The What Hi-Fi? team has been through many awards cycles – 43 to be exact – and every single one is memorable.
Whether it’s your first or fortieth, the process is always gruelling, requiring our team of hi-fi and home cinema experts to forsake daylight for weeks and take up residence in our dedicated viewing and listening rooms.
From those rooms we then run a hardware battle royale. Every five-star product we have already reviewed, as well as new products submitted for consideration, are put through a rigorous comparative testing process where we directly ascertain which is the top dog in its specific category.
It’s a trial you don’t forget, no matter how many times you might have been through it before. Me? I remember the Samsung vs LG TV wars of 2023 like they were yesterday. I was there man, it got real.
But the What Hi-Fi? Awards 2025 testing process has been particularly turbulent.
Why? Because, honestly, I’ve never seen so much awesome new hardware flood our test rooms at once, to the point that plenty of our categories are mainly new products and first-time winners.
There are some categories where this happens every year, of course. The TV market, for example, has a particularly rapid release cycle, with most of the big players launching new sets every year, or at least every other year.
What makes 2025 feel particularly chaotic, though, is what has happened in a number of the usually more stable categories.
Let’s take projectors on the home cinema side and speakers on the hi-fi side as examples.
I was one of the home cinema team with a ball and chain around my ankle helping to shortlist the projectors category.
And while my nearing 40-year-old back is definitely not made for the schlep involved in moving multiple projectors around a room as we ran each head-to-head, the effort was definitely worth it: we identified not one, but five new Award winners. That means five out of six of this year's Best Buy winners are totally new products – with the Sony VPL-XW5000ES being our only repeat winner.
I cannot remember a year with such sweeping changes to the category. And the reason is positive. It isn’t that a load of products suddenly went off sale; it’s that we found something better to recommend.
Take our new recommended premium projector, the Sony Bravia Projector 8. During testing, the projector impressed our reviewers so much that we had multiple team members playing rock paper scissors to “borrow” it for the weekend. Which is why it dethroned last year’s winner in its category, the JVC DLA-NZ800 – a projector that remains an amazing performer in its own right despite losing its trophy.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, we found our first small, but good, coffee table projector, the Hisense M2 Pro. Despite its dinky dimensions and sub-£1500 price tag, this easy to set-up little unit punched well above its weight during our testing process. As one of the main reviewers, this was undeniably one of the biggest surprises of 2025 for me.
And it was a similar story for our intrepid team of speaker testers. This year, four out of the six standmount speaker winners, and three out of the five floorstander trophy takers are new products. Again, it’s not that old winners went to the big hi-fi farm in the sky; once again, we just found a load of awesome new products to recommend.
The Acoustic Energy AE300 Mk2 is one of my personal highlights. As I say in a previous feature, this is an awesome new pair of hi-fi speakers that feel like they were designed just for me. They offer a natural, understated, neutral sonic profile at a price tag a professional magpie can actually afford.
There’s also the Dali Kupid which, as well as having an adorable name, truly delivers on our consistent call for more small, affordable, but great sounding hi-fi. Hence the five-star rating and Award.
And these are just the examples I personally have added to my Awards 2025 battle royale highlights reel. Ask any other member of the What Hi-Fi? team, and they will agree that this has been a particularly interesting and competitive Awards, before regaling you with their own highlights.
We still have our Product of the Year winners to pick and announce on the 13th of November, but I’m already confident in saying that this has been the most interesting What Hi-Fi? Awards I’ve been a part of in quite some time.
All of which made us think that you, our readers, might have some questions to ask about the Awards testing process and the excellent products that won the trophies.
We will, therefore, be running a live Q&A session on Friday the 17th of October between 2.00-3.00pm GMT, where our global technical editor, Ketan Bharadia, TV and AV editor, Tom Parsons, and I will be on hand to answer all of your What Hi-Fi? Awards 2025 questions.
MORE:
These are the best speakers we have reviewed
We rate the best TVs money can buy
Our picks of the best projectors
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