising number of old music DVDs have excellent surround soundtracks, sometimes in 24-bit/96kHz – 'Best of Bowie', 'Queen's Greatest Hits', etc; I pick them out of boxes left on the street these days, or grab them for $2 a pop in charity shops. Like secondhand CDs, they can be a very cheap way to gather good music.

Early pop and rock surround music was also possible on the SACD format, while the emergence of audio Blu-rays was notably led by ‘Pure Audio’ discs, developed by msm-studios in Munich in 2009, beginning with lossless high-res LPCM stereo and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, then later adding Dolby TrueHD and Atmos.

Lossless Atmos music

An important word there is ‘lossless’. Why do I buy the Blu-rays, when I can usually listen to the same Atmos mixes on subscription via Apple Music?

Because Atmos streaming is heavily data compressed, arriving at bit-rates ranging perhaps from 384kbps to 768kbps. Compare those bit-rates with disc-based Atmos audio, which are typically from 3000kbps upwards. Morten Lindberg at 2L recently told Stereophile's erudite Jim Austin that their discs average 6000kbps and peak far higher, which confirms what Lindberg told me some time ago: that Atmos streaming is compressed by a factor of perhaps 11 to 1. That's a similar compression ratio to ye olde 128k MP3s when compared to CD, or to AC3 Dolby Digital soundtracks as used on movie DVDs.

So it's remarkable that it sounds as good as it does, streaming through the speakers from the AppleTV 4K. But the disparity provides mathematical support for what the ears confirm: the lack of compression is immediately evident in the thrilling clarity of the best Atmos music Blu-rays.

Not all – some Atmos mixes can be awful, or just boring, with little more than atmospheric extension of the front soundstage into the rears. There’s no point in paying for that; the stereo will likely serve better.

But when you do get a good ’un – oh wow.

Apple Music, then, is very useful both for listening enjoyably to large numbers of Atmos releases, and for checking whether a particular new Atmos mix of a favourite album is bland or brilliant before putting down your money on the Blu-ray release.

In a little Catch 22, however: by the time you can hear it, you may not be able to buy it. The company getting most of the money from my present addiction is SDE, and their releases are largely limited editions that become unavailable all too quickly; scroll through their ‘sold out’ back catalogue to confirm this. In fact I gather their model is to print not many more than were hard-ordered in the pre-release window, to avoid having “an attic full of unsold discs”. So if you miss that pre-sale window, you just ain’t going to get one. And if you wait to hear the mix on Apple after release, you might be too late to get in on the Blu-ray pre-release.

Hence my trigger finger on all three most recent pre-sales: Alan Parsons' 'Eye in The Sky'; Chris Squire 'Fish out of Water'; Roxy Music's 'Flesh & Blood', that's the tour I saw them on. It's like they're going through my record collection! This is music I can't miss: limited edition access to the best possible versions of my formative albums. Hence I don't know if I was more a-quiver about the long-delayed Atmos mix of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ last year (I had to buy a whole box-set to get that one, but it’s a magnificent package) or the holy grail release of an Atmos version of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s 1984 sonic orgasm ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’. Take my money!

Other Blu-rays are more widely and permanently marketed – the wham-bam brilliant Atmos mix of Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’ by the original engineer Ken Scott, or Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’; these are less likely to go out of print quickly. ‘Animals’ came out in Atmos about 18 months after I bought it in 5.1 24/96 DTS-HD MA. Even I didn't pay again for 16/48 Atmos!

There’s one useful benchmark to confirm instantly that the Atmos mix certainly won’t be bland, and that’s if it’s by Steven Wilson, former Porcupine Tree frontman and absolute ruler of the modern Atmos remix. The new Frankie mix is his, and it was worth every cent of the extra postage from the UK. Loving his instrumental Pleasuredome mixes. I bought Wilson's own 2025 album ‘The Overview’ as an Atmos disc just because I like all his other Atmos mixes (and earlier surround mixes). He is wildly prolific, especially among prog artists: Yes, Black Sabbath, Rush, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Gentle Giant, XTC, Pink Floyd (Pompeii), Roxy Music, also The Who (I’ve just received ‘Who Are You’), and gasp, Robert Fripp’s ‘Exposure’ (for which I could only get the 5.1 DVD). Wilson has opened an Atmos download site called Headphone Dust which may eventually overcome some of those limited availability disc issues, if/once it grows beyond his own material. Others, including 2L, also offer Atmos and surround and high-res as file downloads. Direct file replay has obvious advantages over Blu-ray playback, assuming you have an easy replay chain for the files, which is by no means straightforward in a consumer system. (Meaning I haven't done it yet.)

The Atmos curve should credit Giles Martin as well, for doing so many Beatles Atmos mixes which helped the format gain popular traction; I’ve just been enjoying the SDE Blu-ray of his new Wings mixes, all in utterly uncompressed Atmos, and including even some neglected songs from ‘Back To The Egg’ and ‘London Town’. Joy! Then Mull of Kintyre – skkiip! Bagpipes in Atmos, can you imagine.

Classic after classic in Dolby Atmos. And I’ve been listening on disc only, not on your ‘immersive’ headphones. From my trusty Oppo Blu-ray player my Atmos Blu-rays play into my Yamaha AV receiver, with left and right channels upgraded via stereo power amps, and often I dial my Atmos configuration down to 4.1.2, keeping my large left-right speakers in charge of the front soundstage. This makes for a tight sweet spot, but that’s just fine. I hold my Atmos speaker system close, almost like headphones.

And yet I never listen to Dolby Atmos on headphones. I have tried it many times, and the rear cues have never worked for me. Objects which should be at rear left or rear right have instead sounded merely very widely panned around the sides, so that there’s no real immersion, just a messed-up stereo presentation, some of which sounds notably soft compared to the same track presented in stereo. The occasional Ambisonic recording has worked for me with remarkable 'behind you' voices and effects via headphones, but I've never heard music gain the complete channel separation that is obvious with real speakers. And to my ears the attempt at delivering this effect on headphones causes an overall softness, against which the clarity of stereo can be so superior that I've often been surprised by those who profess to pick the Atmos option by preference.

Until now, anyway.

Apple AirPod Max 2 arrives

So along come Apple’s new AirPod Max 2 headphones. I was very excited about these for a number of reasons. Firstly I am an everyday user of the original AirPod Max; when work is done and I go sit on my sunny deck, I wear the Apples, partly because they make everything sound fantastic, and partly because their ‘Transparency’ mode is brilliantly realistic, so that I can still pinpoint where to look in our big but famously toxic white cedar tree for a chirruping lorikeet or a calling currawong.

This feature is important to me (both to enjoy the birds and to avoid being shat on), but perhaps not for you, which is why there are thousands of headphones available for thousands of different preferences. I must have reviewed 20+ rivals to the Apples since their arrival. But while I've referred to Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2 as a piece of perfection in design terms, and while I needed tissues after packing up and returning the divine but costly open-backed Meze Poets after a review last year, still nothing has made me shell out for shells that beat the Apples for my deck-dozing purposes. Which is why they look so filthy in the comparison picture below. (My wife did clean the headband recently.)

Secondly I was excited by Apple’s announcement of Instant Translation through the new AirPod Max 2s. Say wha - Instant Translation? I wrote about this as a dream scenario for smart headphones not so long back – imagine visiting someone in Italy, say, sitting round a table with all their friends, and instead of everybody kindly switching to English so you can join in, you just wear headphones which translate everything instantly. Mamma mia, you might say.

It blows my mind that this kind of AI-augmented ‘Headphone 3.0’ functionality is already possible – you have to wonder if Apple has had access to alien technology. Sadly I've yet to try it. Our household's collection of two MacBooks, a Mac Mini, an iPad and two iPhones proves as a group to be too slanted towards obsolence, with nothing quite up-to-date enough to power the new 'Apple Intelligence' behind Instant Translation – iPhones 15 Pro or up required, or certain newish iPads. This exciting new future is processor-hungry. Upgrade required.

Same same but better Atmos?

But for music, then (which is what I care about, really), how much more amazing can the new Maxes 2 be than the original Maxes? The answer is, to be honest, not much. Just as they look identical to the old Maxes, and come in the same peculiar non-protective case which looks like a bra from the front and a butt from behind, they also sound extremely similar. I would agree with the review from my UK WHF colleagues that it’s a tad disappointing overall that the new Apple headphones simply aren’t more different from the old Apple headphones.

But then it’s kinda hard to complain too much about that, since the originals still sound as good or better to me than anything else in the market near the price, especially via Bluetooth. I would be amazed if they had sounded any better. If it ain't broke, etc.

That sensible sonic stability was for their stereo sound, however. When I tried some Atmos music, suddenly it worked as never before. The trigger was The Flaming Lips’ ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’, surely the most inspired of Atmos music mixes (as was their DVD 'Void' in 5.1), and the track All We Have Is Now, which begins with electric piano in the back right channel, spacey main vocal in the back left, and nothing at the front at all. That’s precisely what the Apple AirPod Max 2s delivered. Track after track came through with the elements in the same places as I had heard through the speaker system. Headphone Atmos that works! I am delighted.

I have a notion that part of this success is precisely because I had heard these tracks on the speaker system, so I knew exactly what to expect, in terms of what should be where. I am now well acquainted with the details of many Atmos albums heard on speakers, and that likely helps my brain accept positional cues even if they come less distinctly from the headphones.

But I did go back to my original Apple headphones to check, and the Atmos there was not as effective; things sounded softer, potentially through age and use, but potentially through the better chip in the new model. Soft signals in Atmos would especially degrade positional cues, I’d guess.

One other difference was that I let Apple use my phone to image my ears, presumably to personalise the head-related transfer function used in Atmos decoding. Heaven knows how they'll use this biometric information against me when the bots take over, but at least the positional cues in Atmos music may now be more personally and specifically curated. Maybe.

One sure and significant upgrade is that on the new model I can play to the headphones in Atmos via USB-C. My original Apple headphones were the Lightning-socketed type so I’ve never experienced the cabled listening option that came with the USB-C updated version of the originals. Via USB-C it proved a little hard to stop the MacBook using the Bluetooth path (turning off Bluetooth entirely was quicker than trying to persuade the sound settings to switch and stick). But the clarity of lossless stereo music via USB-C was thrilling, and the Atmos imaging was still further improved. It’s possible, therefore, that the previous USB-C version of the AirPods Max might perform equally well as the new Max 2s in this regard.

Two interesting numbers

Mind you, Atmos even via the cable is far from lossless. As noted, Blu-ray disc-based Atmos can use bit-rates of 6000kbps and above.

There are two numbers I’d dearly love to know (I will ask Apple, and will add the answers here if they or anyone else can confirm).

Firstly, what is the maximum bit-rate at which Apple streams Atmos spatial audio? So the rate I'd get if I put my iPhone or MacBook on its maximum quality and Atmos settings and then play to the headphones via the USB-C cable?

I’m guessing this would be the usual ~768kbps at which Atmos streams. Yet the USB-C connection to the headphones could now deliver higher than that. It can do lossless 24-bit/48kHz stereo , which requires native 2304kbps, so perhaps 1200kbps when losslessly encoded. If there’s room through the USB-C cable for that, then there's room for much better Atmos than 768kbps.

Secondly, what bit-rate is used when listening to Atmos on the AirPod Max 2 headphones via Bluetooth, rather than the cable?

I fear it may still be bottle-necked through the 256k AAC Bluetooth codec to which Apple restricts its headphones (and even more incomprehensibly much of its AirPlay ecosystem delivery).

And if Bluetooth Atmos is still going through the pipe at 256kbps AAC to the AirPod Max 2, the compression factor rises to a whacking 20-to-1 or thereabouts. So no wonder that Atmos music via Bluetooth has sounded so soft.

It’s all the more remarkable, then, that the new Apple headphones do a better job, despite what may be the same limitations. I am now genuinely converted to Atmos headphone listening on the new Apple AirPod Max 2, at least via USB-C. In fact I fully recommended it, though perhaps still as an alternative to lossless stereo listening, rather than a permanent replacement.

I’m still working out if I can get the genuine lossless Atmos data from my Blu-rays through to the new headphones via USB-C somehow. I think I'll have to connect an external BD disc drive to my MacBook somehow. More on that if and when it works.

Meanwhile if Apple would only enlarge its Bluetooth pipe to encompass the full 768k Atmos stream, then we could enjoy it all wirelessly as best as possible. Better still, they could raise the Atmos stream quality from the servers to reduce compression and improve every way to play it. That’s the dream, and Apple might one day achieve some of it via a simple firmware update to allow better Bluetooth.

I hope they do. It would save me a fortune in shipping all these Atmos Blu-rays over from the UK.

[ADDENDUM 2nd June 2026: I'm delighted to have discovered overnight that Apple has indeed been working on this in the background. The APAC (Apple Positional Audio Codec) container/codec is already operational in Naim's new Mu-so Hekla (which has been rather rudely branded to Vervent sister company Focal, but it'll always be a Naim to me, and I also doubt Naim would have called it Hekla, realising the homonymical jests possible from the audience).

APAC is apparently scalable right up to lossless Dolby Atmos, but initially we can expect bit-rates to flow from the current 700kbps up to 1Mbps, according to Naim's Steve Harris, who was not uninvolved in the linkages required between the technologies of Apple and Naim. The codec also achieves better (less destructive) compression, he says, so that the bit-rates are not even directly comparable: 700kbps APAC will sound better than current 768kbps Atmos as DD+ (E-AC-3).

He also seems optimistic about the possibility of Apple unleashing something rather better for stereo under AirPlay 2. Sing hallelujah!]

• See all our Australian reviews from Sound+Image and Australian Hi-Fi magazines

April is finally here, which means we’re oh so close to it finally being summer, where we can dust off our BBQ aprons and enjoy the two minutes of sunshine we get each year (in Blighty).

But for our team of hi-fi and home cinema experts, there’s no respite in sight, at least if March is anything to go on, as we’re still seeing a flood of new hardware in our viewing and listening rooms. Over the past 30 days, a staggering five products earned five-star ratings.

And while we love the symmetry, that’s a lot of new products to keep track of, which is why we’ve penned a fresh entry into our regular Pick of the Month column, detailing everything you need to know about our reviewers’ latest recommendations.

LG C6 (OLED65C6)

The LG C6 is the latest step-down OLED from the Korean home cinema giant responsible for not one, but three of last year’s What Hi-Fi? Award-winning TVs. So it has some pretty big shoes to fill.

Thankfully, while its specifications sheet makes it look like a very minor upgrade on the outgoing, and now cheaper, LG C5, the C6 managed to impress our reviewers from the moment they unboxed it.

Brighter and a smidgeon more accurate, with every test disc we noticed a number of subtle improvements that make it the new benchmark for 2026. Hence its new prime position in our best OLED TV guide, and our reviewers’ verdict:

“The improvements aren’t so massive that an owner of a recent C-series model (or one of its closest competitors) should feel the need to immediately upgrade, but if you are in the market for a step-down OLED, the LG C6 is the new benchmark. And it’s a benchmark that its rivals will find very hard to match, let alone surpass.”

Rating: five stars

Read our full LG C6 (OLED65C6) review

Moon 371

Though aficionados have traditionally turned their nose up at them, there’s a lot to like about streaming amps. All the sonic grunt you need to power stereo speakers, paired with the handy ability to stream from your music provider of choice (ours is Tidal).

And last month, we were treated to a true specimen of a streaming amp in the shape of the Moon 371, which proves the category has a place in the enthusiast market as well as more casual circles.

Featuring an eye-catching design, all the streaming smarts you need, and being capable of delivering a fluid, refined sound full of expressive dynamics, it’s well worth any hi-fi fan considering. Hence our verdict:

“Moon has done a great job with the 371 streaming amplifier. It is a neat and stylish package that ticks all the boxes as far as features go, while being a pleasure to use. Add the excellent sound quality into the equation, and it becomes a proper alternative to the best streamer/amplifier separates combinations on the market.”

Rating: five stars

Read our full Moon 371 review

Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2

Valerion is a relative newcomer to the projector market, having started life as a Kickstarter project back in 2024.

Which is why we’re happy to see it come out of the gate strong with the VisionMaster Pro 2, the first Valerion product we’ve ever tested.

Part of the growing wave of “home cinema in a box" projectors flooding the market, the Vision Master 2 sits in the same class as the BenQ X3100i, which we continue to use as a reference point in our viewing rooms.

The idea is simple: give people all the hardware they need to power a movie night in a single box. And as a result, the intimidating-looking unit comes packed with a lot of hardware. Highlights include a triple (RGB) laser lighting system feeding into a 4K-capable DLP optical set-up, and a stereo 12W speaker system.

And, in the real world, despite the company’s youth, the VisionMaster Pro 2 is a very competitive performer capable of delivering a punchy, immersive home cinema experience.

As we said in our review: “From its picture quality to its design, features and even audio performance, the VisionMaster Pro 2 consistently punches above its weight.”

Rating: five stars

Read our full Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2

Yamaha YH-4000

In hi-fi terms, the YH-4000 are in a tough spot. Like the poor saps who played straight after Eddie Van Halen stunned fans at the band’s first gig, with his never-before-seen guitar tapping technique, they have a hard act to top in the shape of the five-star YH-5000SE.

But by striking a lot of the same chords as their Award-winning siblings, while simultaneously carrying a lower price tag, they managed to truly win our reviewers over.

Featuring the same 50mm orthodynamic (planar magnetic) driver as their higher-end sibling and a near identical design, the subtle cuts Yamaha has made are the right ones and let the YH-4000 deliver a solid, albeit occasionally clinical performance.

Whether it was bopping pop, booming rock or complex classical arrangements, paired with a price-appropriate source the headphones delivered impressive levels of clarity, definition and sonic agility.

As we said in our review: “The Yamaha YH-4000 set new standards for the price when it comes to detail resolution and composure. They are wonderfully comfortable, too.”

Rating: five stars

Read our full Yamaha YH-4000 review

Rotel DX-5

MORE:

These are the best stereo amps we’ve tested

Our picks of the best wired headphones

We rank the best TVs money can buy

Samsung’s old dominance of the budget TV market has been severely challenged in recent years, most notably by the likes of Hisense and, especially, TCL.

Can the 65-inch U8000F do enough within its measly price to make the Korean brand the king of TV value once more?

Price

In the UK and US, at least, being able to bag a 65-inch Samsung U8000F for £469 / $430 really does look like a potentially huge bargain.

It’s perhaps not quite such an eye-catching deal in Australia, but when all is said and done, even AU$1299 hardly looks excessive for a 65-inch TV with the usually dependable Samsung name attached.

There are, as we’ll come to later, plenty of reasons why this TV is so affordable. These reasons don’t, though, include anything that might automatically disqualify it from being a potentially good performer for its money.

Not surprisingly, in today’s TV world, the strongest competition for the U8000F comes from TCL – in particular from the C7K and C6KS models, the 65-inch versions of which cost in the UK £829 and £479 respectively. The latter model actually adds local dimming and Mini LED lighting to the equation, despite costing more or less the same as the Samsung U8000F.

Design

The 65-inch U8000F is predictably built predominantly from fairly lightweight plastic. This makes it easy to move around, though, and actually, its bodywork still feels decently rigid and robust. That’s helped, perhaps, by the use of some attractively integrated ribbing in parts of the rear panel.

It’s fairly chunky around the back by today’s TV standards, making it a slightly awkward-looking wall hanging option – but you don’t notice its depth so much when it’s mounted on its pair of included feet.

These feet handily just slot and lock into holes on the screen’s underside, without the need for any screws. They’re positioned quite wide apart, however, meaning you’ll need a fairly wide TV stand to accommodate the TV.

The U8000F’s bezel tastefully sits more or less flush with the screen it holds, and is narrow enough when viewed head-on to prevent you from spotting the bodywork’s fundamentally plasticky nature.

The TV ships with two remote controls. One is an old-school looking chunky affair with a full button count, while the other is a much sleeker number with a nice polished finish and much reduced button count. It doesn’t carry a solar panel like the ‘smart’ remotes you get with Samsung’s premium TVs, but it’s comfortable to hold and easy to use.

Features

The panel at the 65-inch U8000F’s heart is understandably fairly basic by Samsung LCD standards. It’s lit by big ol’ regular-sized LEDs rather than Mini LEDs, and its backlighting doesn’t benefit from any sort of true local dimming system. It’s only a native 60Hz panel, too, which may limit its appeal to gamers with 120Hz (or more) consoles or PCs.

Most surprisingly of all, it doesn’t get a colour system built around Quantum Dots. Instead, as with all of Samsung’s U series TVs of the past few years, it gets something called PurColour, backed up by a Crystal 4K processor that’s a good few notches down in power and sophistication from Samsung’s Neo QLED processors.

If this PurColour system can still map colours accurately and subtly, though, it could still be enough to help the U8000F stand out from the budget TV crowd.

The TV supports high dynamic range video, including in the premium HDR10+ format. There’s no Dolby Vision, though; it seems like hell will need to freeze entirely over before Samsung joins most other TV brands in bringing Dolby Vision to its TVs.

The U8000F’s smart features and interface are provided by Samsung’s home-grown Tizen OS. This would normally be fine; Tizen now carries basically every streaming and catch-up TV service almost anyone could want, bar Freeview Play and Freely. You can operate the TV and find content by talking to it, too, via Samsung’s Bixby system or an external Alexa device. It maintains a dedicated Game Hub screen from which you can access streamed gaming apps or any game consoles or PCs you have connected.

Unfortunately, though, the 65-inch U8000F struggles with the demands of the latest Tizen system, typically running very sluggishly when it comes to opening menus, and booting up apps and streaming services.

While the U8000F’s lack of 120Hz support for gaming is unfortunate (if hardly surprising for such a cheap TV), it does have a few other gaming tricks up its sleeve. These include ALLM switching, VRR support and the HGiG system, whereby the TV essentially passes HDR output control to your Xbox or PlayStation console.

The set also takes just 9.7ms to render graphics when running in its Game mode – one of the lowest such figures we’ve measured.

Picture settings, meanwhile, include a Filmmaker Mode, raising hopes of an easily accessible route to accurate picture quality for AV enthusiasts, as well as Samsung’s suite of Picture Clarity tools for making pictures look cleaner and sharper. The Picture Clarity options here, though, do not include a blur reduction system as you get with more premium Samsung TVs; there are only noise reduction and judder reduction components to play with.

The U8000F’s sound is delivered by a fairly basic 2 x 10W sound system, bolstered by Samsung’s Q Symphony and OTS Lite features. Q Symphony lets the TV’s speakers join forces with those in Samsung soundbars, while OTS Lite uses nifty audio processing to try to make specific sounds appear to be coming from the correct part of the screen.

Connections on the U8000F, finally, comprise a trio of HDMI ports, a single USB-A port, an Ethernet port, the RF jack, a CI slot and, of course, wi-fi and Bluetooth wireless options.

Picture

The U8000F is very much a tale of two picture settings, looking very respectable for its money in its Standard mode, but struggling to meet the demands of AV enthusiasts with its Filmmaker Mode.

Starting with the good news, the Standard mode’s pictures immediately look surprisingly bright by budget TV standards. There’s a very clear step up in brightness between SDR and HDR content, as well as a mild expansion in the HDR image’s colour range. Enough in both cases to make HDR look convincing and surprisingly natural – helped by the presence of a surprisingly effective dynamic tone mapping system (a feature that’s by no means a given at the sort of price level the U8000F is operating at).

The TV’s brightness in Standard mode sits alongside some quite respectable black tones for such an affordable TV. This makes dark scenes comfortable to watch, and creates a degree of contrast that again helps to sell the idea that this is a more HDR-friendly TV than most of its similarly priced rivals.

We should stress that we’re not talking about depths of black in dark scenes of the sort you’d get with an OLED or premium LCD TV – there’s always a hint of grey to remind you that you’re watching a fairly affordable LCD screen – but the impact of this is mild by cheap TV standards.

Dark scenes contain plenty of shadow detail on the U8000F, too, avoiding that flat, hollow look so commonly encountered with budget TVs. Especially budget TVs that are as focused on producing a convincing black tone as this Samsung model seems to be.

The U8000F’s pictures are also sharp enough to look definitively 4K – and thanks to some crisp upscaling, this feels pleasingly true with HD sources as well as native 4K.

The sharpness does dip, though, due to some resolution loss over moving objects that none of the available Picture Clarity settings can completely fix (though choosing a Custom setting with Judder Reduction set to level four or five can at least reduce the impact of the screen’s quite strong native judder with 24fps sources).

There are a couple more Standard mode niggles to report as well. First, very bright picture areas can clip a little, meaning they lose subtle shading information and end up looking so stark that they draw too much attention to themselves (though this reduces with Dynamic Tone Mapping active). Second, colours in relatively dark scenes can ‘clump’ a little, so that very detailed areas such as grass or leaves become a bit rough and ill-defined.

You can also sometimes notice a slightly distracting lag between the backlight system dimming and brightening during scenes that feature abrupt cuts between dark and light shots, and finally, there’s a narrow stripe of light leakage running down the left and right sides of the picture – though this is only generally visible in the black bars above and below 21:9 and similar-ratio films. It’s typically too faint to appear where there’s any sort of picture information other than pure blackness on the screen.

While it’s good to find a very affordable TV that is ambitious enough to carry a Filmmaker Mode, unfortunately, that mode isn’t much fun to watch on the U8000F.

Clipping, for instance, becomes quite extreme without any Dynamic Tone Mapping in play, while motion looks both juddery and soft.

Colours feel flatter in Filmmaker Mode, too, and the image generally lacks impact. Perhaps the biggest issue with Filmmaker Mode, though, is that for some reason, perhaps due to its reduced brightness and contrast, dark scenes suddenly reveal multiple areas of backlight clouding at various points across the screen. You can reduce the impact of this if you watch in a little ambient light, but it’s a shame this feels necessary.

Dark scenes look generally a little greyer in Filmmaker Mode, too, and this greyness can also sometimes take on a slightly green or blue tint.

Not everything about the Filmmaker Mode is a bust. Colours look slightly more even-handed and nuanced, which contributes in particular to a touch less colour clumping in densely textured areas. Shadow detail is still strong, too, despite the extra clouding. Ultimately, though, the Filmmaker Mode’s slightly more nuanced feel in some areas isn’t enough to make it the sort of instant cinematic hit that movie fans might have hoped for.

There’s one more issue to mention, too, that actually affects all of the U8000F’s picture settings: viewing angles. View the TV from really any sort of angle, and the VA panel design causes contrast to take a substantial hit, with parts of the picture that should be black taking on a vivid blue-grey tone. Basically, if your room layout requires lots of people to routinely watch this TV from the side, it’s probably not the TV for you.

Sound

The first thing to say here is that we recommend pretty much always turning the U8000F’s Amplify sound mode on. Without it, the sound tends to feel small and trapped inside the TV.

Even with Amplify mode on, the U8000F’s sound doesn’t exactly shake your foundations. There isn’t much bass depth or presence, and volume levels, even set to maximum, are hardly going to burst your eardrums.

While we might have wished for the U8000F’s sound to give us a bit more, though, what it does give us is actually quite clean and engaging – at least to the extent that the TV seems to understand its speakers’ limitations.

So, bass, while not heavy, seldom distorts or crackles. Treble, while not particularly extended, doesn’t tend to sound harsh or forced. Voices are quite well-rounded and contextualised, and surprisingly, given there are only two speakers in play, the OTS Lite system places voices and spot effects decently accurately in the right place on the screen.

This all makes the sound quite clean and therefore immersive by budget TV standards, making it surprisingly easy to live with.

Verdict

The 65-inch Samsung U8000F is overall a solid TV for its money. It’s up against some stiff and only slightly more expensive competition, and it’s certainly not without its limitations, but provided you aren’t a die-hard cinephile desperately on the hunt for a good Filmmaker Mode, the U8000F’s Standard picture setting actually serves up a cleaner, more balanced, more punchy and above all more consistent performance than most rivals in its class.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 3
• Features 4

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Read our review of the TCL C7K

Also consider the TCL C6KS

Read our Mitchell & Brown QLED1811 review

Best TVs: flagship OLEDs and budget Mini LED sets tried and tested

As I sit here, I can lift my gaze and see three large boxes of electronics on my high-fidelity bench. They are a chunky preamplifier, a slightly less chunky power amplifier, and a similarly-sized network streamer/DAC. I’m about to take them away and replace them with one box.

The current three units occupy 0.05 cubic metres of space and weigh nearly 37 kilograms. The replacement box occupies just 0.01 cubic metres and weighs only 4.8 kilograms.

That replacement is, of course, the Lyngdorf TDAI-2210 digital streaming amplifier, launched in 2025 by the Danish company. The Lyngdorf TDAI-2210 combines pretty much all the features of those three boxes. It’s an integrated amplifier, so a pre-and power amp combined. And it has a streamer built in.

Where it also manages to effectively replace my previous three-box solution is power. The TDAI-2210 has a per-channel rating of 105 watts into 8 ohms, and 210 watts into 4. My regular system is 125/250 watts into 8/4 ohms, so on paper at least, the Lyngdorf could be the only box I need to maintain my current listening experience.

What’s also impressive about the Lyngdorf’s spec sheet is that it manages to package it into a relatively compact, full-width enclosure. A huge contributor to the compactness is that Lyndorf embraces “digital amplifier” fully.

Some others hide behind “Class D” in order to eschew the bogey word “digital”, but in reality, this class of amplifier is simply a slightly different form of digital. Instead of the PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) type of digital on a CD or most streaming platforms, it uses PWM (Pulse Width Modulation).

To simplify matters, perhaps excessively, this represents the signal by how wide the single-bit sample is. Filter that output appropriately and you have an analogue signal. But the thing is, at the amplifier, before the filter, the signal is all one thing or all another thing. Not a gradual slope between the two. So the output transistors are either entirely on, or entirely off. And that makes them immensely efficient.

Which is why you can get a lot of power out of a small box, with only modest heat dissipation. You can see that embrace in the expansion of TDAI – Lyngdorf says it stands for True Digital Amplifier Integrated.

Once you fully embrace something, you can focus on making it as good as it can be. So Lyngdorf, for example, here uses a volume control at the output stage, instead of between what would normally be a preamplifier and a power amplifier.

Now, I do note that there are actually analogue pre-amp outputs: both RCAs and balanced XLRs. And I’m sure Lyngdorf wouldn’t mind in the slightest if, in the future, you wanted to upgrade the amplification to some of its higher-level standalone power amps. Or you might choose to go for some other brand. Whatever. In that case the TDAI-2210 can become a preamplifier, or even merely a source, should you wish.

But this kind of usage then goes against the ethos of the unit’s fully digital design. Because those two analogue pre-outputs must have a separate DAC, turning everything analogue. Stick with the built-in amps, on the other hand, and it’s fully digital all the way until it gets to the speaker binding posts.

You will notice that there aren’t many controls on the front of the unit. That’s in part because you can do a lot of control using the front-panel touch screen, or even more using an Android or iOS app.

There is a “standard model” of the Lyngdorf-2210 which omits the balanced analogue inputs, two pairs of unbalanced RCAs and the moving-magnet phono input. In other markets, these can be added via a modular upgrade, but here in Australia those extra inputs come as standard (see the back panel above). You’ll need to ask your dealer about the other model if you’d prefer to go down that route.

Likewise, there’s a version with a more complete HDMI module: a couple of inputs and an output which supports 4K/8K. The HDMI socket on the standard model is only for the Audio Return Channel from your TV.

Set-up and use

I used the unit… twice. First I had a pre-production model that allowed me to get a good sense of how it worked. Then I was provided with a production model with the first production firmware, to give it the full review treatment. The former was difficult. The latter was a dream.

Happily, if you buy it you’ll be getting the latter!

I used it with Wi-Fi and with Ethernet, and it worked beautifully either way. I mostly used the app on an iPad – an old 6th gen one – but performance was fine regardless. It is very attractively designed, albeit with a few minor flaws. e.g. arrows for going back to previous screens are sometimes at top left, sometimes at centre bottom. A touch more consistency, please. But, of course, with every control app a little learning is involved, and I soon learned this one.

A couple of features were still being finalised as I reviewed. Apple AirPlay was still to come, as was Roon, as was app-controlled DLNA/UPnP. I should note that DLNA/UPnP actually work perfectly when using another app. I used Bubble UPnP on Android, and mConnectHD on iOS to reliably send music from the enormous library on my Synology NAS to the unit. Finalising this facility within the Lyngdorf app will simply be a nice bonus.

Oh, did I mention that there’s a remote control? It’s RF-connected, so no line of sight required. This is sufficiently comprehensive to allow you to pretty much skip using the app.

But you’ll still want your phone or tablet for Tidal, Spotify or your favourite streaming service. I used both of those, and particularly enjoyed Spotify as it became lossless. (And, yes, I have confirmed that it truly is bit-perfect with a comparison of nearly 150 million samples from seven CD tracks.) Both worked perfectly via their Connect features.

The large volume control on the front panel deserves a special mention. Since everything is digital, and indeed the volume controls the sound at the speaker outputs, rather than at the input level to the power amplifier section, there’s no potentiometer through which the signal runs. The volume knob is a controller.

It feels like all volume knobs should, but almost never are. It isn’t particularly heavy, but it does seem to be of machined aluminium, with most of its mass at its circumference. That gives it a nice momentum which, combined with the almost friction-free control device to which it is attached, allows it to spin rapidly, and keep spinning until you stop it. You can control the volume rapidly and surely.

While on the subject of volume control, this is calibrated in one tenths of a decibel and is shown on the screen in home-theatre-like negative decibels, although it could (in theory) be advanced to +20dB. Spinning the knob allows you to fly through those 0.1dBs, but what about the remote? This also works well, once you learn how to use it. You don’t stab the volume control buttons unless you want the tiniest of change. You hold the button down for a second or more. A second makes a noticeable difference in the level, and thereafter it accelerates, so you can knock off ten decibels in about three seconds. This conveys a sense of being really well thought-out for practical use.

Listening sessions

There isn’t much real estate on the back panel of this unit, but that doesn’t restrict the wealth of inputs, particularly because, as mentioned earlier, the Australian version of the TDAI-2210 comes as standard with extra analogue inputs. As a result, it meant I could use the unit’s own MM preamplifier with a Technica SL-1500C and ATVM95SH MM cart, as opposed to my regular setup of a Thorens TD1600 turntable with a Goldring Ethos MC cartridge and Moon 310LP phono preamp. I did use this on a few occasions, but ultimately the Lyngdorf’s MM input was more convenient.

Now vinyl is, obviously, about as analogue as things get. Yet this unit is very much digital. Which means that all the analogue inputs are converted to digital. What form of digital?

Happily, the front panel shows the answer when you have the spectrum display showing. This also shows the digital format, which for all the analogue inputs is PCM24, 96kHz. That is, the analogue to digital converter creates a high-definition digital version of the input to feed to the system. By using 24 bits of resolution, the system can provide quite a bit of headroom to the vinyl inputs – obviously, it wants to avoid hard digital clipping when fed with a hot input.

This provision means that unpredictable analogue inputs such as vinyl need to be turned up higher for the same playback level as any of the digital inputs. I found for the fairly high music levels I prefer, I usually set the volume to around -20dB for digital sources, and -10dB to -7dB for vinyl playback. A lower output cartridge would require an even higher level. The AT cart is pretty average on that front.

You can tweak the sound output of the Lyngdorf using its RoomPerfect EQ correction system, but for a fair comparison with my regular system, I initially chose to listen without this being applied.

Let’s start with a rare item: Capella Corelli’s 'For ye Lovers and Masters of Musique', on the Larrikin label. This collection of small ensemble baroque works was recorded magnificently in Canberra in 1979, and it contains the incredible Chaconne in g minor by John Blow, and as far as I’ve been able to determine this is the only recording, ever, of this piece. Want to enjoy it? You’ll need a piece of vinyl pressed in 1981.

The Blow piece is solo harpsichord. The other pieces include recorder, violin, basso continuo and such. The bite on the harpsichord was excellent, despite the A-D conversion, and the sound was delivered with a lovely sweetness and absolutely no sense of limitation in the plentiful transients. Indeed, the violin on the following Leclair sonata was also gorgeous. Even more so, with no tendency toward stridency in the violin. It was smooth as, well, silk.

The room acoustics were properly delivered, with perhaps a slightly reduced sense of the bass ambience that I’m used to.

But the bass was strong indeed, and powerful, and tight, on an album I picked up recently in the US. A live recording of Dave Grusin and the NY-LA Dream Band. This was released in 1982 before the CD appeared, and with naive enthusiasm for new tech, proclaims on the cover the use of a “Digital Master” – although the recording itself would have been analogue. It is a truly great sounding album, and through the Lyngdorf TDAI-2210 it retains that greatness. The timing is spot on, and the engaging bite of the bass guitar was as good as it gets.

What I particularly loved was the way the Lyngdorf unit supported my Dynaudio Contour 20i speakers in their immaculate presentation of Steve Gadd’s superb drumming. Every element of each tiny explosion of sound was delivered with proper intensity and control that spoke of a wonderful cooperation between amplifier and speaker. Danish amplifier and Danish speaker? Maybe there’s something in that.

What about digital? I played stacks of music from Tidal and Spotify. All worked perfectly well. I mostly use Tidal because, as I’ve found from testing, it really does provide a perfect copy of the original digital music. And now, so does Spotify (albeit without any proper high-resolution content). But I also spent a lot of time sending music from my network attached storage to the unit with the DLNA protocol (which also ensures perfect delivery).

As I write, I’m listening to Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick in two different stereo 96/24 versions: the original mix, and the 2012 Steve Wilson remix. I confess that I haven’t really compared them in the past, but using this system I did a bit of switching. And it was clear that the transparency of the Lyngdorf TDAI-2210 was first-class. There was a huge level difference between the two versions (the original was quieter), but even after adjusting for this there was a clear instability in EQ across the original and occasional confusion in some of the denser passages that was absent in the Wilson version. But in both the dynamics of the drumming provided a basal component that tied the entire works together.

Before exploring RoomPerfect, I wanted to pay close attention to some music with a modern recording sensibility, in which bass wasn’t limited in deference to the limitations of vinyl. So, back to Tidal and Billie Eilish’s 'When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go' album, which is delivered on that platform at 44.1kHz, but a deeper 24 bits. That’s what the Tidal app says, and what the Lyndorf reports on its display.

The plentiful bass was delivered magnificently, with power and control. The Lyngdorf TDAI-2210 exercised masterful control over the Contour 20i speakers, making them do precisely what the music demanded. Those speakers aren’t the hardest in the world to drive, but neither are they the easiest – nominal four-ohm impedance and lowish (86dB, 2.83V, 1m) sensitivity. So I fired up the track Nature Boy from Primus’ album 'Pork Soda' on Tidal (192kHz, 24 bits!) and pushed it to an indicated -2dB. A normal loud listening level with my setup for streamed music is typically between -20dB and -15dB. At -2dB the music was thunderous but remained perfectly controlled, with a strong delivery of the kick drum, and other bits of the kit tightly delivered, Claypool’s bass strong and his nasal vocal delivery relatively smooth.

We don’t talk enough about high-fidelity systems going loud; I’m a strong believer that they ought to for maximum flexibility, and for occasional maximum enjoyment.

RoomPerfect

Now, how about the way Lyngdorf wants the unit to be used?

I had not accepted the RoomPerfect set-up option at first, but it was easy to find in the settings menu within the app. It talked me through the process, both in the app itself and on the front panel display.

Briefly, you assemble the microphone stand and place the microphone in its clip, then connect it to the dedicated XLR socket on the rear of the unit. The unit responds, telling you where to place the microphone (where your head would normally be while listening), and then it issues test signals, one speaker at a time. These are moderately loud but not unpleasant. Each cycle takes about a minute.

It insists on at least four: the head position and three more at random room positions, acquiring “Room Knowledge”. After this it gives you the option to test some more spots. I did just one more.

After that you can use a “Bypass” switch in the app to switch RoomPerfect on and off to assess whether you like it.

How much difference it makes will depend on your speakers, their placement, your sitting position and things like room treatments. For me it made little difference in mid and high frequency delivery, but it brought forward the mid to deep bass – say the 40 to 80 hertz frequency range. This was particularly clear on the Simple Minds album 'New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84)' (on vinyl). I can’t say I was missing these frequencies before applying RoomPerfect, but they added a nice body which may more accurately reflect what the record producers wanted. I assume that the calibration system was compensating for bands of destructive room reflections.

Verdict

The Lyngdorf TDAI-2210 is powerful, sounds great and is extremely versatile. If your budget might stretch into this area, you really should give it an audition; I’d be surprised if you were disappointed.

• See all our Australian reviews from Sound+Image and Australian Hi-Fi magazines

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If you’ve spent any time at all reading the TV reviews here on What Hi-Fi?, you’ll know that panel technology alone does not make a TV.

Even televisions that use the same panel can look vastly different from one another, and that’s before you consider all the other things – such as features, design and sound quality – that might sway a buying decision one way or the other.

When the LG G5 was released last year, it sent the Micro Lens Array (MLA) tech that had been behind its flagship panels for the last two years packing, and replaced it with new, cutting-edge Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel technology.

A few other TVs also bought into this tech – notably the Panasonic Z95B and the Philips OLED910 – and since we’ve already put the LG G5 and the Z95B up against one another, it’s high time we considered how the Philips OLED910 compares with its panelmate too. Let the battle begin.

Philips OLED910 vs LG G5: pricing

Considering the LG G6 is currently prepping itself for the shelves, the LG G5 is now much cheaper than it was at launch (though perhaps not as cheap as it will be in a couple of months).

This price would have brought it much closer to the original price of the Philips OLED910 if a recent price drop from Philips hadn’t widened that gap once again. That is, of course, if you live in the UK or Europe – Philip OLEDs aren’t available in the US or Australia.

We tested both of these TVs at 65 inches, and currently you can pick up that size of the LG G5 for around £2499, while the OLED910 is available for as little as £1799.

The 65-inch G5 has gone as low as £1899 in the past, but we've never seen it available for less than the OLED910.

If 65 inches doesn’t suit your space, you’ll have more choice on size with the G5, which is available in 48, 55, 77, 83 and 97 inches – though it’s worth noting that the 48- and 97-inch sets do not use the Primary RGB Tandem panel, and so therefore will not reach the same brightness levels.

That, perhaps, makes the fewer size choices of the Philips OLED910 less of an issue, with the 55- and 77-inch options, alongside the 65-inch set, most likely covering the screen sizes most people want – and at considerably lower prices.

When it comes to pricing, then, the Philips takes an easy win.

Winner: Philips OLED910

Philips OLED910 vs LG G5: design

Whatever design you prefer is the right answer to which is best, but we’d argue there is more to like about the design of the Philips OLED910 over the LG G5.

The Kvadrat fabric covering the under-screen speaker gives it a stylish, furniture-esque look, and four-sided Ambilight only adds to its flair.

The G5, by comparison, is as slim (2.4cm) and attractive as its predecessors – but it’s a design that has gone unchanged since the G1.

It feels ready for a makeover, but there’s absolutely nothing to dislike here otherwise. The Zero Gap wall mount makes for a super flush fit if you are looking to mount it, but if not, be sure to look out for the version that comes with the tabletop stand – in the UK, that’s currently only available for the 55- and 65-inch versions.

Slim and sleek is all well and good, but we have to pay the OLED910 its dues for its greater aesthetic consideration.

WINNER: Philips OLED910

Philips OLED910 vs LG G5: features

We already know that the LG G5 and the Philips OLED910 share the same super-bright Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel, with peak brightness claims of up to 4000 nits, but what in their feature lists separates them?

For a start, behind those panels are, of course, two different processors – the Philips 9th Gen P5 and LG’s Alpha 11 AI Processor Gen 2. Both are the companies’ most powerful TV chipset, with AI smarts on board that claim to offer a helping hand when it comes to making the picture and sound the very best for what you’re watching.

In the G5, that includes AI Picture Pro and AI Sound Pro, the former covering off a range of picture enhancements, such as AI Perceived Object Enhancer (which aims to boost the three-dimensionality of the picture), AI Super Upscaling and OLED Dynamic Tone Mapping.

LG has also installed an AI chatbot into the G5, which is on hand to help you get your picture how you want it, or solve issues with your TV. For those who don’t feel confident trawling through a settings menu, you can say things such as “my TV isn’t bright enough” to have the settings automatically adjusted.

For the OLED910, the on-board AI helps to classify what it is you’re watching and adapt the picture quality to suit. It also offers similar AI-judged improvements to things such as sharpness, colour vibrancy and contrast, though as always you can turn these off if you prefer.

Elsewhere, the Philips OLED910 continues its commendable commitment to supporting all four of the current HDR formats – that’s HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, alongside the basic HDR10 and HLG.

The G5, by comparison, only supports Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HLG. That covers off the majority of content, in honesty, but the additional support on the OLED910 does keep you covered for absolutely everything, and futureproofed too.

Where the Philips really loses ground is in its connectivity, and this has a particular impact on gamers.

On the LG G5, you have four full bandwidth HDMI 2.1 sockets, all capable of handling 4K/165Hz signals with VRR and ALLM (which covers off the 4K/120Hz max for consoles and 4K/144Hz for fancy PCs), while the OLED910 only has two, with a maximum limit of 4K/144Hz.

One of the HDMI 2.1 sockets also doubles as the eARC port, so you’ll be reduced to just one for your gaming machines if you need it for a soundbar or other sound system. That's not the end of the world if you don't mind any further devices being limited to 4K/60Hz, but it will be an annoyance to many gamers.

We’d also lean towards the LG G5’s webOS platform over the OLED910’s Google TV platform. For us, webOS wins on ease of use and speed, but it also offers a more comprehensive selection of streaming apps, with BBC iPlayer currently missing from Google TV.

It’s closely run in this section, with some wins on both sides. But we think the TV with the best, most impactful features for most users is the LG G5.

WINNER: LG G5

Philips OLED910 vs LG G5: picture quality

Given that both of these TVs received five-star reviews, you can imagine there’s little to grumble about in the way they handle pictures. However, even with the same panel behind them, there are differences in their delivery that might sway your buying decision.

Thanks to that new Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel, the G5 and OLED910 are noticeably brighter than their predecessors, and – most importantly – handle their additional nits well.

Philips does seem to put HDR levels of brightness behind SDR content on all of its picture modes though, which is something we wish was optional, even if it doesn’t impact the overall picture performance.

Colour handling is excellent on both, with punchy and vibrant pictures that clearly benefit from the additional colour volume afforded by this panel. There’s the occasional oversaturation of skin tones in some scenes on the Philips OLED910 that we don’t notice as much in the G5, but overall both sets balance vibrancy and accuracy with few complaints.

Both offer Filmmaker Mode alongside a whole host of other picture options – it’s the picture setting we recommend, since it is the most accurate and usually switches off all additional processing. However, we actually found the OLED910 leaves some of it turned on, mostly for helping the TV to look its best at various levels of ambient lighting.

It’s worth experimenting here and deciding for yourself if there’s any positive impact, but if you’re particularly against any form of added processing, some extra care will be required in the OLED910’s menus to make sure it’s all off.

You can expect sharp, detailed and insightful pictures from both TVs. If pushed, we’d say the Philips gets closer to the solidity and three dimensionism of the Award-winning Sony Bravia 8 II, which is also helped by the OLED910’s better handling of dark scenes – there’s a slight black crush from the LG G5 that means you lose some shadow details in the darkest parts of a picture.

Overall there are some pros and cons for both TVs, but both offer a superb picture with lots to like. We’re chalking this one up as a draw.

Winner: draw

Philips OLED910 vs LG G5: sound quality

While these TVs might come close in picture quality, when it comes to sound quality, there is a clear winner.

The LG G5 offers a 60W 4.2-channel system, while the Philips OLED910 has a 3.1-channel 81W system, produced by B&W, that sits underneath the screen like a soundbar.

Overall, the G5’s performance is disappointing. Even with our preferred Cinema preset, it just isn’t able to dig deep and deliver much bass at all, nor is it very assured with low-level dynamics, meaning dialogue often sounds lifeless and dull.

It’s a really unexciting sound, which means, without a doubt, you’ll need to add to the G5 by way of a soundbar or surround sound system.

However, the Philips OLED910 proves that not all TV sound has to be bad, and manages to deliver a wide, detailed sound, with good effect placement (even with Atmos sounds), impressive weight and a really lovely tonal balance by TV standards.

Dynamics are impressive for a TV too, and there’s a much better handling of low-level dynamics, meaning voices have realism and character, while bigger volume changes are handled well too.

There’s a little softness to deep bass, but you’ll be hard pushed to find a TV that sounds better.

Of course, a good soundbar will be even better, but you’d need to invest in something around the level of the Sonos Arc Ultra for a significant upgrade on what this TV can do.

WINNER: Philips OLED910

Philips OLED910 vs LG G5: verdict

As always, there can only be one winner, and given how close these TVs come in key areas such as picture quality, the value offered by the Philips OLED910 is hard to ignore.

Throw in nice-to-haves such as Ambilight, a pretty great built-in sound system and a living room-friendly design, and that saving over the G5 starts to look even tastier.

However, this particular head to head isn’t cut and dried by any means, and if gaming is a key consideration for you, we might be inclined to recommend the LG G5 because of the additional HDMI 2.1 ports.

The better smart system and full complement of catch up apps is also a mark in the G5’s column, as is that stunningly slim wall-mounted design, which might be worth the additional outlay.

Still, the Philips OLED910 is to be applauded for how much it offers at such a great price.

Getting a 65-inch TV with a performance this good for well under the £2000 mark is nothing short of a bargain. If you choose it as your next TV, we think you’ll be very happy indeed.

OVERALL WINNER: Philips OLED910

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Read our full Philips OLED910 review and LG G5 review

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What Hi-Fi? turns 50 in 2026 and we're looking back on some of the most important hi-fi and home cinema products in our lifetime – and beyond!

We're going back further than 1976 in this article as we look back on a series of debut speakers from hi-fi brands that went on to great things.

Our list details the first-ever models from some of the most renowned loudspeaker brands in history, including Bang & Olufsen, Bowers & Wilkins, KEF and Quad, some (but not all) of which started life long before What Hi-Fi?.

Wharfedale Bronze 2 (1932)

Wharfedale’s first speaker was built in the cellar of founder Gilbert Briggs' llkley home in 1932.

The Bronze was purely a drive unit (in those days, radio enthusiasts assembled their own cabinets). A year later, it was housed in a wooden cabinet for those who wanted an ‘extension’ speaker. Shortly after came the ‘Nubian’ cabinet speaker in 1934.

But it was a whole decade before Wharfedale marked the first of many milestones: the invention of the first two-way loudspeaker.

In 1945, the company combined a 30cm bass driver with a 25cm full-range ‘treble’ unit, using a crossover at 1kHz. And in the years after the company’s introduction of ceramic magnets to moving coil drive units led to the company’s much-celebrated Diamond series.

• That Was Then... Wharfedale Diamond review

Bang & Olufsen Hyperbo (1934)

Not uniquely, Bang & Olufsen came to the speaker market through radio manufacturing. In 1925, Peter Bang & Svend Olufsen’s first commercial radio – the modest production of which began in Olufsen’s attic – was the Eliminator, a radio component that allowed the connection of a radio directly to the mains, eliminating the need for batteries.

Having moved to a factory in Struer just two years later (B&O remain at that same site today), the Hyperbo – a radio, gramophone and integrated loudspeaker – arrived in 1934.

Like every B&O product produced since, the Hyperbo was heavily influenced by the emerging Bauhaus style in the early 1900s: a design attitude that has consistently manifested itself in the artistic craft behind the company's many speakers and TVs.

Acoustic Research AR-1 (1954)

Acoustic Research was founded in 1952 by inventor Edgar Villchur and his student Henry Kloss. Based on the acoustic suspension principle patented by Villchur in 1956, its first model, the AR-1, sold for $185 (over £1000 in today’s money).

The AR-1's woofer trapped air in the speaker’s sealed enclosure to provide a spring for the diaphragm, enabling it to move back and forth – doing the same job as the more conventional mechanical spring.

This was followed quickly by the AR-2 but it was the AR-3, released in 1958, that became Acoustic Research's landmark speaker, borrowing the AR-1's acoustic suspension technology but bringing onboard newly designed drivers.

Quad ESL-57 (1957)

Quad founder Peter Walker was the first to implement electrostatic technology in loudspeakers, waving goodbye to traditional driver cones and cumbersome cabinets.

In their place he put a thinly-stretched, electrically-charged diaphragm between two metal grilles, which received the music signal from the amplifier.

The first in what has become a brand-defining range of electrostatic speakers, the ESL-57, was in production for nearly 30 years, while the ESL-63 continued Quad’s electrostatic legacy until 1999. Quad continues to manufacture electrostatic speakers to this day.

KEF K1 Slimline (1961)

KEF’s oldest speaker was born out of founder Raymond Cooke’s desire to achieve outstanding sound quality from a slim, living room-friendly enclosure.

At 12.5cm deep, the K1 Slimline incorporated the same driver innovations as the Monitor versions that arrived in the K1 series: the B1814 woofer with its flat rectangular diaphragm of aluminium skinned polystyrene, the M64 elliptical midrange unit with a similar diaphragm construction, and the T15 tweeter with its hemispherical Melinex diaphragm.

To minimise colouration, the wall panels of the braced cabinet were dampened with bituminous pads. And, lounge-friendly in their aesthetic as well as their size, the K1 Slimlines were finished in walnut with 'coffee' fleck grilles – a far cry from some of the designs it employs today.

• That Was Then… KEF Reference Model 101/3

B&W P1 (1966)

Beginnings don’t get much more humble than B&W’s. The year after founder John Bowers started hand-assembling speaker systems in the electrical store he ran with Roy Wilkins in Worthing, Bowers & Wilkins (then B&W Electronics Ltd) released its first loudspeaker: the P1.

The cabinet and filter were B&W's own, but the drivers came from EMI and Celestion – this was in the decade before the company started using the bright-yellow Kevlar woven composite.

The profits from the P1 allowed Bowers to purchase a Radiometer Oscillator and Pen Recorder, meaning that every speaker the company sold could have calibration certificates.

• That Was Then… B&W 602 S3 review

Spendor BC1 (late ’60s)

Bextrene was the material of choice for the speaker diaphragms in Spendor’s first pair of speakers, the BC1.

A product of BBC engineer Spencer Hughes (co-founder with Dorothy Hughes, hence the Spendor name) and co-designer Dudley Harwood, the BC1 speakers had a three-way design: the only commercial 8in Bextrene mid-bass driver, a Celestion HF 1300 tweeter and a Coles 4001 G supertweeter.

They were fed by a nine-element crossover comprised of film capacitors for frequency and temperature stability, and radio metal cored chokes that allowed for high transients and low resonances.

The BC1s hit the market in the late ‘60s and found their way into broadcast and recording studios before eventually being available to buy for consumers. Some 600 pairs were supposedly in operation at the BBC at one time.

• That Was Then… Spendor SP2/3E review

Harbeth HL Monitor Mk1 (1977)

British speaker brand Harbeth came about due to the discovery, by founder H.D. Harwood, of a potential new film plastic for speaker cones.

Towards the end of his career in the BBC’s Research Department, and during investigation into bextrene plastic as a cone material for BBC monitors in the ‘60s, Harwood proposed that polypropylene would make a good cone material.

And so, upon his formal retirement, he set up Harbeth to make a speaker with his patented polypropylene-coned driver. The HL Monitor was released in 1977, and four versions subsequently followed over the next decade.

Dynaudio P-series (1977/78)

We have to pedal back almost 50 years to find Danish brand's first speakers – the five P-series models in 1977. However, they were short-lived, had limited distribution and, while using the company’s own crossovers, were the only Dynaudio speakers to rely on OEM drivers.

The P series (P for 'passive') comprised the P16 (pictured), P21, P31, P46 and P76. All models used specially coated soft dome tweeter with high power handling – something Dynaudio would later become renowned for.

The first range to use Dynaudio’s in-house MSP (Magnesium Silicate Polymer) woofers and tweeters, and receive international distribution, was the four-strong MSP series in 1984. Dynaudio has used its own drivers ever since.

• That Was Then… Dynaudio Audience 52 review

ATC S50/S85 (1978)

After a few years making drive units, ATC produced its first speaker systems in 1978: the bass-reflex S50 (pictured) and infinite baffle S85, which established a naming tradition based on the internal volume of the speaker.

Inside the plywood-based 50- and 85-litre cabinets were 2.5cm soft dome tweeters, a 7.5cm soft dome midrange driver and a 22.5cm woofer (two in the S85).

Unusually, the crossover arrangement allowed for true active tri-amping, allowing you to choose between either the internal passive crossover or an external electronic crossover via a rotary switch.

ProAc Tablette (1979)

A few years after founding loudspeaker manufacturer Celef Audio Ltd in 1973, Stewart Tyler decided that producing more expensive designs in smaller quantities, rather than increasing production capacity and potentially sacrificing quality, was the way forward.

With that decision came a new company name: ProAc, short for Professional Acoustics.

The first speaker to bear the name was the Tablette; mini monitors – they really are dinky – which have spawned more than ten variations since their original production in 1979.

Wilson Audio WAMM (1982)

Following Wilson Audio’s Smart turntable, which was essentially a re-jigged Acoustic Research deck and became Wilson Audio’s first ever product, founder Dave Wilson introduced the company’s first pair of speakers, the Wilson Audio Modular Monitor (WAMM), in 1982.

Each channel comprised two towers: one sub-bass module, and one with twin mid-bass drivers and an electrostatic supertweeter flanked by twin midrange/tweeter modules. It sold for $28,000 and was the most expensive speaker you could buy at that time.

The WAMM evolved through six versions from 1982 to 1993, and has since been revived, with the Master Chronosonic and Master Subsonic speakers still current in the company's catalogue.

Focal DB13 (1982)

JMlab established Focal for speaker driver production in Saint-Étienne in 1979, and three years later the company's first pair of speakers appeared.

The DB13 bookshelf speakers were equipped with a double voice coil driver plus Polyglass and Polykevlar driver cones, and were capable of volumes more akin to larger speakers.

They propelled the company towards the high-end audio market and to international shores.

Martin Logan Monolith (1983)

Convinced they could make a class-leading electrostatic speaker capable of adequate bass and suitable for rock music, Gayle Martin Sanders and Ron Logan Sutherland (later ‘Martin Logan’) conceived a prototype in 1980. Unfortunately, its flat aluminium panel blew up when they turned up the volume...

Undeterred, their first production-ready speaker arrived three years later: the Monolith. A revised transducer saw a clear Mylar diaphragm sandwiched between two perforated-steel stators.

And to ensure good sound dispersion, a horizontally curved panel was implemented, and this curvilinear transducer has been central to the design of every Martin Logan electrostatic since.

Sonus Faber Parva (1983)

In 1983, three years after Sonus Faber founder Franco Serblin produced his first system (an all-wood, all-in-one model called the "Snail" that really needs to be seen), the brand was established in a small laboratory in Monteviale, northern Italy.

It was in that year Sonus Faber launched its first product: the Parva 2-way speaker, featuring a Kevlar midrange cone and solid walnut wood cabinet.

This paved the way for some legendary models (such as the Extrema and Guarneri ranges), and what is today, 35 years later, one of the world’s most distinguished and design-savvy high-end speaker brands.

Dali 2 (mid '80s)

The Dali 2 was released shortly after the renowned Danish speaker company Dali (Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries) began in 1983.

The debut speaker had a two-way configuration, with a 6.5in laminate pulp/polyvinyl cone woofer, 1in tweeter with a soft polypropylene dome, and walnut veneered wooden cabinets.

The Dali 2 was followed by larger models in the range, the 3, 4, 6 and 8, which Dali explained shared the same design philosophy and signature sound: they don't "'thunder' or 'boom' bass – they just handle more power and provide better bass response".

Acoustic Energy AE1 (1987)

With the introduction of the AE1 Loudspeaker in 1987, Acoustic Energy Ltd was officially born. The concept was to create a compact studio monitor (it measured 30cm tall and 18cm wide) that could handle the high volumes and dynamics of larger speakers.

To achieve this, Acoustic Energy lined its cabinet with a concrete/plaster compound to eliminate as much resonance as possible, and developed a new mid/bass driver. It featured a 10cm cone of spun aluminium, thicker at the centre than the edges and anodised to create a ‘ceramic sandwich’, and used an oversized magnet assembly that allowed the AE1 to accept 200W of power.

The AE1 was refined in several revisions until 2016, when its SEAS tweeter went out of production. The design has since resurfaced in the amplified AE1 Active model.

• That Was Then... Acoustic Energy AE2 Signature review

Neat Petite (1991)

Neat Acoustics began life as a hi-fi shop in Darlington called North Eastern Audio Traders. After identifying a gap in the market for a small musical speaker, its owners developed the Neat Petite.

When we reviewed them in 1993, we heralded these speakers a musical success. We called their sound 'hugely stimulating', mostly due to the way they portrayed timing and dynamics – something that's continued to be a trademark in the brand’s more recent speakers.

• That Was Then... Neat Petite review

PMC BB5-A (1991)

After a stint as the manager of BBC's Maida Vale studios, Peter Thomas and former BBC engineer Adrian Loader designed the first PMC speaker, the BB5-A.

It introduced the company’s hallmark Advanced Transmission Line technology, in which drivers were used to improve bass output.

In an interview with What Hi-Fi?, Thomas said: “The design was certainly not conventional. Whereas the majority of speaker designers used ported or sealed cabinets, we found that a transmission line system for bass loading, if refined, gave a performance that significantly exceeded conventional bass loading principles.”

Wilson Benesch A.C.T. One (1994)

Five years after launching its first product, the Wilson Benesch Turntable, the British company launched a second: the A.C.T. One loudspeaker.

Unveiled at the 1994 Frankfurt High End show, the A.C.T. One used carbon fibre – the world’s first curved carbon fibre composite panel in a speaker design. It sported the sloping top and solid metal baffle that remain part of the company’s distinctive designs today.

While many years before the implementation of crossover-free midrange driver designs, as seen in the company’s Eminence series, the A.C.T. One placed great importance on phase coherence and the reduction of crossover elements.

Eclipse TD 512 (2002) 

Deviating from the traditional two-driver configuration and box design, Eclipse’s speakers are as distinct as they come. The company’s first, the 36cm-tall TD 512 speakers, were a "radical departure from the speaker norm" (as we stated in our 2002 review), with only one drive unit and an egg-shaped enclosure made of marble-loaded resin.

The former’s job to cover the whole frequency resulted in some shortcomings – namely, a rolled-off treble – but ultimately these beautifully imaged and detailed speakers did more than enough to enjoy a five-star debut. As we said at the time: "Little else at their price (£2350) will deliver such unrestricted access to the recording."

Q Acoustics 1000 series (2006)

Q Acoustics may not have the heritage of some other brands, but the British company’s debut, the six-strong 1000 series in 2006, has been one of the most notable of the 21st century.

The 1000 series comprised the 1010 and 1020 bookshelf speakers, 1010C centre channel, 1030 and 1050 floorstanders, and 1000S active subwoofer. Each model featured the same ferro-fluid cooled, micro-polyester weave tweeter and Linkwitz-Riley crossovers, and every drive unit was ‘torque mounted’ into its front baffle.

The 1010s were five-star performers in their own right, and later received another five-star review as part of a complete multi-channel surround package.

MORE:

• The What Hi-Fi? Hall of Fame
• The best stereo speakers of the 21st century
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If you’ve been eyeing up the Award-winning Sony Bravia 8 II for your next TV, but don’t have the budget to stretch to it, taking a look at the other models in the Sony range might feel like a good starting point.

There’s always the hope that the more affordable models have retained some of the flagship greatness at a lower price – but at the very least, that they’ve strived for the same goals when it comes to getting the best picture performance bang for your buck.

However, despite their similar naming conventions, the Bravia 5 and the Bravia 3 are not only completely different panel types to the OLED-packing Bravia 8 II, but also different from each other – so it’s important to step with caution.

While our star rating is always a great indicator of the products we recommend, when you’re comparing two models at quite different prices, it’s good to understand what the differences are between them, and what you’re getting for the extra outlay. Allow us to explain all.

Sony Bravia 3 vs Bravia 5: pricing

Right now, you can pick up the 65-inch Bravia 5 that we tested for around £1299 / $1000 / AU$2695. That’s not a bad price at all for a Sony-branded Mini LED TV with local dimming, and a nice saving from the launch price of £1699 in the UK.

The Bravia 3 is considerably cheaper, and at the time of writing is available for around £849 / $650 / AU$1399. That’s pretty close to its launch price of £899 in the UK (US and Australian savings on RRP are slightly heftier), but we have known this screen size to go as low as £749 during big sales periods.

We'll tackle the question of value through the course of the review. This round is all about which option is cheapest, and that's comfortably the Bravia 3.

WINNER: Bravia 3

Sony Bravia 3 vs Bravia 5: design

It’s fair to say that neither of these TVs are going to be the best choice if you're hoping to wall mount.

In our review, we noted that the Bravia 5 has a rear panel that sticks out further than its competition, which could make it feel a bit clunky and awkward for wall hanging.

When you consider that the Bravia 5 measures 5.8cm deep, and the Bravia 3 measures in at 7.2cm, we’d say that both of these sets lend themselves best to life on a TV stand.

As you might expect for the price difference, the Bravia 5’s overall aesthetic is a little elevated compared with the Bravia 3. Both have relatively slender bezels, but the Bravia 5 sports a tasteful dark grey brushed metal effect finish, whereas the Bravia 3 is unashamedly black plastic.

It feels all the more lightweight when you’re putting it together too, and at least for our taste, the feet on the Bravia 3 lack some of the sophistication of those on the 5.

We do appreciate Sony’s no-screw mechanism on both TVs though, which allows the TV to just slot onto the stand, saving fuss and making setup out of the box really straightforward.

The Bravia 3 does score points over the Bravia 5 for its two-way stand, which allows you to set the feet into either narrow or wide positions to suit your furniture or soundbar requirements.

The Bravia 5’s feet only have one position, but thankfully that is relatively narrow to allow you to place it on most stands without issue. If you have a soundbar though, you’ll just want to check that it can fit in front of the stand – the Bravia 5 does adjust to two different heights to make sure the screen isn’t blocked by adding one.

Overall, although the two-way stand on the Bravia 3 is a nice addition for soundbar owners, we much prefer the design of the Bravia 5, and think it can accommodate a soundbar in the majority of situations.

WINNER: Bravia 5

Sony Bravia 3 vs Bravia 5: features

One of the biggest differentiators between the Bravia 5 and the Bravia 3 is their panel technology – the Bravia 5 is a Mini LED TV with local dimming across 240 zones, whereas the Bravia 3 is a direct-lit LED TV without any local dimming.

That’s going to have a fair impact on its picture quality capabilities, but we’ll come on to that in the next section.

Elsewhere, the processing chip that runs the show is different between the two models, too.

Given the price difference, it’s not surprising that the Bravia 5 has the more sophisticated of the two – Sony’s flagship XR processor, which also powers the Bravia 8 II.

The Bravia 3, on the other hand, uses the older, midrange 4K HDR Processor X1.

What that means in isolation is hard to quantify, given the TVs’ differing features elsewhere. The XR is clearly a more powerful processor that can draw out more by way of picture subtlety and colour accuracy, but how much that would be as noticeable on a direct-lit LED screen with no local dimming is questionable.

In other words, going for a lower-power processor in the Bravia 3 feels like the right choice for its price and capabilities.

As these are both Sony TVs, their HDR capabilities are the same – they both support HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision, and don’t support HDR10+.

However, of the two, only the Bravia 5 is IMAX Enhanced certified, and it’s also the only one that offers a range of ‘Calibrated’ picture modes to get the best picture quality from the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Sony Pictures Core.

Both have Dolby Atmos and DTS:X spatial audio support, though the Bravia 5 has a better sound system to deliver it on.

The Bravia 5 offers 40W of sound across four speakers (two full-range drivers and two tweeters), compared to the 20W across two full-range drivers on the Bravia 3.

If you’re keen to hook up a games console to your TV, the Bravia 3 wouldn’t be the best pick of the two due to its 4K/60Hz panel, with the 4K/120Hz panel on the Bravia 5 making it a much better choice.

The Bravia 5 also has VRR on two HDMI ports, as well as ALLM on all four of them, whereas the Bravia 3 only has ALLM. That makes the Bravia 5 a clear winner for gamers.

Both TVs use Google TV for their smart features, offering a good selection of streaming apps, along with the addition of YouView in the UK for the catch-up services that Google doesn’t offer.

Using Google’s interface also means that both TVs have access to features such as Google Assistant and Chromecast, as well as AirPlay 2. While we did notice a few small glitches initially in the Bravia 3’s handling of the UI, overall, both TVs work smoothly and without issue.

The Bravia 5 also has the compatibility to work with the Bravia Cam, to control the TV by gesture – something the Bravia 3 does not offer.

We don’t particularly value the extra tricks the Bravia Cam adds to the TV-watching experience, particularly considering its £199 / $200 / AU$149 price tag, but if you do, the Bravia 5 is the only set out of the two to get it.

All things considered, it’s not exactly surprising that the Bravia 5 has better features than the Bravia 3, given its higher price tag. However, it’s when you look at the wider market that the winner becomes clear.

The Bravia 5 shoots above its pay grade in many respects, including by being one of Sony’s XR Backlight Master Drive panels. That’s a premium feature found on many of its much pricier TVs that aims to boost picture quality and reduce power consumption by improving local dimming performance.

However, when you consider the Bravia 3 against other competitors at its price, its specs are disappointing. There are similarly priced TVs that use better panel technology and have local dimming and better gaming features.

For those reasons, the Bravia 5 takes the win here again.

WINNER: Bravia 5

Sony Bravia 3 vs Bravia 5: picture quality

That feeling of the Bravia 5 delivering value for money only continues when it comes to picture performance.

It might be the cheapest Mini LED model in the Bravia lineup, but the picture quality doesn’t feel compromised by its more affordable ambitions – the Sony DNA runs clearly through this set.

In particular, that XR Backlight Master Drive panel does exactly what we’ve seen it do elsewhere, in that it maximises the performance of the backlight, meaning we get impressively bright and well controlled pictures for this price category, with even and consistent blacks and minimal blooming.

It means the Bravia 5 really holds its own in the contrast stakes, which ensures – when combined with its well-judged shadow detail – that both bright and dark scenes look as natural and cinematic as each other.

All this greatness only starts to become compromised in extremely complex HDR shots, or when you watch the Bravia 5 from much of an angle, when its more affordable local dimming mechanism might become more apparent. Overall though, this is a great performer at its price.

Unfortunately, the Bravia 3’s handling of contrast and shadow detail is not such good news. What strikes us most is how the entire picture has an almost grey hue, which means it lacks solidity in blacks from the get go, and makes dark scenes almost unwatchable.

The panel almost seems to glow in darker sequences, losing a lot of detail in the process, but even in scenes with lots of light, the image lacks contrast. This means Sony’s calling card of excellent three dimensionality is largely lost, which is a big hit on our overall picture enjoyment.

Thankfully, the Bravia 3 manages to look much more like a Sony TV when it comes to colour.

As long as you switch from the out-of-the-box settings to Professional mode, colour performance is pretty good, looking balanced and natural, while retaining a degree of believable richness.

The Bravia 5 has a little more flexibility on its presets, thanks to its more sophisticated processing, but ultimately also manages a great mix of punchiness, shading subtlety and balance, even retaining an impressive amount of colour saturation during darker scenes.

Both TVs manage to show off Sony’s talent for motion processing, with sweeping panning shots handled admirably by the Bravia 3. The XR processor in the Bravia 5 will arguably push motion handling that little bit further, by way of subtlety and realism, but there’s no reason for complaint with either set here.

Despite this, the overall picture quality is a clear win by the Bravia 5 – even at the set’s individual price points.

Once again, the Bravia 5 punches above what we might expect at this price, giving 4K images a sense of density, texture and clarity that we are more used to seeing in Sony’s more expensive TVs.

While some of Sony’s famous picture processing is still evident in the Bravia 3, its poor backlight control leads to a loss of contrast and shadow detail that’s hard to forgive. This is an easy win for the Bravia 5.

WINNER: Bravia 5

Sony Bravia 3 vs Bravia 5: sound quality

While we all know that a soundbar or surround sound system will always make your new TV sound its best, both models do a pretty good job for built-in TV audio.

Even with the pretty modest speaker set-up in the Bravia 3, Sony manages to provide impressively clear dialogue alongside a decent sense of low-level dynamics.

Sound even has a good sense of height to it, giving more space to big effects such as explosions or planes flying overhead. Bass could be heftier, but to be honest, the Bravia 3 already outperforms what we have come to expect from a TV at this price.

The Bravia 5 is equally impressive. No elements in a mix pass the Bravia 5 by, yet the processing is also sophisticated enough to ensure no detail takes on more significance than it should.

The four drivers here create a spacious soundstage that offers a good sense of height, with both dialogue and sound effects placed accurately within it.

There’s power to the sound too, but also a level of precision that ensures sound is never distorted.

Like the Bravia 3, it’s lacking a little bass, but we would always take that over too much, and overall find the sound to be precise and immersive. We’re calling this one a draw.

WINNER: Draw

Sony Bravia 3 vs Bravia 5: verdict

From the get-go, this head-to-head might have looked like a shoo-in for the more expensive, better specified, and better reviewed Bravia 5.

But even when you consider both of these TVs’ positions within their respective markets and price categories, it’s hard for us not to recommend – if you are truly torn between the two – that you try to save up the difference and opt for the Bravia 5, or consider a different TV at the Bravia 3’s price instead.

The Sony Bravia 5 follows in the footsteps of the other five-star TVs from Sony’s most recent TV lineup, offering impressive features for its price, a formidable picture performance and a pretty decent sound performance to boot.

By comparison, the Bravia 3 is lacking the features we might expect at this level, and delivers a picture performance we find almost unrecognisable as a Sony TV.

For anyone considering these two TVs, hoping to get Sony’s famed picture processing on a bit of a budget, the clear winner is the Bravia 5. From everything we have seen so far, it’s the clear value proposition in Sony’s current TV lineup.

OVERALL WINNER: Bravia 5

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The name of this Majority system might invoke visions of angelic figures or an off-brand Bond villain, but seeing the soundbar package in the flesh will set you straight pretty quickly.

Featuring one of the most compact designs we have had in our test room and boasting Dolby Atmos support, it’s a tempting proposition on paper.

And, even though the budget soundbar market has been hotting up in the past year, the Bowfell Halo Atmos still stands out as something unusual.

Price

The Majority Bowfell Halo Atmos is not only the cheapest Dolby Atmos system we’ve ever tested, but the cheapest Dolby Atmos soundbar we’ve tested, period, coming in at £169.

This converts to around $225 / AU$320 in the US and Australia respectively, but it’s not currently available in either region.

When looking at complete Dolby Atmos soundbar packages at a similar price, only the Hisense AX5125H comes close to matching this and is available for £249 / $350 (around AU$500). That model received a What Hi-Fi? Award last year, and we praised its cinematic weight and scale in our review.

If you don't mind doing without the dedicated surrounds, a subwoofer, and/or Dolby Atmos, your options at this level widen dramatically, with models such as the Sony HT-SF150, Creative Stage Pro and Sonos Ray all being strong choices.

Build

Comprising a main soundbar, two surrounds and a subwoofer, the Bowfell Halo Atmos is a complete Dolby Atmos package. That’s all packed into a mind-bogglingly small footprint, so much so that it looks almost like a toy replica of a larger system.

As a whole, the soundbar package weighs just 3.6kg so, suffice to say, it feels pretty cheap.

The soundbar alone measures 6.2 x 41 x 9cm (hwd) – that’s smaller than the average baguette. It's somewhat dwarfed by our 65-inch LG C6 TV, and will look much more at home beneath a 32- or 43-inch model.

The surrounds are incredibly compact – just a little bigger than the average clenched fist. The subwoofer also boasts a compact design at just 32cm tall, with an inconspicuous black plastic coating and a five-inch driver.

On the top of the bar is a panel where you can change the power, volume and input. Rather surprisingly for such a budget model, we have a dot matrix display at the front of the bar that flags input, volume and EQ adjustments.

Set-up is fairly simple, as the main surround speaker connects to the other via a cable. There’s no wire connecting to the main soundbar, so there's no cable running from the front to the back of the room.

While you may prefer a completely wired surround experience, at this price, we wouldn’t expect more.

Majority’s remote control for the bar is oddly quite bulky, especially compared to the rest of the package.

From here, you can control volume, power, input, toggle between EQ modes and adjust the bass and treble levels. These EQ modes consist of Music, Movie, News and Sport, although these are counter-intuitively labelled numerically on the display.

Features

Under the hood of the soundbar you will find three front-facing drivers. The subwoofer features one down-facing driver and the surrounds include one front-facing driver each. That adds up to a 5.1-channel system.

The Halo Atmos offers Dolby Atmos support, but there’s no DTS:X or DTS-HD Master Audio on the cards. As there are no up-firing drivers, these Atmos effects are virtualised.

It does offer Bluetooth 5.3 but, as you would expect from such a budget model, there is no wi-fi connection. You can use most other smart devices to stream music from the likes of Tidal, Apple Music, Qobuz and Spotify.

Connectivity is understandably quite limited. Around the back of the main soundbar you will find an HDMI eARC socket, a USB, an aux and an optical port.

Sound

It’s fair to say our expectations were fairly low for the cheap and tiny Majority system, but we are quickly and pleasantly surprised by its sound.

We opt for the Movie mode (‘EQ2’ on the display), but are at first greeted with a rather dominating bass that distracts from the rest of the sound. For that reason, we bump it down a few notches to help with integration.

Once we have scaled it back, the system delivers a deep and relatively tuneful bass that gives movies a sense of excitement.

We start off at the deep end with our go-to bass stress test as a futuristic ship weaves around buildings in chapter two of Blade Runner 2049, accompanied by a tonally varied soundtrack.

While the soundbar does not have the punch to give each beat an impactful entrance, it is still reasonably controlled in its delivery and can go impressively deep considering the subwoofer’s small stature.

What’s more, it doesn’t distort the bass – we have seen more expensive models make this mistake. This strong bass results in a loud delivery, so the dynamics feel a bit stunted.

The Blade Runner 2049 scene should start off moodily, but the Majority system goes in all guns blazing at the expense of the subtle atmospherics. It also lacks the extra extension to deliver the dynamic climb to the dramatic crescendo.

Even if you turn down the volume, it still doesn't have the expressive dynamics we are looking for.

Turning to its performance with vocals, they are certainly clear and intelligible, which will be an improvement on most TVs’ audio, especially with the smaller models with which the Majority will likely be partnered.

Watching Wicked, as Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba launches into an electric rendition of The Wizard And I, her voice is brought to the front of the track and means you won’t miss a word. The vocals lack warmth and expression though, making them come across as somewhat artificial.

The lower midrange is a particular area of inadequacy for the Majority, meaning some deeper voices feel a little inconsistent, with something of a gap felt in those frequencies.

Having dedicated satellite speakers of course gives you an element of surround sound that you can’t get from single bar set-ups, but their compact design limits their effectiveness. While they do at times draw the ear with a neat surround effect, their audio is quite localised and doesn’t tie in terribly effectively with the sound from the main bar.

When watching Top Gun: Maverick, for example, when a jet flies from right to left, the soundbar does a respectable job of placing the sound and tracking it across the screen, but there is a noticeable gap between the soundbar and the surround speakers.

That isn’t to say their presence in the system isn’t a net positive, but don’t go expecting a fully immersive surround field.

On that subject, the Majority system’s Dolby Atmos chops are also rather limited. You get some sense of height effects, but only to a little above ear height. If you’re expecting to hear helicopters hovering overhead and fighter planes sweeping across your ceiling, you will be disappointed.

In Thunderbolts, when a squad of soldiers gun down the hapless Bob, the gunshots remain pretty glued to the TV screen without much of a surround sound effect. That’s a shame if you want that extra immersion, but that’s perhaps too much to ask at this price and size.

Compared to the slightly cheaper Creative Stage Pro, the Majority model is clearly the more immersive of the two. Its deep bass and ‘true’ (if limited) surround sound make for a more cinematic experience. The Creative, however, counters with a much more natural-sounding vocal performance and a more precise soundfield. It’s primarily a choice between scale and authenticity.

The Majority does not perform nearly as well with music as it does with movies.

Playing Harry Styles’ American Girls in Music mode with the bass knocked down again, the soundbar seems to be adding surround processing where there should be none.

The vocal track should sound direct and focused, but the soundbar spatially separates the harmonies in a forced and discombobulating manner: it sounds as though there is an uninvited choir of Harrys serenading us.

On the plus side, the subwoofer’s enthusiastic way with bass lends the track a good sense of pep and energy. But the Creative delivers a more natural and pleasant listening experience with the same track, offering a more crisp and better-organised rendition.

If you are looking for a system equally capable with music as with movies, your money would be better placed elsewhere.

But the Majority model delivers a surprisingly bassy and cinematic sound that, while limited, feels rather impressive for the price.

Verdict

For such a budget model, the Majority Bowfell Halo Atmos has massively exceeded our expectations. Its compact design will be a big draw for those working with a small space, as long as you don’t mind some pesky wires.

On top of that, its hard-working subwoofer makes a controlled impact and gives movies a good buzz of energy.

It’s certainly not a great choice if you are planning to use your soundbar for music, and the Atmos effect is limited, but this remains a cheap and convenient way to improve your TV’s audio quality and get a sense of cinematic surround sound.

SCORES

• Sound 4
• Features 4
• Build 4

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Hisense wants to be the RGB Mini LED brand. It came out swinging with the 116-inch UXQ last year to kick off its new range with a bang, and now it's bringing a duo of more reasonably sized models with the next generation panel tech to the market.

The UR9 sits at the top of its conventional TV lineup, and it aims to offer movie fans a brighter panel and a better sound system, so you'd think that would be what caught my eye during a trip to Munich, Germany, with the brand. But, at the event I found myself gravitating towards the step-down model instead.

Upon announcing the new panel technology, I began gearing myself up to report on sky-high prices that echo the early days of OLED and QLED, and yet, Hisense is determined to bring this new panel tech to the masses, and I think the UR8 will be the TV to do just that.

The TV sits below the two flagship RGB Mini LEDs mentioned above, and yet it offers a lot of the same features and on-paper performance benefits. My brief run-in with the TV left a strong first impression, and while we'll need to test it in our dedicated AV testing facility to settle on a final verdict, I do have a few early thoughts to share.

Price

Pricing hasn't been revealed for the UR8 quite yet, but we're under the impression that it will be fairly competitive. Hisense promises that pricing information should come soon, and the TV itself is currently slated to launch in the first half of this year.

It'll be available in five sizes when it launches, including a few more "average" living room-friendly ones, such as 55- and 65-inches. XL TV fans are, of course, still catered for, with Hisense also offering this TV in 75-, 85- and 100-inch sizes.

In terms of competition, it looks as though the UR8 will be going up against Philips' new mid-range RGB Mini LED, the MLED981, and Samsung is slated to launch a step-down RGB Mini LED model later this year, too.

Build

The UR8 isn't the flashiest TV I've ever seen, but the build is solid, stylish and slender at just 58mm in width. That's fairly slick by backlit TV standards.

Furthermore, it features a centralised pedestal stand, meaning you won't have to worry about obtaining a wide media unit to accommodate this TV. We saw the UR8 in its 75-inch screen size, and it featured this style of stand; however the very largest screen sizes may differ.

Hisense has also bundled in its button-heavy solar-powered remote. While it may look a little old school next to the slick minimalist remotes included with most TVs these days, we actually appreciate that every function has a dedicated button rather than having to remember a bunch of short cuts and long presses to access simple things like the input menu.

Features

It should come as no surprise that the headlining feature of the UR8 is the new RGB Mini LED panel technology. Hisense says that it delivers purer and more vibrant colours, and the Chinese AV giant has even achieved certification from colour-validating powerhouse Pantone.

Brightness is also a key benefit of the RGB Mini LED panel technology, and Hisense claims that the UR8 can reach a peak brightness of 3500 nits. That's below the 4000 nit figure quoted by Hisense for the UR9 step-up model, but it's still an impressive figure.

This new panel is being driven by the company's HiView AI Engine RGB processor, which has been specifically designed with the RGB Mini LED panel technology in mind.

Furthermore, this has to be one of the best-equipped TVs for gamers that we've ever come across. The UR8 sports a 180Hz panel, which tops the 165Hz limit we've seen on recent sets from LG, Samsung and Philips. On top of that is the inclusion of four full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 sockets, all of which support VRR and ALLM, with one socket doubling as HDMI eARC.

Hisense hopes that you won't need to use that HDMI eARC socket, though, as the built-in 2.1.2 channel speaker system, which supports Dolby Atmos, has been tuned by Devialet to reportedly deliver punchy, immersive cinematic sound.

Vidaa remains on board for all of your streaming needs, and while this isn't our favourite operating system on the market, we find that it covers a majority of the available streaming apps, based on our experience from using it on other Hisense TVs and projectors.

Last, and by no means least, the UR8 will be among the first Hisense TVs to gain Dolby Vision 2 support. Despite being announced as a launch partner back at IFA 2025, Hisense doesn't seem entirely sure when Dolby Vision 2 is coming to its TVs; however, it insinuated that it will be added via an over-the-air update after the TV's launch. It will also support HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG.

Picture

Unfortunately, Hisense didn't demo any real-world content on the UR8, but we did see a looping demo in the TV's dynamic picture setting.

While that's not ideal for assessing what the TV is like when watching movies and TV shows, it did give us a good idea of what the RGB Mini LED panel technology is capable of.

Furthermore, the content shown seemed fairly low-resolution to my eyes, which introduced some unfair banding and haloing around bright and colourful content on black backgrounds.

I will therefore reiterate that these hands-on impressions won't reflect the verdict from our future full review of the UR8.

That all being said, Hisense seems to have delivered on its promise of delivering rich, pure and vibrant colours based on this early look, as every shade pops on this display.

Reds, blues, greens, yellows, pinks and purples all appear rich and vivid, and while this will likely be reining in for an authentic cinematic experience, it's an eye-catching demonstration of the capabilities of RGB Mini LED.

These look especially effective against dark backgrounds, as the UR8 seems to deliver some seriously convincing black levels for a backlit TV. This is thanks to the RGB Mini LED system's more advanced backlight control, which should address the my, and the wider What Hi-Fi? team's, biggest issue with "traditional" Mini LED sets.

I couldn't test other crucial picture performance aspects, especially including motion, during this session, so you'll have to wait until our full review to discover if the UR8 can nail the majour pillars of picture performance.

Sound

I'll keep this short and sweet. Despite highlighting the UR8's Devialet-tuned 2.1.2 channel sound system, Hisense didn't actually demo it during the event.

However, based on the team I's experiences with last year's U8Q, we have fairly high expectations. We found that the U8Q delivered a powerful, spacious and cinematic sound, and while the bass could have been a bit more controlled, we ultimately deemed it to be a rather impressive built-in sound system.

Early verdict

It's too early to decide on a verdict for the UR8, but this TV is certainly worth watching out for based on what I've seen so far, combined with the on-paper specs.

It touts the latest panel technology. superb gaming specs, a high-spec sound system and plenty of software smarts, so as long as Hisense can nail the price, it could be on to a winner.

As a team, we're eagerly awaiting both of Hisense's RGB Mini LED models to land in our home cinema testing room, so check back soon for a full review.

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Sony has just taken the wraps off two new TVs, but if you were expecting a new QD-OLED to replace the Bravia 8 II or a successor to the Bravia 9, you might be disappointed.

That's because these two new models are both budget-oriented – and one of them came out in the US last year.

The genuinely new TV is the Bravia 3 II which, as the name suggests, replaces the three-star Bravia 3.

The good news is that the Bravia 3 II features several upgrades over its predecessor.

The most eye-catching of these upgrades is the introduction of four HDMI 2.1 sockets, which, in combination with the 120Hz panel, means the TV supports 4K/120Hz gaming (plus VRR and ALLM) across all of its HDMI inputs.

That's a first for a Sony TV, and hopefully it points the way towards this becoming standard across the brand's range in the future.

The next major upgrade is the processor: the Bravia 3 II receives the XR Processor, which has until now powered only models from the Bravia 5 and up.

This XR Processor brings with it Sony's XR Triluminos Pro technology for wider colour gamut coverage and the XR Clear Image feature for AI-powered upscaling.

Unlike the Bravia 3, the Bravia 3 II also features Netflix Calibrated, Prime Video Calibrated and Sony Pictures Core Calibrated picture presets, which are designed to deliver the most authentic picture quality from their respective streaming services.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Sony has just been in touch to clarify that these calibrated modes won't be present on the Bravia 3 II at launch, but will instead be added at an as-yet unspecified later date]

What hasn't been upgraded, at least on the face of it, is the backlight.

Sony refers to the Bravia 3 II as simply having a 'Direct LED' backlight, and makes no mention of local dimming. That leads us to believe it will, like its predecessor, lack any form of local dimming.

In a world in which TCL offers affordable models with backlights that feature Mini LEDs and 1000+ dimming zones, that's undeniably disappointing, even though Sony has a reputation for squeezing the absolute best out of its hardware.

If you're a UK reader thinking that the Bravia 3 II still sounds like a tempting TV proposition, I'm afraid I have some more bad news: it's not currently scheduled to launch in the UK.

Sony says this is something to do with catch-up app certification, which sounds a little strange, but it does at least seem as though there's a good chance the TV will make it from mainland Europe to the UK at some point in the future.

In the regions in which the Bravia 3 II is launching, it will be available in sizes ranging from a fairly bijou (by modern standards) 43 inches, right up to a whopping 100 inches.

Bravia 2 II

Then we have the Bravia 2 II which, as mentioned, launched in the US last year.

As the name suggests, this TV sits below the Bravia 3 II, and it is in fact the new entry point to the Bravia range (there are models further down in Sony's range, but they're not designated Bravia models).

Once again, this is a 'Direct LED' TV, and as you would expect, it lacks the 120Hz panel and HDMI 2.1 sockets of the Bravia 3 II.

The Bravia 2 II also features Sony's X1 chip, rather than the XR Processor.

As with the rest of Sony's Bravia range, the 2 II features the Google TV smart platform, and it has the Sony Pictures Core app built in.

It will be fascinating to see how much the Bravia 2 II launches for in the UK. It will be available in 43-, 50-, 55-, 65- and 75-inch sizes, and in the US, the 65-inch model currently goes for around $700, which seems a little high in comparison with many TCL models.

We'll update this piece with confirmed pricing when we get it, and we will of course be reviewing the Bravia 2 II just as soon as we can get our hands on one.

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Last week, I was whisked away to Berlin for Philips' Unboxed event, in which the company unveiled its latest range of AV and hi-fi products.

While the retro audio range caught my eye, mostly thanks to the funky designs clad in canary-yellow plastic, my main focus was on the glorious new OLED TV lineup that Philips will be launching later this year.

My personal highlight was the OLED911, a new premium model that utilises LG Display's second-generation Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel technology, supports Dolby Vision 2 Max, and continues Philips and Bowers & Wilkins' partnership with an impressive built-in sound system.

While those attributes are exciting in their own right, there are two features included on this TV that I think make it the perfect gaming TV.

After years of accepting that Samsung and LG would be the only manufacturers to equip their high-end TVs with four HDMI 2.1 sockets, Philips has broken the mould and left the likes of Panasonic, Sony, TCL and Hisense behind.

The OLED911 features four full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 sockets, all of which support up to 4K/165Hz signals with VRR and ALLM. Frankly speaking, it's about time some of the other manufacturers caught up, but I won't let that spoil my fun, as I'm delighted to see Philips make a play (quite literally) for the Best Gaming TV title.

This now means that users can attach either four consoles (or an HDMI 2.1-equipped streaming device) or three gaming devices and an HDMI eARC-equipped soundbar, without having to compromise on performance. That means gamers who have invested in an Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2 and a gaming PC will feel right at home on the OLED911.

It's worth noting that all of Philips new OLED models, including the OLED761, OLED811, and OLED951, will all feature four HDMI 2.1 sockets; but the OLED911 takes the edge by including the Bowers & Wilkins sound system and four-sided Ambilight.

That neatly takes us onto my next point: Ambilight. Philips is adding a huge upgrade to the ambient lighting system this year with AmbiScape, which will allow you to connect your TV to smart bulbs made by a handful of manufacturers (including Philips Hue, Nanoleaf and IKEA) to create an immersive light show that fills your entire room.

As someone who has gamed extensively on a Philips Ambilight OLED TV, I can vouch for how much more immersive and exciting the reactive lighting system makes the experience; so now I'm just picturing my entire room lighting up like some sort of festive gaming grotto.

Pair that with the abundance of HDMI sockets and that Dolby Atmos-touting built-in sound system, and the OLED911 becomes a very tempting proposition to gamers. However, what really seals the deal is the inclusion of a 48-inch model, which could be perfect for smaller dedicated gaming rooms, or even for desktop use.

While we currently believe that this model won't feature the brighter Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel technology, it retains the gaming goods that I'm interested in.

I'll have to wait until June for the OLED911 to launch, but in the meantime, I'll be fantasising about my new dream gaming TV set-up.

MORE:

Read our Philips OLED911 hands on review

As well as our full Philips OLED910 review

And check out our picks for the best OLED TVs

2026 is shaping up to be a very interesting year for OLED TVs. Two Japanese AV stalwarts, Sony and Panasonic, have entered strategic partnerships with huge Chinese corporations to ensure their respective TV businesses can flourish in these uncertain times. And we can't ignore the fact that RGB Mini LED is knocking on OLED’s door as the latest challenger in the panel technology arena.

Nevertheless, this hasn’t deterred European heavyweight TV manufacturer Philips from swinging for the fences with its 2026 TV range, which encompasses a wide range of panel technologies. OLED is still the reference choice in its eyes, but that hasn't stopped it from also launching RGB Mini LED, Mini LED and QLED TVs.

That being said, there was one TV from its range that stole the spotlight at Philips’ (and its parent company TP Vision’s) launch event that we attended in Berlin this week.

The Philips OLED911 is the sequel to the five-star OLED910, a brilliant TV which gave the Product of the Year-winning Sony Bravia 8 II a run for its money when we tested it last year. The new set continues Philips’ close partnership with legendary British hi-fi company (and recent inductee into the Harman International family) Bowers & Wilkins.

With a fresh design, beefed-up panel, and surprising new feature set, could the Philips OLED911 be the TV to watch in 2026? It might just be…

Price

As is often the case with our TV hands-on reviews, pricing hasn't been confirmed for the OLED911. However, we can take an educated guess from the price of the OLED910, which launched at a surprisingly competitive £2199 for the 65-inch model.

You'll notice that we are mentioning only UK pricing; this is because Philips unfortunately doesn't sell this range in the US or Australia. You will find Philips-branded TVs in these markets, but they are manufactured by another company, not TP Vision.

Back to that £2199 price tag. We actually reviewed the OLED910 at £1799, as the TV's price dropped almost instantly it came out; and it has remained there ever since.

Other flagship OLEDs, including the Sony Bravia 8 II and LG G5, have both dropped to similar prices as of late, so this sector of the TV market really is a hot spot.

We are hoping that Philips takes a similar pricing strategy with the OLED911, as some competitors, such as the Panasonic Z95B and, probably, the Sony Bravia 8 II, will be sticking around for the foreseeable future. Price cuts, then, are inevitable.

Build

Philips has a tendency to switch up the looks of its TVs on a yearly basis. Considering that it has a tendency to make the best-looking TVs around from a design standpoint, we take no issue with this.

The OLED911 is no exception; upon first impressions, this TV is a sight to behold.

It takes the established bottom-mounted speaker-bar and dual-feet design of its predecessor, and refines it to look even smarter and more premium. That chin-mounted “soundbar” no longer spans the entirety of the TV's bottom edge. It now takes on the shape of an elongated pill, which stops just short of the full width of the screen, giving the illusion of a trimmer build overall.

The bar comes in two sizes, depending on whether you get the 48- or 55-inch, or the 65- or 77-inch model, respectively. You'll notice that we mention a 48-inch model here: the OLED911 will be the first in this range to come in the smaller screen size.

The metal pill-style feet of the previous model return, and while they aren’t placed at the very ends of the TV, they are still spread fairly wide, meaning a media unit of decent width will be necessary to support this TV.

That, of course, is if you don't wall mount it. And we wouldn't be surprised if a lot of prospective OLED911 customers take this route. Philips has managed to shave this set down to an impressively slender 39.9mm, down from 47.3mm. Marry that slim frame with the four-sided Ambilight system, and you could well say that this TV was practically made to be wall-mounted.

Features

Speaking of Ambilight, the OLED911 has a new trick up its sleeve for fans of the reactive lighting system, which mirrors the action on screen. Philips is introducing AmbiScape, which allows its new Ambilight-equipped TVs to interface with smart light bulbs from various manufacturers (including Philips Hue, Nanoleaf and IKEA) and sync up, turning practically your entire room into an immersive Ambilight landscape; hence, AmbiScape.

Ambilight might not be for everyone, but we’re fairly sure the new second-generation Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel will be to most people’s preferences. Philips claims that this TV can reach a staggering peak brightness of 4500 nits, while the improved reflectivity-reducing qualities of this display (baked in by its originator, LG Display) will help to mitigate more than 99 per cent of on-screen reflections.

Furthermore, this RGB Tandem OLED 2.0 panel can now reach refresh rates up to 165Hz with VRR – and this is where we get onto the OLED911's next best feature. Philips has opted to equip this TV with the slightly less powerful MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset rather than the Pentonic 1000.

That sounds like a downgrade on paper, but it actually means that the OLED911 has four full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 sockets, all of which support 4K gaming at high refresh rates with VRR and ALLM. This catapults Philips into the best gaming TV conversation with the likes of Samsung and LG.

Philips has achieved this by moving away from Google TV, and instead opting for Titan OS on its entire 2026 range. This operating system was developed in Barcelona, and Philips has been a key player in bringing it to market as an alternative to Google’s operating system. With this streamlined and less demanding OS, the MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset becomes more than powerful enough, and the gaming benefits speak for themselves.

Picture processing, however, is handled by Philips’ own 10th Gen P5 AI processor. As the name suggests, AI is integrated deeply into the picture processing here, with some examples including AI HDR tone mapping, and a new AI HDR expansion/restore feature that uses “frame-by-frame analysis to measure the incoming HDR signal and restore the original light output of the content, matched to the peak light output of the display.”

And, if you thought the Philips OLED911 had run out of sleeves up which to hide its tricks, here's where we reveal that this is the world's first OLED TV to support Dolby Vision 2 Max. HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ are also on board, making this among the most versatile TVs around when it comes to HDR format support. The inclusion of the hotly anticipated Dolby Vision 2 makes this one of the most exciting OLED TVs of 2026.

Dolby Vision 2 Max supports the likes of Authentic Motion and Light Sense, on top of the benefits of “standard” Dolby Vision 2. The former adjusts motion in real time to ensure judder is minimised without introducing the soap-opera effect, whereas the latter will take the ambient light of your viewing area into consideration and adjust the picture accordingly.

Last, but by no means least, is the built-in sound system. This is probably the most “hi-fi adjacent” built-in TV sound system we have seen, which makes sense as it comes from legendary British speaker manufacturer Bowers & Wilkins.

The new sound system features dedicated left, centre and right channels, each of which features two new 45mm midrange glass-fibre drivers alongside a 19mm titanium-dome tweeter and a slimmer 75mm subwoofer supported by four force-cancelling passive radiators.

If that built-in woofer doesn’t deliver enough bass for your liking, you can directly hook up an external subwoofer to the TV for more low-end punch.

In total, this system features a combined power output of 81W, with eight dedicated channels of amplification powering each speaker.

Picture

Our time with the Philips OLED911 was mostly spent watching a short clip from the beginning of A Quiet Place: Day One via an Apple TV 4K alongside some of Philips’ bold and punchy demo-reel content. Still, we were able to make some preliminary assessments based on our fairly limited time with the TV.

Our findings here, though, certainly don’t reflect our final verdict on this TV. You’ll have to wait for our full review for that.

Still, the TV appeared to look fairly balanced and cinematic during our demo of A Quiet Place (this clip was played more to highlight the audio capabilities of this TV, which we'll come to), with rich colours that didn’t look oversaturated.

The yellow coat and orangish-red of Lupita Nyong’o’s character, Samira, had a nice touch of vibrancy against the mostly grey backdrop of New York City. The mix of sharpness and contrast also seemed to give a very solid sense of three-dimensionality to the picture.

That being said, during a sequence in which a lot of what appeared to be smoke or dust is kicked up, there was some fairly severe banding on display. This could be due to the lower bitrate of the streamed content, but it caught our eye nonetheless.

Moving on to Philips’ punchy demo content, while we hesitate to call the panning shots of nature and cities particularly natural-looking, they did a great job of highlighting this TV’s capabilities when it comes to delivering punchy colours and dazzling brightness.

The argument that OLEDs aren’t capable of reaching Mini LED levels of brightness is slowly becoming redundant, and the rich, luscious colours mixed with this intense brightness sure do make for a show-stopping debut performance from the OLED911.

Sound

Few TVs on the market can boast the same sonic credentials as the Philips OLED900-range. As we have established, the TV’s sound system was developed by Bowers & Wilkins, and representatives from the British audio company gave us an in-depth look (and listen) at the OLED911’s new speaker setup.

It’s too early to tell if this sonic hot streak will continue with the OLED911, especially with the redesigned speaker enclosure and slimmed-down subwoofer. We will certainly need to test this TV’s sound system thoroughly in our own AV testing room. The early signs, however, are promising.

We saw the 55-inch model, which features the slightly smaller speaker lozenge, yet the sound it produces is anything but small. During that brief demo with A Quiet Place: Day One, we found the sound to be superbly atmospheric, with a spacious sonic field that placed sound effects with impressive accuracy.

A helicopter passing overhead was placed with impressive height, and the sound of a police car’s siren speeding past in the background of the shot moved dynamically from right to left, and extending past the confines of the screen to provide a sense of cinematic scale that we don't often hear with built-in sound systems.

Bowers & Wilkins also demonstrated the OLED911’s sonic capabilities with music, playing Ezra Collective’s God Gave Me Feet For Dancing (feat. Yazmin Lacey). The track’s lively energy was presented with a solid sense of rhythmic drive, while the vocals were clean and clear.

While the overall sound from the OLED911 seemed to be big, bold and crisp, we felt voices lacked a touch of warmth perhaps, although we should stress that the listening space was by no means ideal. Once again, final judgement must wait for when we test this set in our dedicated home cinema room.

Early verdict

In a year with potentially fewer flagship rivals than before, Philips could easily have rested on its laurels and delivered a modest follow-up to the excellent OLED910. We're pleased to see that the company has done the exact opposite.

With a super-bright OLED panel, superb gaming specification, an upgraded sound system, a sleek new design and a bold new take on Ambilight, the OLED911 is shaping up to be a TV that could truly steal the spotlight from the superb Sony Bravia 8 II, as well as, potentially, the upcoming LG G6 and Samsung S95H.

MORE:

Read our full Philips OLED910 review

As well as our Philips OLED760 review

And check out our picks for the best OLED TV

Like it or not, AI is being integrated across an increasing number of AV and hi-fi products. And one of the most popular, Amazon’s Alexa chatbot, is getting an upgrade.

This comes in the form of Alexa+, which will be enabled across a range of Amazon devices across the UK.

Alexa+ will be rolled out on Amazon devices, including the Echo Dot Max, Echo Studio, and the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max. Amazon claims this will add more processing power, memory, and edge-based computing with next-generation sensors” to the user experience.

Daniel Rausch, Vice President of Alexa and Echo, claims that the new version of the AI assistant has been "completely rearchitected from the ground up" and offers a "much more personalised and proactive" experience than its previous version.

It has been designed to be even chattier than its predecessor, with more appropriate intonation in an effort to make the responses feel less robotic.

The assistant can also open other apps, including Spotify and Apple Music, with plans to expand to include more platforms.

We got to see Alexa+ in action, and it is certainly impressive how the tech integrates seamlessly with a number of separate devices.

When asking it to play music from the Echo Show 11 (essentially a smart display with Alexa+ built in) in a demo, you can tell Alexa+ to play sound from individual Echo speakers or ask it to play from all available devices in your home. That would come in handy if you are moving between rooms.

However, we notice that when it is bombarded with multiple, complicated commands, the assistant does take a little while to deliver the information.

It’s also worth noting that when we reviewed the Amazon Echo Dot Max, the smart speaker received a disappointing two-star review. While we found the Alexa integration was responsive and versatile, it ultimately was let down by its muddled sound and derivative design.

Amazon’s most recent Fire TV Stick 4K Max, on the other hand, snagged a What Hi-Fi? Award last year and impressed with its fuss-free and effective 4K HDR streaming capabilities.

Early access to Alexa+ starts from today for free, but will move to £20 a month after this window. For Prime members, however, it remains free.

You can purchase a new Echo device for immediate access and, if you already own one of the newer generations, you can sign up for an invite via Amazon’s website.

MORE:

Here's our review of Amazon Echo Dot Max

And check out our review of the Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED

These are the best Alexa speakers

To mark its centenary last year, Philips announced that it will be reviving its classic Moving Sound range of products from the 1980s – think bold yellow colours, burly boomboxes, and slimline on-ear headphones to plug into your portable cassette player.

At Philips' headquarters in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, I was shown an early preview of the upcoming reimagined modern range, which features portable Bluetooth speakers (the modern boomboxes), updated on-ear headphones with wireless connectivity and a brand-new pair of true wireless earbuds.

Philips has now confirmed the final product names, specifications and prices of its modern Moving Sound range.

The two portable Bluetooth speakers are called The Tube (MS80) and The Roller (MS60), and they both feature Bluetooth 6.0, Auracast sharing technology, IP67 rating for water and dust resistance, and 24 hours of battery life.

The Tube is the bigger and more powerful of the two speakers, boasting 140W of power driving two 12.7cm woofers and two 19mm tweeters, while dual passive radiators promise deep, dynamic bass.

There are large physical control buttons and a colour display that shows off an animated cassette graphic – a clear nod to its '80s roots. The Tube measures 51 x 20 x 16.5cm and has a carry handle and shoulder strap to make it easy to transport, and is priced at €350.

The Roller (MS60), meanwhile, is an iconic '80s name and design that has been modernised for the today's listeners. It's a smaller portable speaker at 38 x 20 x 12cm, and features a built-in carry handle.

It features a "true stereo acoustic architecture" with 60W of power driving a dedicated woofer, tweeter and passive radiator, while Moving Sound Bass+ technology promises powerful bass response. The Roller is priced at €180, with other pricing yet to be announced.

Like The Tube, this portable Bluetooth speaker also features a colourful screen that displays the cassette animation and both models can be used as a power bank to charge your smartphone on the go. You can control both speakers using the Philips Entertainment App, too.

Next up is The Ringo Duo (MS1) headphones that sport a lightweight, on-ear design and are yours for just €35. This classic on-ear headphone design has been updated with wireless Bluetooth connectivity, while also allowing you to listen in wired USB-C mode.

They feature 40mm drivers, and have a built-in AI microphone for clearer calls that also aim to reduce background noise. Designed for ultimate portability and comfort, the Ringo Duo headphones have an adjustable headband and come with three sets of detachable ear cushions. 26 hours of battery life is promised, too.

Of course, we didn't have wireless earbuds in the '80s, but Philips' revived Moving Sound range wouldn't be complete without a set of true wireless earbuds. According to Philips, The Buds (MS3) "bring the collection fully into the modern age while maintaining the playful spirit of the original design language."

The Buds feature hybrid active noise cancellation, spatial audio, multi-point connectivity and Auracast support. Six microphones ensure "excellent" ANC ability, while three AI mics are used to ensure clear voice calls even in busy surroundings.

We are promised a total battery life of 42 hours (with ANC off) with the charging case, while a 10-minute charge will give you two hours of playback. The earbuds are IP54-rated, while various controls can be personalised using the Philips Headphones App.

The rather large, round charging case comes with a display screen, much like JBL's Tour Pro 2 smart display case, and it can also display the same cassette animation seen on the portable speakers. The Buds are competitively priced at €80. Other prices are TBC.

All products in Philips' new Moving Sound range are available in yellow or black finishes with neon pink accents to capture that retro '80s aesthetic.

All four models will be available in Q2 of 2026 and aim to deliver the "bold spirit of the original 1980s Philips designs with a fresh mix of colour, style and modern performance."

MORE:

Philips' do-it-all microsystem boasts AirPlay 2 and Tidal Connect alongside a built-in CD player

Marshall is bringing big party speaker vibes to a smaller but still powerful form

Philips announces 2026 TV lineup with Tandem OLED, RGB Mini LED and Dolby Vision 2 Max

Philips has officially unveiled its 2026 TV lineup, with new Ambilight-equipped models launching across its OLED and Mini LED ranges.

The European AV company has confirmed the next generation of its flagship OLED+ TVs with the OLED951 and OLED911, with the latter replacing the excellent OLED910 from last year.

The biggest new feature for 2026 is AmbiScape, which allows Philips TVs to interface with smart bulbs from the likes of Philips Hue, IKEA and NanoLeaf to create a more immersive AmbiLight experience that lights up your whole room.

Both of these TVs utilise the latest generation Primary RGB Tandem OLED 2.0 panels, with Philips quoting an astounding peak brightness figure of 4500 nits, as well as improved reflection-mitigating properties, which will reportedly combat more than 99% of on-screen reflections.

Both TVs also support refresh rates up to 165Hz, and Philips now joins the likes of Samsung and LG by offering four full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 sockets (all of which support VRR and ALLM) thanks to the inclusion of the MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset.

All of Philips' upcoming TVs support HDR10, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, though the OLED951 and OLED911 will be among the first TVs in the world to support Dolby Vision 2 Max.

This will use AI-backed software to deliver the best Dolby Vision picture experience based on the precise content you're watching, applying the Authentic Motion and Precision Black picture settings where needed.

Dolby Atmos audio is also supported, although these TVs feature different sound systems.

The OLED951 features a discreet 70W 2.2 channel sound system, comprised of dedicated two-way left and right speakers controlled via an accurate digital crossover.

The single woofer featured on the OLED950 has been replaced by two smaller bass drivers, too, each of which sits in redesigned enclosures. This has allowed Philips to make this TV slimmer without, it promises, compromising the audio performance.

The OLED911, on the other hand, continues the brand's longstanding partnership with Bowers & Wilkins, as it sports a dedicated bottom-mounted soundbar-style speaker. This is now a sleek, rounded "lozenge" style speaker bar, which comes in two different sizes depending on the screen size you choose.

The TV houses dedicated left, centre and right channels, each of which features two new 45mm mid-range glass-fibre drivers alongside a 19mm titanium dome tweeter and an improved Nautilus tube design.

These mid-range drivers are isolated from the rigid system enclosure, according to Philips, while the other drivers feature "newly developed, high-damping, TPE isolation mountings" for reduced vibration.

The subwoofer found on the OLED910 has also been replaced with a slimmer 75mm subwoofer, which is "supported by four, force-cancelling, passive radiators", which are now mounted with improved isolation to reduced vibrations.

The slimmer subwoofer has also allowed Philips to reduce the maximum thickness of the set from 47.3mm to 39.9mm.

If that doesn't sound like it'll meet your bass needs, then Philips will also allow users to connect an external subwoofer directly to the OLED911.

In total, this system features a combined power output of 81W, with eight dedicated channels of amplification powering each speaker.

Moving away from sound and onto the processors, these TVs sport the same 10th Gen P5 AI processor. The difference is that the OLED911 features one processor, whereas the OLED951 sports a dual processor arrangement.

This processing power will support a range of AI-backed picture processing features, including a more precise AI HDR tone mapping, and a new AI HDR expansion/restore feature that uses "frame-by-frame analysis to measure the incoming HDR signal and restore the original light output of the content, matched to the peak light output of the display". Which certainly sounds clever.

Interestingly, Philips is moving away from Google TV this year, with both of these flagship models using the company's TitanOS system instead. This system already supports a wide range of international streaming apps, though Apple TV is the only omission; thankfully, it will be added this summer.

The Philips OLED911 will come in the same 55, 65 and 77-inch sizes as the OLED910, as well as a new 48-inch screen size. Philips joins LG and Samsung in embracing this smaller screen size for its flagship set.

The OLED951 will launch in 55 and 65-inch sizes, and will feature a premium, slim-bezel design with metal feet.

New mid-range OLEDs

Philips is also bolstering its mid-range OLED offerings with new additions to its 800 and 700 series TV lineups.

The OLED811 will feature an OLED EX panel (or "traditional" OLED, as we often refer to it) rather than the Primary RGB Tandem OLED technology used by its larger siblings.

Philips quotes a peak brightness of 2500 nits across the 55-, 65- and 77-inch versions, with a presumably slightly lower light output on the 42- and 48-inch models.

However, Philips has included the same 10th Gen P5 AI processor as the flagship models and the MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset, making it a potential rival to the LG C5 for serious gamers, thanks to the inclusion of four HDMI 2.1 sockets.

Also supported is the AmbiScape lighting system and the same HDR agnostic approach, which includes both HDR10+ and Dolby Vision 2 Max. Alongside this is Dolby Atmos support via the 70W 2.2 speaker system (50W on the 42-inch model), and the TitanOS smart system.

Sitting below this is the OLED761, which is a follow-up to the excellent OLED760. Much like Panasonic's new Z86C, Philips has incorporated the affordable new OLED SE panel from LG Display, which will reportedly support a peak light output of 1000 nits.

AmbiScape is, once again, supported, and this entry-level OLED features the step-down 7th Gen P5 AI processing. Moreover, the OLED761 features four HDMI 2.1 sockets, which support gaming up to 4K/120Hz with VRR and ALLM.

The OLED761 will launch in 55-inch this August and 65- and 77-inch models in October.

RGB Mini LED joins the lineup

Philips is also launching a new range of backlit TVs, and it's embracing the latest panel innovation with the MLED981.

This is the company's first RGB Mini LED TV, and it will sit above the QLED models within the company's range. Interestingly, Philips is propositioning this screen technology below all of its OLED models, even the entry-level OLED761.

Launching in October in just one screen size, 85 inches, the MLED981 packs in an impressive 11,520 dimming zones, with a claimed peak brightness of 2500 nits. Philips promises improved halo control and reduced motion artefacts.

The 10th Gen P5 AI processor supports many of the same AI features as the OLED flagships, and Dolby Vision 2 Max is also included. Titan OS, however, is supported, and the MLED981 sports a 70W, 4.1 sound system, with two down-firing drivers, two side firing-drivers, plus a rear-mounted subwoofer.

Continuing the theme of large TVs, Philips is also introducing its biggest Ambilight TVs to date.

The PQS9001 or "The One" is a QLED model, and will be available in 43-, 50-, 55-, 65-, 75-, 85- and 100-inch sizes. It supports the "standard" version of Dolby Vision 2, and the sound system varies greatly depending on the size.

The 43-inch model features a 20W 2.0 system, the 50-inch to 65-inch sets have a 40W 4.0 system, while the 75-, 85- and 100-inch sets include 50W 2.1 sound systems.

The PQS9001 will launch in June in 43- to 85-inch sizes, and the 100-inch model will follow in October.

That's a lot of new Philips TVs to look forward to. The all-important pricing for all these models is yet to be confirmed.

We're on the ground at Philips' TV launch event and will be bringing you more news and first impressions in the coming days.

MORE:

Read our full Philips OLED910 review

As well as our Philips OLED760 review

And check out our picks for the best OLED TVs

While it’s only been around for the blink of an eye by AV standards, having started out in ultra-modern fashion on Kickstarter in 2024, Valerion has already come a long way.

It was officially announced as the premium ‘sub-brand’ of slightly longer-in-the-tooth projector brand AWOL Vision in May 2025, and it’s now already onto its second generation of products.

That second generation of products includes the first Valerion model to ever grace our review pages: the VisionMaster Pro 2.

With a grand name like VisionMaster Pro, a gleaming design that feels like it could go ten rounds with a Sherman Tank and still look catwalk-ready, and not one but two genuine performance boosting updates recently tucked under its belt, Valerion’s latest projector certainly isn’t shy about coming forward.

But can such a nascent brand really hold its own with the best the projector establishment has to offer?

Price

Considering Valerion is positioned as a premium sub-brand of AWOL Vision, the VisionMaster Pro 2’s £2019 / $2999 / AU$4999 price really doesn’t seem unreasonable.

That’s especially true when you consider that this is a projector which, as we’ll see, is packed with convenience and performance-enhancing features, and sports one of the most eye-catching designs the projector world has to offer.

The sort of premium coffee table space the VisionMaster Pro 2 at least looks like it’s designed to fit into, though, is a crowded one these days, with other roughly cube-shaped models such as BenQ’s similarly priced X3100i and Hisense’s much more affordable C1 already setting a high design and performance bar.

Design

Aside from its now quite common cubic shape (usually adopted to accommodate a decent sound system and some extra cooling room to help keep fan noise down), the VisionMaster Pro 2 looks truly unique.

Its top and left/right edges are particularly eye-catching, adorned as they are in a distinctive, deeply ribbed finish where the outer end of each rib features gleaming silvery metal.

The ribbing combines with the fact that the VisionMaster Pro 2 is exceptionally heavy by projector standards to make it a tricky beast to pick up and move.

With the gleaming ribbed sides offset glamorously by beautifully smooth, polished, mirrored glass front and back panels, though, this really is a projector design to admire. Even if your tastes might normally lean towards something more conservative.

The metallic theme continues with the VisionMaster Pro 2’s remote control, which is wrapped very fetchingly across its bottom third, around its edges and over the navigation buttons by a beautifully premium-feeling brushed metal finish.

This is offset handsomely by a matte black backdrop for the remote’s buttons, which are both backlit and helpfully arranged for the most part.

Features

The VisionMaster Pro 2 packs a handy bag of tricks inside its compact but weighty form. At its heart lies a triple (RGB) laser lighting system feeding into a 4K-capable DLP optical set-up, capable of pumping out a claimed 3000 ISO lumens of light.

That’s a pretty promising brightness figure in our humble opinion, with experience suggesting it has the potential to handily straddle the tricky line between being bright enough to punch through a degree of ambient light, but also not so bright that there’s little to no chance of the projector being able to deliver any decent black levels and contrast.

In fact, Valerion claims a very respectable 15,000:1 contrast ratio for the Pro 2 with the projector running in its most contrast-friendly settings (more on these later).

Remarkably, the VisionMaster Pro 2 is claimed to be capable of covering 110 per cent of the AV world’s most extreme BT2020 colour gamut (well beyond the DCI-P3 range used for most real-world HDR content mastering), and impressively, it’s capable of playing both the Dolby Vision and HDR10+ premium HDR formats.

Projectors able to handle even one of these premium formats are still relatively rare, so the Pro 2’s ability to handle both – essentially meaning the projector can play the best version of any content it’s presented with – feels like a real luxury.

It’s equipped with a Filmmaker Mode setting for quick access to relatively accuracy-based pictures (though we feel its Movie preset actually delivers the most rewarding results in dark room settings).

Also, its IMAX Enhanced certification shows the Valerion been deemed capable of doing justice to the relatively noiseless and screen-filling IMAX Enhanced mastering system.

Finally, ISF certification proves that it has all the tools a professional calibrator needs to optimise the projector to your specific room conditions.

Gamers will be pleased to hear that the VisionMaster Pro 2 can support 240Hz frame rates, at which speed it can render images in just 4ms. HDMI ports one and two can also cope with 4K/120Hz signals with HDR, though the third HDMI tops out at 1080p/120Hz if you want to retain HDR.

Note, though, that as with some TVs, even the two full HDMI 2.1 ports only take in high frame rates with HDR and 4K resolution if you manually select the specific HDMI’s Enhanced Pro option via the projector’s Input menu options.

There’s support for ultra-wide gaming formats (32:9 and 21:9) if you’re playing a PC title that supports such ratios, and you can call up an overlaid crosshair in the centre of the screen to help your aim.

This latter feature is especially useful when you’re dealing with images as big as the 300 inches the VisionMaster Pro 2 claims to have enough edge-to-edge sharpness to successfully deliver. The only gaming disappointment is the lack of any VRR support.

Smart features are handled by a built-in Google TV system. This gives you access to most of the key streaming and UK broadcaster catch-up apps, including Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, Disney+, Apple TV, Channel 4, My5 and ITVX. Though, as usual with Google TV, the BBC iPlayer is notably absent.

There is, though, support for AirPlay 2, Chromecast, Miracast, Google Home, Apple HomeKit and Alexa, with near- and far-field Google Assistant voice control also available.

While the VisionMaster Pro 2 might have designs on being a fairly serious home cinema projector, it can still adapt easily to a range of potential living room set-up situations thanks to auto image size, auto keystone correction and auto focus options, along with manual backup adjustments where required.

The auto size feature is backed up by an unusually generous 0.9x-1.5x level of optical zoom.

Picture

The first thing we should say here is that the way our time with the VisionMaster Pro 2 played out meant that we actually got to see it both before and after it received not one but two firmware updates that seriously improved picture performance in multiple ways.

So, before we get into how a fully updated Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 performs, we recommend that you check if your Pro 2 is running the latest software.

If your model’s DLP firmware version (found in the About/Upgrade section of the Settings/System menu) says it’s in the 7x series, it needs to be upgraded to version 79 – a process that can only be done using a USB storage stick.

If your projector’s DLP firmware is in the 83 series, you don’t need the DLP firmware update.

Once you’re confident your DLP firmware is correct, check that your projector is running firmware version P1215, and if it isn’t, you should be able to get it via manually instigating an over-the-air update. Full details on both update processes can be found in the support area of Valerion’s website.

The DLP update is designed to reduce the projector’s susceptibility to DLP’s projection’s rainbow effect issue, where stripes of red, green and blue can flit around in your peripheral vision or over standout bright objects. And it’s fair to say its effects are pretty transformational.

So much so that the Pro 2’s rainbow effect goes from being consistently and obviously distracting enough to cost the image a full performance mark, to occurring so mildly and rarely that it seldom bothers us at all. It hasn’t completely gone, to be clear, but it really is way, way less of a nuisance.

The P1215 firmware, meanwhile, delivers two other extremely welcome performance enhancements, first by unlocking the ability to adjust the projector’s laser output for the Dolby Vision Dark mode, and second by enhancing the projector’s Dynamic Tone Mapping system for optimising HDR sources to the projector’s capabilities.

The Enhanced Black Level feature for automatically optimising the projector’s laser output to suit each scene you’re watching is pretty essential to getting the most all-round watchable images on the VisionMaster Pro 2.

Being able to apply it on its Low setting to the Dolby Vision Dark mode results in some of the best images we’ve seen on a projector even close to this price level. Black levels go from OK to excellent, without costing much brightness or colour vibrancy at all.

The ‘Low’ Enhanced Black Level setting has a helpful impact on regular HDR10 content, too, transforming images from good if slightly grey in dark scenes, to really cinematic, contrast-rich affairs that wouldn’t look out of place on a much more expensive dedicated home theatre projector.

Making the Enhanced Black Level feature’s impact all the better is that it improves black depth while causing precious little subtle shading detail to become lost in the darkness.

Though if you do feel that dark areas have started looking a touch hollow with the Enhanced Black Level feature engaged, a thoughtfully designed Shadow Detail Enhancement feature is able to do a great job of marginally raising the black level floor when subtle details are present without impacting the overall brightness level.

In a perfect world, more of the Pro 2’s picture presets might have been more effectively set up out of the box, rather than needing manual adjustment. It’s true, too, that achieving the most accurate images using the Filmmaker Mode requires the Enhanced Black Level feature to be turned off, resulting in a slightly flat-looking image.

It’s hard to complain too much about the odd preset foible, though, when Valerion has not only provided fairly straightforward and logical tools for enhancing its images in all the right ways, but has actually delivered those tools with a degree of sensitivity, subtlety and image understanding that’s rare indeed in the ‘lifestyle’ projection world.

Joining the Pro 2’s impressive brightness and contrast is a seriously impressive colour range. This extends comfortably out to the furthest reaches of even the most aggressive HDR masters in our 4K Blu-ray collection, but at the same time, the colour processing uses that range at least as much for delivering subtle shading differences as aggressively vibrant spectacle.

The result is an exceptionally punchy image, but one that doesn’t feel cartoonish or flat. Especially as Valerion’s latest firmware update for the projector seems to have introduced better control over how light combines with colour, causing less clipping of detail in the brightest areas and a better all-round balance of tones across HDR scenes.

The VisionMaster Pro 2 delivers 4K sources with a level of pixel density and sharpness that gets mighty close to native 4K in appearance, despite the projector not having a genuine 4K DLP Digital Mirror Device count.

It even manages to keep that sharpness more or less intact when there’s motion and camera panning to handle, thanks to an unusually effective ‘Film’ motion processing option. This massages away the heaviest judder effects without making the results look unnaturally fluid or generating unwanted and distracting processing side effects.

Even after receiving its latest firmware updates and plying it with a few judicious picture setting tweaks, the VisionMaster Pro 2’s images aren’t entirely niggle free.

We’ve already mentioned that faint traces of the rainbow effect remain. Also, though, bright shots can be affected by a slight glimmering effect of the sort we’d normally associate (at a much stronger level) with watching a bright projector on a high-gain screen.

And, while using the ‘Low’ Enhanced Black Level mode is for us borderline essential to getting the best picture quality from the VisionMaster Pro 2, it can occasionally cause slight brightness instability – and the High Enhanced Black Level option pushes this issue to really quite unpleasant levels. The ‘Clear’ motion processing option applied by default to many of the Pro 2’s presets also causes all sorts of distracting issues.

Finally, while gaming on the VisionMaster Pro 2 is enjoyable and responsive enough at 120Hz frame rates, it feels a little laggy with 60Hz titles. Input lag measures 34.3ms with 1080p/60Hz feeds, which isn’t actually bad. But the real-world 60Hz gaming experience just doesn’t quite feel as responsive and fluid as we’d like.

With any projector, though, especially any projector that wants to have a serious stab at HDR content, there are always going to be picture performance trade-offs.

And the simple fact is that the trade-offs that an updated and mildly tweaked VisionMaster Pro 2 requires you to swallow feel like pretty small beer against all the good stuff Valerion’s projector can do.

Sound

The VisionMaster Pro 2’s integrated 2 x 12W speakers sound much better than most integrated projector speaker systems.

For starters, they have enough power and projection behind them to create at least a sense of a dome of sound existing beyond the projector’s physical bodywork.

Most location effects in a sophisticated movie mix appear fairly accurately placed within this sound dome, too, and the simple fact that the audio can escape the projector’s bodywork helps it sound a bit more attached to the projector’s distant pictures than usual.

Perhaps even more impressive is the depth of bass the Pro 2’s speakers can reach without succumbing to crackling, buzzing or dropouts.

This gives soundtracks a properly cinematic feel you barely ever get with integrated projector sound systems – especially as this impressive low frequency foundation is maintained even during loud, dense action scene moments without the rest of the mix sounding overwhelmed or thin.

There’s even a genuine sense of impact with movie staples such as punches or gunfire.

In a perfect world, the highest treble would sound a little more rounded and smooth, and voices would sound a bit more open and project better from the Valerion’s bodywork.

But the fact that we’re even able to pick out such specific audio issues rather than just being overwhelmed by the general mediocrity most projector audio systems serve up actually proves how much better the VisionMaster Pro 2 sounds than most of its peers.

Verdict

Valerion is, on paper, still a novice brand, and the Kickstarter-plus-major-firmware-updates journey of its VisionMaster Pro 2 projector is unusual to say the least.

It turns out, though, that neither of these apparent challenges has managed to stop the Pro 2 from both becoming a (literally) shining star of the mid-range lifestyle projector scene, and putting Valerion firmly on the home entertainment map.

SCORES

• Picture 5
• Sound 4
• Features 4

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A new week is upon us, which means a fresh entry into our regular hi-fi and home cinema news digest, Rewind.

As always, our team of experts detail the top stories to break over the past seven days, and what a week it was! As well as a key exclusive review of LG’s latest step-down OLED, we saw a piece of cataclysmic news break involving two big-name hi-fi brands.

Here’s what you need to know.

We tested the LG C6

LG’s step-down C series of OLED TVs has a strong track record in our testing rooms, as evidenced by the number of LG C5 sets in last year’s What Hi-Fi? Awards.

Which is why our reviewers were very happy when the 65-inch LG C6 appeared in our testing rooms last week. We initially found the 65-inch set a little dull when the series was unveiled, featuring modest specification bumps to a standard OLED panel rather than the next-gen Primary RGB Tandem OLED tech seen on its larger siblings.

But once we got to properly put it through its paces in our viewing rooms, these initial concerns proved to be completely unfounded. Make no mistake, the C6 is an upgrade on the C5 in nearly every way. As said by our reviewers: “While it might seem at first glance to be the least exciting model in LG’s 2026 OLED TV range, the ‘normal’ sized C6 is, in fact, a revelation.”

Read our full LG C6 review

Naim and Focal are getting new owners

News that Barco is set to buy VerVent Audio is, without a doubt, one of the biggest AV stories to break this year.

Like Harman International’s takeover of Masimo’s Audio brands last year, it means the Belgian firm will take control of several big hi-fi brands, chief among which are Naim and Focal.

What the deal means for both remains unclear, though Barco CEO, An Steegen, has confirmed they will continue to operate as consumer brands on some level and are part of a wider aspiration to grow the firm’s audiovisual offering.

Read the full story: Marquee audio brands Focal and Naim will soon have a new owner

We reviewed WiiM’s HomePod-inspired speaker

The WiiM Sound is a smart speaker that wears its inspiration on its sleeve, having a near identical design to the iconic Apple HomePod 2, outside of the inclusion of a clever OLED screen.

It’s a 360 smart speaker designed for people on the hunt for a single box, or in this case, single cylinder, solution to their audio needs. After putting it through its paces in our listening rooms, while its audio lacked the precision and dynamics needed to dethrone Apple’s smart speaker, we did find plenty to like about it.

Highlights include an easy-to-use interface, excellent app support and a smooth, fluid sound that will delight more casual listeners. As we said in our review:

“As with all other WiiM products we’ve tested, the Sound speaker impresses with its breadth of streaming features, easy-to-use interface and smart design. We imagine many will be charmed by these elements in daily use, and rightly so. Sound quality remains its Achilles heel, however.”

Read our full WiiM Sound review

Sonos has a new speaker

Talking of smart speakers, Sonos released a new one last week. Specifically, the brand lifted the lid on its new Sonos Play portable speaker.

The new Play sits between the Sonos Roam 2 and Move 2, both in size and price, and is designed for home and on-the-go use, coming loaded with a battery and a swanky-looking charge base. The latter makes it look and work like a proper home speaker when used inside, thanks to the inclusion of wi-fi streaming, alongside Bluetooth.

Sadly, we haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, though we’re expecting our review unit soon, so make sure to watch this space.

Read the full story: Sonos' new Play portable speaker is like a shrunken Move 2, but it's priced the same as the Apple HomePod 2

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Our picks of the best OLED TVs for serious movie fans

Amazon’s original Fire TV Omni QLED TV launched nearly three years ago, and while it feels like yesterday that we were evaluating if the e-commerce goliath could make a TV worth its weight in cardboard Prime delivery boxes, the truth is that an update has been sorely needed for quite some time.

While Amazon did update the range with the four-star Fire TV Omni Mini LED last year, it has taken until now for the company to update the mid-range QLED model.

With a slew of under-the-hood upgrades promised and a Prime Day price to keep in mind, could this TV offset the onslaught of formidable budget TVs from the likes of TCL and Hisense?

Price

The 65-inch Amazon Fire TV Ember QLED launched at £1050 / $850 (roughly AU$1970 in Australia, where the TV isn't sold directly). You’ll notice that’s a £50 / $50 increase over the first-generation Omni QLED. In the grand scheme of things, this is a fairly moderate bump considering how volatile TV pricing has been since 2023.

Nevertheless, the Ember QLED faces fierce competition from the likes of TCL and Hisense. The Award-winning TCL C7K undercuts the Ember QLED here in the UK at £899 / AU$1595, though it’s significantly more expensive stateside.

Hisense’s four-star U7Q Pro is a similar affair at £899 / AU$1695, making it noticeably cheaper in the UK, but far less comparable in the US.

The Ember QLED does, however, have a trick up its sleeve. Amazon holds frequent – and we mean frequent – sales events throughout the year, including various Prime Days, Big Deal Days and Black Friday events, and here is where you can expect to pick this TV up at a colossal discount.

For instance, when we first ran this review, Amazon's Spring Deal Days were live, and the 65-inch Ember QLED was available in the UK for £ 690.

Even better, at the time of this update, there are lots of early Prime Day deals available, and this model is down to just £600 / $710.

In short, pounce at the right time, and the Ember QLED is really something of a steal.

Design

The Ember QLED is a smart-looking and well-built TV. While it still sits within the budget to mid-range sector of the market, Amazon hasn’t cheaped out on the build.

It’s constructed from a smooth and solid plastic, with a crosshatch design adorning the rear. It’s not too chunky by backlit TV standards, and it actually looks quite sleek next to the fairly bulky and plasticky-looking TCL C7K.

The sleek silver trim below the screen adds a touch of class, and the metal feet are surprisingly premium compared to the plastic ones supplied with the recently reviewed Sony Bravia 3.

On the subject of the feet, they are frustratingly placed at each end of the TV (127.2cm apart to be exact), and there is no option to fit them into a narrow configuration; so be sure to measure up your media unit before buying this TV. The good news is that the stand sits quite high, and the width should accommodate a full-sized soundbar.

Amazon also bundles the expanded Fire TV remote with the Ember QLED. If you haven’t come across this handset before, it’s basically a Fire TV Stick remote that’s been stretched and had a smattering of extra buttons added, including a number pad and TV guide button.

Interestingly, Amazon appears to be offering this TV in just three sizes this year. We have the 65-inch model in for review, but there are also 50- and 55-inch options, with the 43- and 75-inch versions no longer featuring on Amazon’s product page.

Another note on those sizes: we found that the performance greatly differed between screen sizes with the previous generation Omni QLED, so this review only pertains to the 65-inch model.

Features

Amazon’s mid-level Fire TV certainly isn’t the most feature-packed TV on paper, but for what it's worth, we think Amazon has mostly cut the right corners here.

This is a direct-lit LED TV with a quantum dot layer to boost colour vibrancy; hence the “QLED” in Ember QLED. While TCL is implementing Mini LED backlights at the price, Amazon reserves that panel technology for the step-up Omni Mini-LED model.

The good news is that this is a greatly improved panel over the previous Omni QLED, according to Amazon. It reportedly features double the dimming zones compared to its predecessor, meaning it makes a significant jump from 80 zones to 160 zones. This, in theory, should provide a significant boost to contrast, and while it won’t work miracles, it should also rein in blooming.

Furthermore, Amazon quotes this TV as being 60 per cent brighter than the first-generation Omni QLED; that’s a substantial jump. While it hasn’t provided specific figures regarding the brightness level, we did note that the original Omni QLED didn’t feature “pure peak brightness to provide a dazzling rendition of the latest and greatest HDR movies”.

Furthermore, Amazon has retained its agnostic approach to HDR formats, meaning that this TV supports HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ Adaptive and Dolby Vision IQ. The suffixes attached to each of the dynamic HDR formats mentioned here relate to their ability to tap into the built-in ambient light sensor to adjust HDR brightness levels based on the light levels in your viewing space.

Unfortunately, that holistic view only extends to the picture, as the audio features are a little bit less impressive. This TV supports Dolby Audio via the Dolby Digital Plus codec, but it does not directly support Dolby Atmos. You can pass Dolby signals through the TV via the HDMI eARC socket (we’ve reached out to Amazon to confirm if this includes Dolby Atmos), and there’s also an optical socket for legacy and/or entry-level audio devices.

The lack of native Dolby Atmos support may sound like a setback, but the 65-inch Ember QLED supports two 12W drivers for a combined audio output of 24W. These are bottom-firing units, so the concept of achieving Atmos height effects is fairly outlandish to begin with, and as we’ll come to discover, we’re actually pleasantly surprised by this TV’s audio capabilities.

On the subject of HDMI sockets, we can quickly mention the gaming specs, or the lack thereof. The Ember QLED features one HDMI 2.1 socket (which is the aforementioned eARC socket) and three HDMI 2.0 ports, which may sound like an issue until we realise that this TV sports a 60Hz panel. Therefore, 4K/120Hz gaming is out of the question, though the single HDMI 2.1 socket does support VRR, ALLM and Dolby Vision Gaming.

Either way, serious gamers should probably look towards the TCL C7K, as it supports gaming at 4K/120Hz with VRR and ALLM included.

Now, onto the bread and butter of this TV: streaming. Amazon threw its hat into the streaming ring early with its first batch of Fire TV devices launching in 2014, and Amazon Prime Video, originally Amazon Instant Video, introduced internet video streaming in 2011 – so we presume that it must feel fairly confident in this space by now.

Much like the other hardware in Amazon’s Fire TV lineup, the Ember QLED runs the Fire OS platform, which is a very solid operating system when it comes to app availability. We didn’t run into any notable gaps when it comes to the available app library, and the system runs smoothly when scrolling through the home page.

Advertising is fairly prominent throughout, and there is a tendency for the TV to prioritise content from Amazon – be that Prime Video content or products you can purchase from the web store – but that’s somewhat expected.

Another Amazon-specific feature that’s front and centre with the Ember QLED is Alexa. There are microphones built into a protruding section of the chin bezel of this TV, which can thankfully be disabled by a physical hardware switch for those who don’t want Mr Bezos listening into their everyday conversations.

Having these mics always running, however, allows us to use this TV as a super-sized Echo speaker, meaning it can control smart home appliances, answer questions and play music, movies and TV shows via a voice search function. This works nicely with Amazon’s Ambient Mode, which shows information and/or artwork on the TV screen when it's not in use.

Even with the on-board microphones disabled, there is an option to chat with Alexa via the remote’s microphone and Alexa-summoning button.

Overall, the Ember QLED sits between the TCL C7K and the Sony Bravia 3 in the budget TV hierarchy in terms of features. It has more to offer than the Sony, thanks to the inclusion of quantum dots and local dimming, but the TCL is a clear step-up thanks to its improved gaming specs, Mini LED backlight and Dolby Atmos-capable sound system.

Picture

We were quite complimentary of the first-generation Amazon Fire TV Ember QLED’s picture, and we find that this latest edition enhances a few of its best qualities. Unfortunately, it also seems to carry forth a few of its shortcomings.

We’ve paired the Ember QLED with our trusty Oppo UDP-203 4K Blu-ray player, and raided our physical media collection for a handful of reference discs, including Alien Romulus, Civil War and Blade Runner 2049. We’re also using Apple TV to test the Dolby Vision performance, with F1: The Movie being our weapon of choice. The TCL C7K is also on hand as a side-by-side comparison.

Through much trial and error, our preferred settings for this TV are to stick with its Filmmaker mode, but to adjust a few settings – and we stress “a few” as the Ember QLED takes the decisions out of our hands in many cases by greying out a lot of the advanced picture settings.

Turning the local dimming up to medium and HDR tone mapping up to its middle settings yields the best results. Both of these are off by default in Filmmaker Mode, but without them, the picture is noticeably lacking in contrast and punch. We also turn sharpness down to 10, as we find the picture to look a little over-etched at the default setting of 20.

With the TV tuned in, we begin with Civil War, and it quickly becomes apparent that this TV is capable of producing an image that is overall nicely balanced, and it clearly doesn’t try to achieve more than it can based on the hardware limitations.

There is a nice sense of sharpness and definition to the outline of subjects, which, when paired with the improved contrast thanks to the inclusion of double the dimming zones, creates a solid, three-dimensional effect.

The helicopter that skims across the top of a lake towards the Charlottesville Military Base is nicely rendered, and the sense of sharpness and detail extends to skin and clothing textures, too. This sequence features a lot of foliage, and the trees are also packed with detail and texture, making for a convincingly bushy look.

Colours are mostly a success on the Ember QLED’s screen. We approve of the general richness of colours and find that they’re balanced in most scenarios aside from some occasionally overblown greenery. Skin tones are also generally handled well, with some tonal variation which adds some warmth to the characters’ cheeks, although we could accuse the Ember QLED of looking a bit pale at times in this regard.

We also find that highlights are handled admirably on the Ember QLED, and our eyes are often drawn to them over the (on-paper) brighter TCL. During the sequence in which the group of journalists drive through a forest fire at night, there is an impressive intensity to the flames, even if the TCL is better at revealing detail and colour variation within these highlights.

What’s most surprising about this TV is its ability to dig up considerably more dark detail compared to the Mini LED-touting TCL. During the opening scene of Alien Romulus, we find that the details are much more visible on the spaceship as it emerges from the depths of space, and there is also more definition to the Xenomorph fossil, too.

The trade-off here is black levels. The Ember QLED leans towards the grey end of the spectrum when it tries to deliver large swathes of black, meaning that space isn’t quite as deep and infinite as we’d hope it to be. The TCL is a clear winner here, as the improved black levels and more granular contrast control allow stars to punch through with a bit more intensity.

However, the Amazon wins back some ground here, as its backlight seems to be much more consistent during these low-light sequences. We notice that the TCL continuously raises and lowers its backlight to compensate for the small bursts of light through this mostly dark sequence, whereas the Amazon remains much more controlled and, therefore, less distracting.

One area where we have to point out a flaw in the Ember is with motion. The TV doesn’t allow us to adjust its motion settings, or “Action Smoothing” as it calls it, when it's in the Filmmaker Mode setting, and in the Movie preset it's set to the maximum level of 10.

Regardless of what setting we land on, there always seems to be something slightly off with the motion. Soldiers striding in the background of a shot in Civil War look floaty and over-smoothed (almost jelly-like in some cases), and there are some general oddities and visible artefacts to fast-moving objects.

With this in mind, we stick to Filmmaker mode, which seems to either tone things down drastically or turn it off completely, for the best, albeit still compromised, experience.

Switching to Apple TV for some Dolby Vision testing, the gap between these TVs widens, and the TCL begins to show what the extra money goes towards. The intro sequence to F1: The Movie looks good on the Amazon, with the rich colours and sharp details transferring over from our 4K Blu-ray testing, but the TCL introduces some serious pop to the image that steals our attention away from the Ember.

Headlights glow, and fireworks burst with more brightness and vibrancy on the TCL, and the additional contrast earns the TCL a bit more three-dimensionality here as well. Out of the two, the TCL appears to be clearly more competent with Dolby Vision.

Finally, we spin the Blu-ray release of Logan to see how the Ember handles upscaling, and it's surprisingly good news in this regard. Colours seem to be overemphasised, but detail levels and the general picture sharpness are both excellent, to the extent that the TCL can look slightly soft.

This is an especially promising sign, as this streaming-focused TV will undoubtedly be used to access a lot of lower-resolution content from various services, so a considered approach to upscaling is encouraging.

Sound

We’ve already hinted that the Ember QLED’s speakers aren’t the most technically advanced on the market, and they appear to be far behind the TCL’s Bang & Olufsen sound system on paper. The truth is that Ember QLED actually beats expectations in many ways.

Using our tried and tested chapter two stress test from Blade Runner 2049, we find some immediate flaws in the bass performance. The Amazon distorts heavily here, and while we presume that the Bass Enhancement sound mode may help here, it actually makes things worse. That being said, while the bass is quite waffly and flappy, it does dynamically build slightly better than the TCL, which can sound quite one-note in this regard.

Thankfully, when the baseline test begins, we find that the Ember QLED is more within its comfort zone, providing a fairly smooth and balanced approach to dialogue. There isn’t oodles of low-level dynamics on display here, but there is more richness and emotion to voices than the TCL, which can sound quite coarse and, at times, unpleasant.

Both TVs struggle when it comes to reaching high volumes; however, the Amazon sounds less strained when pushed to its maximum, all while sounding a touch more powerful and fuller too.

We’ve established that the Amazon doesn’t try to extend beyond its means by attempting any fancy Dolby Atmos processing, and we feel as though it's all the better for it.

While there isn’t a grand display of cinematic scale on show here, there is a nice breadth to the sound, and while height effects don’t extend beyond the limits of the screen, we get the impression that the Ember QLED is doing its best to place height effects with some verticality.

This is a prime example of a TV not trying to push the boundaries when it doesn’t have the capabilities, and while we’re all for being ambitious, we find that the Amazon Fire TV Ember QLED creates a smoother, fuller and much nicer sound to listen to as a result.

Verdict

Amazon has delivered another compelling, affordable TV with the latest generation Fire TV Ember QLED. While it's not a massive upgrade over the original model, the upgraded panel leads to an impressive picture performance, and the unassuming built-in sound system proves that sometimes less really is more.

While the TCL C7K remains our preferred choice at this price range, thanks to its Mini LED panel and better gaming specs, the Fire TV Ember QLED is a solid alternative. And if you can hold out until one of Amazon’s many sales events, this TV will be well-worth considering thanks to its substantially reduced price.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 4
• Features 4

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