In one week's time, the annual Bristol Hi-Fi Show 2026 will open its door, with hi-fi brands ready to show off their latest speakers, amplifiers, turntables and more to an enthused public – or at least, the ones who have made their way to the city of Bristol.
This is the first year in many that the What Hi-Fi? team won't be running our usual stand and demo at the ground floor for the whole weekend; but fear not, as myself and my colleague Ketan Bharadia will still be there on the day the show opens (Friday 20th February) to see all the new products and bring you our highlights.
A fully working Cyrus 80 AMP
Back at the High End Munich Show in May 2025, we were treated to the biggest surprise in hi-fi: a preview of Cyrus’s next electronics, which was a new 80 Series of electronics in a full-width size. Cyrus is famous for its half-width chassis designs, so a full-width model for the first time ever felt as incongruous and monumental a change as Naim switching its iconic green lights to white.
The Cyrus 80 AMP sits above the brand’s premium, Award-winning 40 Series of electronics, which impressed us with their modern designs and fantastic sonic performance across the board. The 80 AMP – a streaming preamplifier with the BluOS platform and 150W of Class A/B amplification per channel – aims to extend that new modern aesthetic and glorious sonic talent even further, and higher up the price range. It’s an ambitious new era for Cyrus.
The model we saw on display at Munich last year wasn't a full production model, but we're hoping that the the 80 AMP on show at Bristol will be the finished product. We are excited to see it in the flesh, maybe even hear it in action, and get the final details, including pricing. At Munich, we were told the 80 series would sit in the £5000 to £6000 range.
Personally, I’ve always been fond of the half-width design, but the new 80 AMP with its sturdy aluminium chassis and sleek touchscreen display certainly looked impressive at first glance.
ATC will unveil EL50 active loudspeakers
ATC has teased a new active loudspeaker joining its ranks, the EL50. Details are less than sparse for now and we will get the full specifications at the Bristol H-Fi Show 2026 next week, but there are plenty of reasons to be excited here. ATC has a strong reputation in both passive and active speakers, and we have highly rated the ATC active models we’ve encountered, including the recent ATC SCM20ASL (astonishingly insightful and transparent), the ATC SCM40A active floorstanders (exceptional dynamics and control); we even had active versions of our reference ATC SCM50 speakers for a while in our test rooms, back in the day.
ATC has previously made an EL150 active speaker that is now discontinued, which featured a a 25mm tweeter, a 75mm “ATC SM-150s” soft-down midrange driver, and a ‘super linear’, rather massive, 37.5cm bass driver. This model used ATC’s P6 amplifier that featured three-way active crossovers with phase equalisation, and boasted 350W per channel into 8 ohms. That’s 50W for the tweeter, 100W for the mids and 200W for the bass.
The ‘150’ in the name tends to denote the cabinet volume, so we expect the new EL50 to be smaller (50 litres) than its discontinued sibling, which measured a behemoth 131.5 x 60 x 29cm and weighed 82kg. Whether it will carry on the rather bold styling – by ATC’s standards – remains to be seen.
Rega teases a new turntable
We have even less information here than we do about the ATC EL50, but a note on Rega’s website teases that the brand will be announcing “new electronics and a new turntable for the 2026 show”. More details will be revealed closer to the time, but it sounds like we’ll have to be at the show to see first-hand what these new Rega products are.
Rega has a history of showing previews and prototypes of new products – the flagship Mercury/Solis pre/power amps are an example from last year’s Bristol – and I’m curious to see what else is on the horizon. The amplifiers have been getting sequels lately, but beyond a new Nd cartridge range and the superb Planar 3 RS Edition, the standard Planar turntables haven’t had a proper revamp in many years.
I’d love to see the entry-level Planar 1 be the first to get a long-awaited update, as it would be interesting for Rega to start at the budget end with any new technologies and engineering updates (rather than the other way round as most other brands do, with tech trickling down from higher end models). We’ll have to wait and see what lies in store for us next week.
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