Has a film ever changed you?

If you're a fan of home cinema, then there's a good chance that a movie has (hopefully) touched you in some way or stuck with you over the years.

But how many films have actually changed home cinema?

There are many great reference discs out there which have surely opened some people's eyes to the possibilities of truly immersive home cinema, but only a handful of film titles can lay claim to have impacted the industry.

We're going to go through some of the most notable firsts in home cinema below, as well as a few pioneering titles which single-handedly changed the industry.

It's an interesting mix of absolute classics, smaller innovators and a few films you probably wouldn't expect. See how many you own...

1976: The first-ever VHS is... disputed

So what was the first film to kickstart the home media revolution? Well, no one's really sure. A long-standing rumour suggests that South Korean drama The Young Teacher came out on tape in 1976, shortly after JVC released the technology, but this claim has been widely contested.

The first Western releases are a bit more certain – Magnetic Video released the first 50 titles in a wave in 1977, which included classics such as M*A*S*H, Patton and Hello, Dolly!

1995: Batman and Jack Ryan bring surround sound home

Okay, bear with us here – surround sound technically entered our living rooms in the 1980s, when Dolby Surround and Dolby Pro Logic used a matrix to decode stereo into multi-channel sound. But surround sound as we know it today, with completely separate, discrete channels, came a bit later.

Batman Returns made history in 1992 as the first film to be released in cinemas in what is now Dolby Digital, making digital sound and 5.1 the new standard. However, it wasn't until the 1995 release of Clear And Present Danger on LaserDisc that a discrete Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound track was available on home media.

Dolby Digital would then, of course, become the audio specification for DVD, and is still in use today, even if it has been superseded by the object-based Dolby Atmos.

1996: DVD arrives with a Harrison Ford double bill

DVD premiered in Japan with four titles in December 1996: Eraser, The Fugitive, Assassins and the fittingly futuristic Blade Runner: The Final Cut.

The format reached the US a few months later in March 1997, with 32 titles on launch day, including Twister, which became the top-selling DVD of the year and a notable early demo disc for the format.

DVD arrived in the UK in June 1997, when former What Hi-Fi? staff members were distinctly unimpressed with the Thomson DTH-1000U in our first-ever DVD player review. We were limited to region 2 imports from Japan at the time, however – DVDs didn't hit UK shops until 1998, when Mars Attacks! topped the first UK DVD chart.

Sony would later add a DVD drive to the PlayStation 2 in 2000, which would launch a DVD boom – with veteran AV experts contending that home cinema really took off when the disc-based format arrived. While DVD (and most physical media) is undoubtedly facing some challenges, they're still being made and released 30 years later – a lifetime in AV terms.

1997: DTS roars into home cinemas with Jurassic Park

We're sure many home cinema fans are familiar with DTS. But did you know the dinosaur mega-hit Jurassic Park played a key role in its development? Not content with revolutionising digital effects, director Steven Spielberg did the same for digital sound too, investing in the creation of DTS to showcase the film's sound design and various dinosaur roars.

This resulted in Jurassic Park becoming the first film to debut in cinemas with DTS surround sound in 1993, and also claiming the title of the first DTS home video release when it debuted on LaserDisc in 1997.

Dolby Digital and DTS have had a heated rivalry ever since, with DTS also creating several more advanced versions – including their own object-based codec, DTS: X.

2006: Adam Sandler and Arnie bring us Blu-ray

With Sony set to kit out the then-upcoming PlayStation 3 with a Blu-ray disc drive, it's no surprise that the Japanese tech giant also led the charge when it came to the discs themselves in June 2006.

50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, Underworld: Evolution and xXx were the very first Blu offerings courtesy of Sony, along with MGM's The Terminator.

A real mixed bag then (was anyone who purchased a ludicrously expensive early Blu-ray player reaching for an Adam Sandler rom-com?), and HD-DVD arguably had a stronger launch line-up with The Last Samurai, Million Dollar Baby, The Phantom Of The Opera and Serenity earlier that year.

However, we all know how that one went – HD-DVD waved the white flag in February 2008, and Blu-ray continues to be sold to this day, though it's of course competing with its successor...

2010: Avatar leads the 3D charge

Avatar was not, in fact, the first 3D Blu-ray – that honour goes to Monsters Vs Aliens in 2010, which was initially only available with Samsung 3D TVs or Blu-ray players.

However, almost anyone who invested in 3D home theatre technology at the time (which wasn't many, let's be honest) did so because of the Avatar effect, hoping to recreate the visual splendour of James Cameron's blockbuster at home. Avatar would have its 3D home premiere on Sky on Christmas Eve 2010, with a 3D Blu-ray release two years later.

Studios had mostly abandoned 3D Blu-ray by 2018, though certain regions worldwide still receive new releases. The most notable recent worldwide release has fittingly been a remaster of Avatar, as well as its two sequels – Avatar: Fire And Ash was released on 3D Blu-ray as recently as May 2026.

2014: Dolby Atmos arrives with a Michael Bay bang

Brave was the first feature-length Dolby Atmos film after a special installation at the El Capitan Theatre for its premiere in 2012.

However, it wasn't the first use of Dolby Atmos on disc – that honour goes to, um, Transformers: Age Of Extinction on regular old Blu-ray in 2014. Whatever you think of the film, it is a technical showcase, and it coincided with the announcement of the first Dolby Atmos technology for home theatres.

2016: X-Men, Hitman and Kingsman are the first 4K discs

As What Hi-Fi? reported at the time, the first 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray discs came to the UK in a wave in early 2016, meaning it was a photo finish with no definitive winner.

The eight discs in total were all 20th Century Fox titles: Fantastic Four, Maze Runner: Chapter II - The Scorch Trials, Kingsman : The Secret Service, The Maze Runner, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Life Of Pi, Hitman: Agent 47 and Exodus: Gods And Kings.

While you might call the quality of these films, well, mixed, there's no denying the excitement in the air when this new format was announced, and 4K Blu-rays can now often be found strewn across our test room after a lengthy review session.

It's been a rocky road for 4K Blu-ray since, with some of our favourite 4K Blu-ray players disappearing, key manufacturers leaving the market and Sony seemingly hinting that the next PlayStation won't support any disc-based home media at all. Will we even get another home cinema format? Time will tell...

2017: Billy Lynn's Long, High Frame-rate Walk

Ang Lee's experimental war drama Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk was not the first high frame-rate movie release (that was The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which was released in cinemas in 2012 at a divisive 48fps), but it was the first to take its high frame-rate to home media in 2017.

The 4K Blu-ray was presented in 60fps rather than the 120fps seen in cinemas, but it was still a first for the format. We found both the film and the high frame-rate experience to be a bit hit and miss in our Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk review, noting a hyper-real sense of depth at the cost of a cinematic feel.

It's not a trend that would catch on, however – Ang Lee would return to high frame-rate for his next film Gemini Man, but otherwise home video has stuck with good old regular 24fps.

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The fact that What Hi-Fi? is enjoying its 50th anniversary is an uncomplicated reason for celebration, of course, and is deserving of no little admiration too.

Personally, though, I find it a slightly bittersweet occasion – for no other reason than I was the editor of What Hi-Fi? on the occasion of its 40th birthday. I vividly remember the feeling of excitement and, mostly, relief when that good-looking 40th anniversary issue arrived from the printer – and I’m not going to lie, the knowledge that ten years have passed since then makes me feel even older than I usually do.

I joined What Hi-Fi? as a staff writer at the very end of 2003, and I became features editor and then deputy editor; I became editor towards the end of 2012.

Unlike quite a few people who went on to occupy senior editorial roles at What Hi-Fi? I didn’t start out in the stockroom – part of me thinks that’s because the magazine couldn’t wait to get my copy onto its pages, but the bigger part of me knows it’s because I would have been a rotten stockroom manager. Even back then I had no more than two days per week of lifting and fetching and carrying in me before I had to lie down for an extended period of time.

I was editor for just shy of half a dozen years – and so I am more than willing to take an appropriate amount of credit (almost 12 percent of 50 year’s-worth, if my maths is correct) for the fact that What Hi-Fi? flourished during that period, just as it had done before my stewardship and has continued to do since.

The broad editorial template – to offer readers sincere, impartial and expert advice about a wide range of audio/visual electronics, with the emphasis strongly on value for money – had been established long before my tenure, and I know for a fact it hasn’t changed in any fundamental way since.

It’s a demonstrably successful formula, after all, and it will require a personality considerably more iconoclastic than mine to meddle with it.

The decision to add the words ‘Sound and Vision’ beneath ‘What Hi-Fi?’ on the masthead had been taken a fair while before I joined, and during my time as editor I embarked on a long, concerted and determined campaign of ‘going on and on’ in an effort to get it taken off again.

The January 2016 issue was the first to simply carry the What Hi-Fi? branding since 2001. “Everyone knows we cover video equipment as well as audio equipment,” ran my cunningly simplistic argument, “and the What Hi-Fi? brand is plenty strong enough to communicate that fact by itself.”

But there’s no denying that, for the first few years of my editorship, at least, it was around the video products, rather than the audio products, that much of the real innovation was happening.

That’s not to say audio products were standing still, of course. It was during the period I was in charge that wireless, multi-room, voice-controlled and otherwise smart speakers gained something approaching ubiquity.

Although it would have taken quite a feat of imagination to predict the resurgence of compact disc as a viable and popular storage format, the vinyl revival* was in full swing (so much so, in fact, that our friends at Rega supplied a limited edition of just three ‘What Hi-Fi? 1976-2016’ turntables which we gave away to readers as prizes in a 40th-anniversary competition).

(*I solemnly promise, here and now, I will never use the phrase ‘vinyl revival’ ever again.)

And it was towards the end of 2014 that Tidal launched, turning music-streaming services from highly compressed triumphs of convenience over quality into authentically worthwhile sources of high-resolution audio.

But in video equipment, the market was expanding in all directions at once. And not just in the average size of televisions being sold (which rose from around 36 inches in 2012 to 47 inches in 2018 – and currently sits at around 55 inches, despite the fact that no one’s house seems to have got any bigger).

At the end of 2012, Sony launched the very first ‘Ultra HD’ (quickly rebranded as ‘4K’) television for consumers. The 84-inch KD-84X9000 cost $25k, and came with a custom Dell media player loaded with 10 4K movies – handy, given that no native 4K content was available at this point.

By 2013, though, Netflix and YouTube were offering native 4K streaming, and it only took until the end of 2014 for the first 4K Blu-ray players (and the accompanying discs) to be announced.

It wasn’t until the start of 2016 that What Hi-Fi? reviewed the first 4K Blu-ray player a manufacturer was brave enough to submit for testing. It’s safe to say the Panasonic DMP-UB900 (yours for £600 at the time) impressed us – “the future of home cinema, on disc” and “a devastating first blow” were among the accolades in the review. There may even have been an “oh wow!" in there somewhere.

But, of course, What Hi-Fi? is never going to imply that anything is perfect – “sound could be a little more agile” was the one meaningful criticism we could muster.

LG attempted to democratise both 4K and OLED TV technology at CES in 2013 with the announcement of a 55-inch model (its previous OLEDs had been no bigger than 15 inches) that sold for a mere $10,000. Dolby whipped the covers off Dolby Vision HDR in 2014 and by 2015 it was appearing in the mainstream television market.

And in 2017, Samsung – which had spent the previous five years decrying OLED technology as some kind of bourgeois affectation – unveiled its QLED TV technology. Because if there’s one thing the consumer electronics industry loves to do, it’s to throw as many competing formats at the wall as possible in order to establish if any of them will stick.

Of course, the Holy Grail of consumer electronics is ‘convergence’ – or, at least, it is as far as the actual consumers are concerned.

In 2012, Dolby launched Dolby Atmos spatial audio, upgrading 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound with dynamic, object-based, immersive sound. By 2015, the technology was showing up in AV receivers and soundbars (and those receivers and soundbars were being reviewed by What Hi-Fi?) and the more intrepid streaming platforms were fully on board too.

And by the time I vacated the editor’s chair, Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision were integrated into television and projectors, while spatial audio had taken its place alongside multi-room sound as a ‘must-have’ for music and movie fans alike. The line between the ‘audio’ and ‘home cinema’ markets has only continued to get more blurred.

It’s safe to say I have never been happier – in my professional life, anyway – than when I was working at What Hi-Fi?. I got to listen, and then paid to write about what I’d heard. I went to places I would never have otherwise been.

And most of all, I met some people – colleagues, members of the consumer electronics industry, readers of the magazine and the website – who I am still in touch with nearly a decade later and some of whom mean a great deal to me.

I realise this is a fairly sentimental way of viewing what was, after all, simply a job at a consumer advice magazine. But the fact that What Hi-Fi? has been around for 50 years lets you know that it has never been any ordinary enterprise.

I don’t doubt for a second that someone (probably as-yet unborn) will be writing with great nostalgia and affection about their time at What Hi-Fi? when its 100th anniversary comes around.

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On 9th April 1988, 17-year-old Alan Shearer became the youngest footballer ever to score a hat-trick in the English top flight, knocking three past Arsenal during his first full start for Southampton. It was the beginning of a record goalscoring career and, first and foremost, a dream debut.

Not every debut can be heralded as such an enormous success in the moment, but the beauty of hindsight certainly can cement them into the history books – as it has done with the hi-fi products you’ll see below.

As we celebrate 50 years of What Hi-Fi? this year, we've been looking back at the iconic hi-fi debuts in the loudspeaker, amplifier and turntable fields, and enjoyed the task so much that we challenged ourselves to curate a definitive 'Best Of' list across categories – the aforementioned three, plus CD players and DACs, to be more precise.

And while we tried to curate a succinct list of some of hi-fi's great classics, after much deliberation, we couldn’t get it down below 33 products without compromising a good night’s sleep. (Trust us, we – especially the author of this piece – tried.)

For some of us, this exercise has been a nostalgic walk down memory lane; for others, an excuse to learn more about our industry’s earliest successes and, in many cases, their lasting impact. So let’s dive in with decks first...

6 debut turntables

Thorens TD 124 (1956)

Founded 140 years ago by Hermann Thorens in Sainte-Croix Vaud, Switzerland, Thorens produced its first full turntable effort following years of design and engineering in the fields of gramophones, Edison-style phonograpsh, radio receivers and music cabinets (some of which featured built-in record players called ‘discophones’).

The TD124 was an instant runaway success and helped lead the German brand to become one of the most revered manufacturers of record players in the '50s and '60s, earning itself legendary status on the way. So legendary that the now-revived Thorens brand chose to commemorate its 140th birthday by releasing a special anniversary edition of the most recent version of the deck, the TD 124 DD.

Acoustic Research AR XA (1961)

The AR XA was designed by one of our greats, Acoustic Research founder Edgar Villchur, who, after inventing the acoustic suspension loudspeaker, the AR-1, in 1954, went about making as big of a splash in the record player market. The goal: to minimise the relative motion between the platter and tonearm and isolate them from external vibrations and acoustic feedback.

Rather than those components and the motor being attached to the turntable’s top plate, as was customary at the time, the AR XA mounted the tonearm and platter to a sub-chassis beneath it, suspended at three points by springs at equal load points. Villchur liked to demonstrate its effectiveness by hitting the AR XA’s wooden base with a mallet while the record played on uninterrupted.

The deck also used a low-speed, low-powered motor. These solutions were, Acoustic Research admitted, based on ideas by telecoms manufacturer Stromberg-Carlson and others, but Acoustic Research presented it in a package that was immensely good value – so much so that the initial price of $58 had to be raised over subsequent years.

Technics SP10 (1970)

The direct-drive design was invented in 1969 by none other than the Technics brand – specifically, Shuichi Obata, an engineer at Matsushita (now Panasonic, who owns Technics), based in Osaka, and made its debut in the classic Technics SP-10 turntable.

Unlike the idler wheel and belt designs that were around at the time, the platter sat on top of a drive motor that spun at 33 1/3 or 45 RPM – no belts, no wheels, just a hefty production cost. Oh, and a phenomenal sound. The SP-10 was an award-winning deck used by broadcasters around the world, including the BBC.

Anyone familiar with the Technics brand knows that the legendary SP-10 of course spurred generations of the design’s evolution, refining it to reduce vibrations and improve rotational stability and signal-to-noise ratio, the current culmination of which includes the S-1200GR line and the SL-1300G.

Rega Planet (1973)

When Rega owner Roy Gandy was working at Ford Motor Company, training to be an engineer, he was also making and selling speakers in his spare time. Customers would ask him for turntable recommendations to pair them with, but he wasn’t convinced by the quality of those available at the time and so decided to design his own – the Planet.

Gandy once told us that the Planet, with its three-spoke, steel and aluminium platter and Acos Lustre tonearm, ”sold because it looked different, rather than on sound quality”. He worked hard to reduce motor noise, and then, realising that the platter’s three metal discs didn't support the record well enough, ended up switching to a glass platter, which Rega still uses today in turnables such as the iconic Planar 3.

• A hi-fi classic: meet Rega's first-ever record player, the Planet

Linn LP12 (1973)

This initially unassuming belt-driven turntable may have had an initially slow rise to fame, but by the ‘80s it had become the dominant premium record player in the UK market, and today it’s considered the country’s most popular high-end deck of all time, not to mention one of the most capable ever made in any country.

Its current form, while recognisable, has had as many changes over the original as Only Fools and Horses’ Trigger’s beloved road-sweeping broom with 17 new heads and 14 new handles – changes that have kept it at the forefront of turntable performance.

Pro-Ject 1 (1991)

The original Pro-Ject 1 laid the foundations for what has been a virtually unblemished record of success for not only the ongoing line but the Austrian company’s record player output on the whole. It was essentially a modified version of the Tesla NC-500, which was originally made as an affordable turntable for distribution across Central and Eastern Europe, and its success gave then-audio-shop-owner Heinz Lichtenegger the green light to buy the Tesla factory that was closing down, hire 50 staff and begin producing turntables under the Pro-Ject name. Fast forward to today and the brand is still there – as are some of the original Tesla machines.

“It was pretty ugly,” Lichtenegger told Stereo Life magazine, “but in terms of mechanics and sound it was really worth the price.” Indeed that second sentiment could describe any number of Pro-Ject turntables since.

• See our longer list of 13 debut decks from iconic turntable brands
• Want something current? These are the best turntables we recommend

3 debut CD players

Sony CDP-101 (1982)

By Autumn 1982, the CD momentum had been building for a while, but it was on October 1st that Sony launched its first player, along with the first album available on the new format – Billy Joel's 52nd Street. While early versions of CD players Sony had demonstrated loaded the disc vertically, allowing people to see the action through a transparent front, the released CDP-101 sported the horizontal tray-loading style that of course went on to be the more popular one.

As we noted in a 40th-anniversary ode to the disc, Sony could relay all 16 bits of a CD’s audio signal, achieving this ‘by using a single-channel DAC which alternated between left and right channels. The player did not incorporate a hold-circuit which would have allowed a slight delay in the first-decoded channel so they could be output in sync. Some make much of this.

But that particular criticism was simply silly. The delay of one channel compared to the other could be fixed just by moving the speaker carrying the delayed sound closer to you. How much closer? Well, the delay was precisely 11.3 microseconds. Which means 7.7 millimetres.’

Philips CD100 (1982)

It’s hardly surprising that the two companies behind the compact disc format were the first to release CD players. While Sony’s CDP-101 had a front drawer disc tray and 16-bit DAC, Philips’ CD100 was a top-loader that only used a 14-bit DAC.

So what about those last two bits of a CD’s audio signal? Well, that particular gap was bridged with a process called 'oversampling', where three extra samples of the signal were created and then fed into the DAC at four times the original rate, matching the resolution of 16-bit in the process. Clever.

Though that theoretically increased noise levels, the CD100 tended to be the critically better-rated performer, with a naturally smooth sonic character and first-rate error correction, and while many subsequent players adopted Sony’s 16-bit DAC approach, the first players by Meridian and Marantz in the mid-80s, the MCD and CD-63 respectively, followed the CD100’s oversampled 14-bit DAC cues.

• We look back at the very first CD players tested by What Hi-Fi? and the advent of this innovative digital format

Cambridge Audio CD1 (1986)

Cambridge Audio's first player cost a fortune when it launched in 1986 for £1500 (over £5000 / $6000 / AU$9000 in today's money), which was two to three times most others. But you couldn’t argue you weren’t getting your boxes’ worth. The CD1 comprised two – the upper one housed the disc tray and power supply while the bottom housed the DAC.

Like the Philips, it too went down the oversampling 14-bit DAC method, though, keeping with the theme of quantity, incorporated three of them – two worked to nail speed and accuracy, the third took care of error correction.

Playback filters were yet another novelty of the CD1, which had nine options that covered the various pre-conversion filters that studios were using at the time in the absence of any standardisation for digitising analogue master tapes to CD.

4 debut DACs

Arcam Delta Black Box (1987)

A&R Cambridge had been going for almost 20 years before it decided to reinvent itself and change its name to Arcam, and the Delta Black Box DAC was one of the early and most instrumental products to define that transformation.

It was the company’s first of its kind, and really one of very, very few of its kind around at the time – not surprising considering it was a DAC/processor designed to make domestic CD players (with S/PDIF outputs) sound better and arrived just a few years after such players began hitting the market. Sony and Marantz had outboard DACs for their higher-end players, but the Arcam was roughly three times more affordable, retailing at £249.

Co-founder John Dawson said that lots were sold as add-ons to mid-priced players, with sales figures of it and the closely related, Toslink optical input-toting Black Box 2 (1989) exceeding 10,000 units. Unsurprisingly, it also worked with the company’s own (Delta 70 CDP) CD player, which featured the same chipset, namely the 16-bit famous Philips TDA1641A. The Delta Black Box also took advantage of the Philips SAA7220 oversampling digital filter, complementing that architecture with plenty of independent stabilised power supplies and good analogue circuitry.

Also key to the Black Box design was a custom, Arcam-branded integrated circuit, which was necessary to decode the S/PDIF data stream to I2S as no commercial part was available at the time. Dawson notes that it was a 1000-gate array made by Newmarket Microsystems and cost roughly £10,000 to tool, with each chip costing £11, but that it was the first mover advantage the brand needed – no one else had one for at least a year.

• From college-room creations to British hi-fi icons, Arcam’s John Dawson reflects on 50 proud years of electronics engineering

Wadia 2000 Decoding Computer (1988)

With the rise of the CD in the mid-80s, it was only a matter of time before more powerful processors and advanced number crunchers would be required to push digital audio down the evolutionary track. That was the thinking of a bunch of engineers from Minnesota who formerly worked at 3M Corporation and shared collective experience in digital telecomms R&D.

In response to their dissatisfaction with the early CD players’ performance, they founded Wadia Digital and launched what was a seminal product in digital audio’s history – the Wadia 2000 Decoding Computer.

As described by Arnis Balgalvis for Stereophile shortly after the DAC’s release, the 2000 was “a sonic knockout… a development significant enough to reevaluate the status of the Compact Disc medium… for once we can be rid of the perennial qualifier: "It's good...for digital."” The result of years of R&D, it was the first decoder to resample at a 64x rate – much higher than anything else at the time – through the implementation of four AT&T DSP chips (which were replaced by Motorola ones some years later).

Wadia has many claims to fame, from producing the first outboard DAC and introducing glass fibre optics to home audio, to producing some of the most sophisticated CD players ever (like the 581ISE), but for its impact on the digital audio world at that time, the 2000 could well be considered its crowning achievement.

dCS 950 DAC (1993)

dCS’s journey began in 1987 when Oxford University graduate Mike Story and a team of engineers established themselves as an electronics consultancy to companies such as Ferranti, Marconi Avionics and British Aerospace, leading to collaborations with the Ministry of Defence and then, thanks to Story being somewhat of an audiophile, digital audio design.

The 900 ADC (analogue–to-digital converter) was the first fruit of that particular labour and the first to use the dCS Ring circuit technology that, evolutions on of course, still lies at the core of dCS designs today. The breakthrough 24-bit design was a hit with professional engineers, including Bob Ludwig, inspiring dCS to launch the 950, the world’s first 24-bit DAC, four years later.

Another hit in the professional market and the inspiration to create the company’s first consumer DAC for home use, the Elgar.

Chord DAC64 (2002)

A good 13 years after Wadia’s first DAC turned up at the Consumer Electronics Show, so did Chord Electronics’. The DAC64 was the first offspring of many from the ongoing collaboration between Chord founder John Franks and audio engineer Rob Watts, and the first to use the FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) design which, covering everything from conversion to filtering, has been the beating heart of every Chord DAC since.

The DAC used 64-bit filter and DAC architecture (hence its name) and a crucial part of the design was the Watts Transient Aligned filter (WTA) filter, based on the theory that the timing of transients is better captured by high sample rates and the benefits are audibly discernible.

Speaking of the move to FPGA, Watts told What Hi-Fi?: “It was all about ultimate performance and pushing the boundaries of what was possible. I knew from the work that I had done (notably on the Deltec PDM1024 DAC) that there were serious problems within existing DACs and the only way of addressing these issues was by creating my own design using FPGA technology.” The rest, as they say, is history.

11 debut amplifiers

McIntosh 50W-1 (1949) 

In 1946, Frank McIntosh, a design consultant for broadcast and TV stations, hired Gordon Gow to help him design a high-power, low-distortion amplifier for his clients – something he didn’t believe was already on the market. This amplifier would be – you guessed it – the 50W-1.

The mono tube design utilised a pair of 6L6 output tubes and, pretty remarkably and as advertised (McIntosh apparently had a thing about many amps at the time not meeting their specifications), a frequency range of 20Hz to 20kHz at less than one per cent distortion. The 50W-1 was also notable for introducing the company’s first patented circuit, the Unity Coupled, which is still used in its full-size amplifiers and even its top-line valve headphone amp. It

Exactly twenty years later, McIntosh amplifiers would be used to power the ‘69 Woodstock music festival.

Cambridge Audio P40 (1968) 

Cambridge Audio’s first-ever product was also the first amplifier in the world to use a toroidal transformer – a significant innovation at the time and, considering its ubiquity in amplifiers now, an important one. It just happened to be being manufactured by another local company at the time, and was implemented to help handle the heavy load necessary to produce heavier (rock) music.

The P40 was designed by founders Professor Gordon Edge (after whom the 50th anniversary Edge series is named) and fellow engineer Peter Lee, with the slimline case designed by Roy Gray from Woudhuysen Design.

The P40 was an instant success but proved tricky to produce in large quantities and so the P50 was introduced a year later to address that, arriving with more power under the hood and a unique active volume control that was useful for matching a variety of input levels.

Audio Research SP-3 (1972)

While during the 70s the audio industry had all but moved from using vacuum tubes to transistors (due to their smaller size and lower power dissipation), a fella called Bill Johnson was certain there was life in the vacuum tube in the right hands – or indeed circuity.

With 20 years of experience in audio (he had a store in Minneapolis and had designed custom amplifiers for customers), he founded Audio Research and launched the SP-3 preamplifier, which used six 12AX7s and two 12AX7 LN tubes. At the time, Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound publication said: “I’d be willing to flatly pronounce this preamp the best.” And he wasn’t alone in extolling its virtues, not just in terms of its performance but also its robust build and classic looks.

Audio Research stuck with vacuum tubes (which went on to have a resurgence in the 80s, of course) and 10 years later would produce one of, in our opinion, the most legendary products of all time, the (15-valve) SP-10.

Naim NAP200 (1973)

In his early 20s, Julian Vereker, then a successful racing car driver and self-taught engineer (super-tuned Minis was his speciality), switched from building his own cars to building his own amplifiers and loudspeakers, primarily out of dissatisfaction with the way recordings he made of musician friends sounded. (A pretty a multi-talented guy, eh?) When the 70s rolled around, designs were in place and he won a contract to supply London’s Capital Radio station with audio equipment, the success of which led to Naim Audio being born.

Vereker and his co-founder Shirley Clarke were directors of their shop in Salisbury, UK (where the company’s products are still built five decades on) and their first consumer product for home use was the NAP 200 power amplifier, using a Vereker design from a couple of years previous.

Anyone familiar with the revered British brand will know that the iconic NAP line is still going strong today, with the current NAP 250 model representing everything it has ever stood for: musical, rhythmic, dynamic sound.

A&R Cambridge A60 (1976)

The year it was founded, Amplification & Recording Cambridge (now Arcam) launched a slimline integrated amplifier that went on to become the go-to middle-market amplifier in the 80s and the natural upgrade from your budget champions such as the NAD 3020 and Mission Cyrus One (both below).

Not only did it deliver a sound that was punchy, rhythmic and dynamically expressive, but it also was well equipped with a handful of inputs (one of which was fed by a capable moving-magnet phono stage) and treble, bass and balance controls, as well as being lovely to look at.

All in all, the A60 was a runaway success througout its 12-year shelf life (it was replaced by the Delta 60 in 1988) and certainly laid the foundations on which the British firm built its success.

• That Was Then... A&R Cambridge A60 (1976) vs. Arcam A19 (2013)

Mark Levinson ML-2 (1977)

OK so, admittedly, the ML-2 wasn’t Mark Levinson’s first product, following a few preamplifier designs, but it was its debut power amplifier, produced from 1977 to 1986 – and a bloody good one at that.

Based on the designs of the company’s first designer John Curl and finished by succeeding engineer Tom Colangelo (who was behind subsequent ML designs until Mark Levinson himself left the company to found Cello and took Colangelo with him), it was a 25-watt (into eight ohms) Class A monoblock design that could double its output as impedance halved (50 watts into four ohms, 100 watts into two), contributing to its nice fit with Quad’s electrostatics at the time. Because of that Class A operation and rate, however, this physical beast of an amplifier (30kg heavy with its giant heat sinks and side carry handles) drew 400 watts of power from the AC (!) and could heat a small living room.

Still, this natural partner to the ML-1 (one of those aforementioned preamps) blew the competition away and made up an equally legendary, tri-amplified reference system called the HQD system, featuring six ML-2s powering four Quad electrostatic midranges, two Hartley woofers and two Decca ribbon tweeters, with two LNC-2 electronic crossovers also present.

NAD 3020 (1978)

We don’t think anyone could really argue the NAD (New Acoustic Dimension) brand was established on the success of the original 3020 amplifier. It was born out of the desire by a group (led by American Marty Borish, who had just resigned as President and CEO of Acoustic Research) to offer hi-fi enthusiasts unprecedented value-for-money performance, and the Class A/B design was the brainchild of the founding group’s Björn Erik Edvardsen (known as BEE and a former Dolby Labs engineer).

This unassuming budget amplifier didn’t measure particularly well, nor would its 20 wat-per-channel output have turned many heads, and yet it could drive speakers better than most of its price-matching rivals at the time, setting the standard for sound quality in a category where most still put specification and features first.

It had a balance that was smooth and full-bodied, which worked well with the less-than-refined budget kit of the time, delivering a good, coherent sound. No wonder it went on to become the best-selling integrated amplifier ever.

Krell KSA-100 (1980)

Just before the 80s rolled in, husband and wife duo Dan and Rondi D'Agostino launched Krell out of their garage. It was named after the scientifically advanced alien civilisation from the classic 50s sci-fi film Forbidden Planet (one of Dan’s favourites from childhood) and made its public debut at CES 1980 with just one product – the KSA-100 power amplifier.

Amplifiers are often referred to as powerhouses, and at that time the Krell would’ve epitomised that label – thanks to a deliberately excessive power supply and output stage, the KSA-100 could drive any load, regardless of impedance, delivering 100 watts of Class A power into eight ohms… or 1600 watts into one ohm!

That was a great deal more than the high-end alternatives from the likes of Mark Levinson and Threshold at the time, and pretty groundbreaking. Not only was the arrival of such a capable power amplifier like the KSA-100 (and subsequent models like the legendary KSA50) great news for audiophiles, but it was also great news for manufacturers of high-end loudspeakers. Designers could concentrate on creating speakers safe in the knowledge they didn’t have to worry as much about the load they were putting on amps.

Musical Fidelity The Preamp/Dr. Thomas Power Amplifier (1982)

Many (including us) consider 1985’s A1 one of the most iconic amplifiers of all time, so it’s pretty impressive that it came just three years and three products after Musical Fidelity was founded.

The company's first two products were a matching pair, with the bare-bones-named preamplifier arriving first, reportedly created out of the dissatisfaction that founder Antony Michaelson had with the TVP-1 preamp made under his previous Michaelson & Austin company. It quickly racked up rave reviews (and not just for its illuminated naming on the fascia), and then came the chunky power amplification partner.

Evidently, its designer, Dr. Martin Vincent Thomas, didn't like the idea of falling in line to make The Power Amp, choosing to take matters into his own hands when it came to establishing a moniker for Musical Fidelity's first power amp. The 120 watts-per-channel Dr. Thomas was a great visual and sonic match, surprisingly powerful too.

• That Was Then... Musical Fidelity A1 (1985)

Audiolab 8000A (1983)

The product that started it all for Audiolab, both literally and figuratively. Audiolab was formed in 1983 by Philip Swift and Derek Scotland, and its debut 8000A integrated quickly earned worldwide acclaim for its standout build quality, box-ticking featureset (tone controls: tick, headphone output: tick, phono stage: tick, separate record selector so that you could listen to one source while taping another: tick) and an insightful performance that could drive most price-compatible speakers with ease.

Knocking the A&R Cambridge A60 off its perch, it was responsible for an overall raising of standards so far as British amplifier build quality and design were concerned, and set the standard for midrange amps for years to come.

Cyrus One (1984) 

Cyrus Audio was founded as the electronics offshoot of Mission Loudspeakers (hence the brand’s early name ‘Mission Cyrus’) and its debut products in late 1984 were two half-width integrated amplifiers – the Mission Cyrus One and, with greater power output and a more sophisticated phono stage, the Mission Cyrus Two.

Despite its modest price of £130 (approx £600 / $700 / AU$1000 in today’s money), the One was very much a product for audiophiles – no balance or tone controls, but plenty of analogue inputs and a sound quality that outperformed pricier rivals at the time.

It was highly musical and had a particularly impressive knack for detail retrieval, surfacing low-level information that other amplifiers, to quote our review, "repressed or simply rendered messy". It’s little wonder, then, how these two debuts launched Cyrus into electronics stardom in the mid-80s.

• See our longer list of 9 debut stereo amplifiers from iconic hi-fi brands
• Check our current guide to the best stereo amplifiers you can buy

9 debut speakers

Wharfedale Bronze 2 (1932)

Wharfedale’s first speaker was built in the cellar of music and audio enthusiast Gilbert Briggs' home in a West Yorkshire town called Ilkley in the valley of Wharfe (known as ‘Wharfedale’, hence the company name). The Bronze was purely a drive unit – in those days, such things were considered cutting edge technology and radio enthusiasts would assemble their own cabinets – but a year later it was housed in a wooden cabinet for those who wanted an ‘extension’ speaker, and shortly after came the Nubian cabinet speaker in 1934.

According to a history by Audio Affair, his wife, Doris Edna Briggs, would wind and solder voice-coils for these fledgling Wharfedale loudspeakers, two of which won first (the Bronze) and second place in the local Bradford Radio Society’s annual competition in 1933. Now with a factory in Bradford and production ramping up to 9000 units per year, Wharfedale Wireless Works (as it was called then) was off to a flier.

A decade later, having produced 40,000 transformers for telecomms company Marconi during World War II, the company 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.

Acoustic Research AR-1 (1956)

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 used entrapped 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.

That was followed shortly afterwards by the AR-2, but in 1958, the AR-3 became Acoustic Research's landmark speaker, borrowing the AR-1's acoustic suspension technology, but bringing onboard a newly designed midrange driver and tweeter.

Quad ESL-57 (1957)

Despite what this list may have you believe, revolutionary speaker technologies don’t come along often, which makes the exploits of Quad (an acronym for 'Quality Unit Amplifier Domestic') founder Peter Walker all the more significant. In 1956, Walker introduced a speaker that used electrostatic technology instead of conventional drivers for the first time ever, waving goodbye to traditional driver cones and cumbersome cabinets and consequently the obstacles they present (such as cabinet colouration).

In their place was a thinly stretched, electrically charged diaphragm between two metal grilles receiving the audio signal from the amplifier As music played, the electrical charge on the grids changed polarity and through the forces of attraction and repulsion made the membrane move, so creating sound.

That speaker would go on to be called the ESL-57 and marked a huge step up over the moving coil designs of that time (particularly in the rendition of vocals), so much so that garnered worldwide popularity and significance, remaining in production for nearly 30 years and spawning several brand-defining ‘ESL’ electrostatic siblings, the latest of which can still be seen on shop (and show) floors – and many ‘Best Of’ hi-fi lists like this one – today.

KEF K1 Slimline (1961)

After five years working for Gilbert Briggs at Wharfedale (before which he was a BBC trained engineer), Raymond Cooke decided to start his own operations under the KEF (Kent Engineering and Foundry) name. He wanted to move away from the conventional drive unit materials that Wharfedale was using at the time (paper) to experiment with the various plastics that were just becoming available.

The founder also had another desire that went against the grain back then: to achieve outstanding sound quality from a slim, living room-friendly enclosure.

While KEF launched the ‘conventionally’ sized, three-way K1 monitors in ready-built and also kit form (a popular concept in the Sixties), with their 35cm-deep, braced and heavily damped enclosures standing tall at just over a metre high, it also launched slimmer versions alongside them, with cabinets just 12cm deep.

They featured the same innovative drivers with synthetic material cones – 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.

B&W P1 (1966)

In the mid-60s, John Bowers started hand-assembling speaker systems in the back of the radio and TV shop he ran with Roy Wilkins in Worthing (the two had met serving in the Royal Corps of Signals during World War II.

When only a year later a Miss Knight, a wealthy Worthing resident and former opera singer who had been impressed with Bowers’ speaker advice, left him £10,000 in her will (nearly a quarter of a million in today’s money), he was able to instil his skills into a business he called B&W Electronics Ltd – and the P1 were released.

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 highly successful, highly acclaimed P1 allowed Bowers to purchase a Radiometer Oscillator and Pen Recorder, meaning that every subsequent speaker from the P2 that soon followed could have a calibration certificate. Just as importantly, it put Bowers & Wilkins on audio reviewers’ maps as a British brand to follow.

Spendor BC1 (late ’60s)

Spendor was founded by BBC engineer Spencer and his wife Dorothy (hence its name) Hughes and introduced itself to the world with the BC1, a brainchild of Spencer and co-designer Dudley Harwood (later of Harbeth fame), both of whom had designed drivers as part of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s R&D team.

Bextrene was the material of choice for the speaker diaphragms in Spendor’s first pair of speakers (hence the ‘BC’ (Bextrene cone) name), having featured in the BBC’s LS5/5 studio monitors for which Hughes had been the laboratory technician. In fact, the three-way speakers utilised the only commercial 80-inch Bextrene mid-bass driver at that time, paired with a Celestion HF 1300 tweeter (ranging between 3kHz and 13kHz) and a Coles 4001 G supertweeter (above 13kHz). 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 BC1 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!

Wilson Audio WAMM (1982)

Wilson Audio Founder Dave Wilson had a pretty ambitious dream to design speakers that could be configured to the room they sat in. After much experimentation, he was adamant that there was a direct correlation between the acoustic centre of the driver and knowing where and when the sound from each of the drivers arrived at his listening position. Align the drivers correctly to the listening position and the result is far more integrated and thus lifelike sound. The first (of many) Wilson Audio speakers to address that was the WAMM (Wilson Audio Modular Monitor).

Each channel comprised two towers: one sub-bass module with woofers operating below 55Hz, and one with twin mid-bass drivers and an electrostatic supertweeter flanked by twin midrange/tweeter modules. The drivers were precisely placed to reduce timing differenced between them to microsends. Central to the design was the electronic crossover and equalizer.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the WAMM was the most expensive speaker you could buy at that time at $28,000. The model 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.

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 only 30cm tall and 18cm wide – barely larger than a shoebox) that could handle the high volumes and dynamics of larger speakers. And boy, was that concept delivered.

Acoustic Energy lined its cabinet with a concrete/plaster compound to eliminate as much resonance as possible. It developed a new mid/bass driver made of metal (rare at that time), featuring a 10cm cone of spun aluminium which was thicker at the centre than the edges and anodised to create a ‘ceramic sandwich’. And it also used an oversized magnet assembly that allowed the AE1 to accept 200W of power.

Indeed, while on the smaller side for speakers of their time, the premium bookshelf designs certainly could let rip, capable of delivering impressive punch and dynamic reach. Their huge soundstage, accuracy and speed of delivery were superb, too, as were their staggering levels of detail.

The AE1 was refined over several revisions (including an active pair) until 2016, when its SEAS tweeter went out of production, making it one of the longest-running speakers, as well as one of the most influential. The brand recently reimagined this classic speaker with all-new components in the Acoustic Energy AE1 40th Anniversary, retaining all of the magic of the original.

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 (Professional Monitor Company) speakers, the BB5-A (which BBC Radio would go on to choose for their new music studio at Maida Vale). They 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 recalled being introduced to IMF transmission lines by Tom Barron (now PMC’s business development manager) at the Audio Olympia show in London. “You’ve got to hear these, there’s something very special about their sound,” Barron told him. That was, Thomas said, a “lightbulb moment”.

“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.”

Thomas says the BB5 could be his favourite PMC speaker: “ that was the first speaker we produced commercially, and it set us on the road of what was to become PMC. Without that, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”

• See our longer list of 22 debut speakers from iconic speaker brands
• Quiz! Can you name the first audio product from these 12 iconic hi-fi brands?

Sometimes, you just can’t let a good thing go.

Whether it’s a great TV series that just refuses to be cancelled – see Futurama, Frasier and Scrubs – or that pop star who desperately clings to relevancy with just one more comeback tour (we’ll let you decide for yourselves whom that could be), it can be hard to step away from the limelight when you know you’ve had a good thing going.

It’s the same with hi-fi. When a brand strikes gold, it’s natural to want to keep on mining that rich vein of ore for ever. And, while there are always new products to make and new areas to explore, sometimes you just can’t help but resurrect, revive and revisit the legends that helped to make your name.

From limited-run anniversary editions to full-scale revivals of beloved classics, these are the hi-fi revivals that proved that lightning can strike at least twice.

The Technics SL-1200 series turntable

Technics’ SL-1200 turntable series is one of the most famous ever made.

Launching in 1972 and then refined in 1979 through the SL-1200MK2, the direct-drive design became a perennial favourite for professional DJs and DIY mixers thanks to its ease of use, hardy construction and faithful sonic reproduction. It also happened to look really cool, and didn’t cost an absolute arm and a leg.

So revered was the SL-1200 series that Technics’ parent company Panasonic just had to bring it back for the 21st-century listener. Technics relaunched two ‘Grand Class’ models in 2026 as part of its revived SL-1200 series, just two years after Technics itself returned as a brand, with What Hi-Fi? travelling to Las Vegas’s CES show to witness the much-anticipated rebirth of an icon.

Externally, Technics didn’t deviate much from the classic SL-1200 design for its 2016 SL-1200G reboot, opting for a three-layered construction with a gleaming brass top and heavyweight aluminium platter mounted above the direct-drive motor.

Back was the vertical pitch control, sleek metallic chassis and left-mounted on-off button, all signatures of a company harking back to its impressive hi-fi heritage.

From vinyl collectors to almost every DJ who has ever spun a record, everyone knows about Technics and its iconic SL-1200 decks.

Read our Technics SL-1200g review

JBL L100 Classic loudspeakers

The L100 loudspeakers are as integral to the image and heritage of JBL as the SL-1200 series of turntables is to Technics.

When we visited JBL’s Los Angeles headquarters in early 2026, a pair of the L100A were proudly displayed within their own themed booth as part of the US brand’s 80th anniversary celebration showcase. These are speakers of which JBL is, quite rightly, extremely proud.

When JBL revived them in the shape of the L100 Classic in 2019, the new standmounts were designed specifically to emulate their predecessor’s appearance and size, once again sporting that iconic ‘waffle’ foam grille and boxy aesthetic that had been such a staple of the originals.

Inside, JBL did make significant changes to its revived units, bringing in a 13cm midrange unit coated with a polymer for improved resonance-control, alongside a titanium-dome tweeter for crisper, cleaner highs. Titanium tweeters weren’t so much of a thing back in the 1970s.

The original L100 speakers had been born entertainers – the famous Maxell ad of the time showed a man nearly being blown away by his pair – a spirit which was fully revived with the powerful, full-scale approach of the reborn Classics.

Five stars, and plenty of envious glances, soon followed.

Read our JBL L100 Classic review

Musical Fidelity A1 amplifier

The A1 was not Musical Fidelity’s first amplifier, but it was the one that really helped the company establish its reputation.

When the A1 launched in 1985, it cost an enviably modest £189, putting it in direct competition with the Cyrus Two amplifier and, as you’ll see below, the iconic Nait 1. The A1 distinguished itself from its competitors, however, via its Class A-biased circuit, designed by the legendary engineer Tim de Paravicini, alongside its wide, distinctive casework.

At the time, not much else looked like the A1, and not much sounded like it, either. Musical Fidelity truly harnessed the power of Class A amplification with its trailblazing amp, resulting in a sound that suffered from minimal distortion and left most of its competitors struggling to keep up.

When Musical Fidelity brought the A1 back in 2023, Class A amplification was a must. Like its 1980s namesake, the newer A1 also runs very hot, but as we wrote in our review, it does a fine job in echoing the spirit of the original “by sounding wonderfully expressive and fluid in a way that eludes most modern alternatives”.

Musical Fidelity also resurrected that iconic casework for the new iteration, resulting in a modern amplifier that does its utmost to capture the look and sound of an icon. It needs care with partnering, and features are somewhat thin on the ground, but the revived A1 gives you a taste of classic hi-fi combined with the reliability of a new product.

Read our Musical Fidelity A1 review

Naim Nait 50 integrated amplifier

The original Naim NAIT (later called the Nait 1) is a legend in its own right.

Launched in 1983, the Nait was seen as something of an oddity when it landed, sporting a relatively modest power rating and marking itself out as Naim’s first-ever integrated stereo amplifier. This, then, was the first time that the British brand had combined power and preamplification into a single unit.

Naim celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023 and, to mark the occasion, gave the world the revised, limited-edition Nait 50 to pay homage to 1983’s original Nait 1. While some brands seek to reinvent or repackage a product for general release, the Nait 50 was limited to just 1973 units, each priced at a not-inconsiderable sum of £2699.

As a celebratory product designed to honour a legend, the Nait 50 shares many of the quirks of the original, and while it’s not perfect, its hugely entertaining, somewhat flavoured sound captures the deeply musical spirit of the Nait 1.

We had the pleasure of getting one of the Nait 50 amps into our test rooms a little after Naim announced its release, so if you’re interested in really digging into the nitty-gritty of the revised Nait 50, we strongly recommend giving our in-depth hands-on a read.

Read our Naim Nait 50 hands-on review

Wharfedale Linton Heritage speakers

The Linton were a big deal for Wharfedale. Making their debut in 1965, the three-way standmount speakers continued to run for several iterations throughout the 1970s, helping to establish Wharfedale’s reputation for quality sound wrapped up in an equally dependable package.

The original Lintons were 25-30cm across, depending on the specific model you picked, producing a big, open sound from their large front baffle and the sizeable drivers that could be held within the cabinet.

When you think of standmounts these days, you will probably be thinking of more compact specimens that could perhaps perch on your desktop or nestle into a bookshelf, but the Lintons were full-blooded standmounts with real presence.

The revised Heritage version continue to honour that legacy. Launched in celebration of Wharfedale’s 80th birthday, they followed the overall design language and general template of their progenitors, albeit with larger cabinets, bigger drive units and upgraded components.

The result was worthy of any 80th birthday celebration. As we wrote in our review: “We get a brilliant sense of scale and space from the Lintons. We play John Williams’s The Raiders March – the main theme from the Indiana Jones films – and get a thrilling sense of these speakers’ dynamics.”

They won’t be for everyone, but as we enthused at the time, 2020’s updated Linton are “the best of old hi-fi combined with the best of the new”. A revival done right.

Read our Wharfedale Linton Heritage review

MORE:

The end of an era: the Marantz CD6000 series is one of modern hi-fi’s greatest hits – we look back through the evolution of this budget CD player range over the past two decades

What Hi‑Fi? turns 50: read all of our 50th anniversary features

15 legendary hi-fi brands that are still going strong today

Marantz's newest CD player, the CD 70, continues the brand's long-held reputation of making entry-level disc spinners that hit the mark, with a performance brimming with insight, power and clarity, and a solid build quality that's easy to use.

But this CD 70 also marks the end of an era. With a new model name, a new design language and a hike in price, the CD 70 heralds the end of the celebrated Marantz CD6000 series, and a new beginning for what ‘entry level’ hi-fi means in 2026.

The CD 70 replaces the Award-winning Marantz CD6007 – a player that launched in 2020 and has been our entry-level recommendation ever since, for its hugely entertaining, cohesive and detailed sound, good spread of features, and superb build quality for its £349-£399 price.

The CD6007 follows in the footsteps of a long line of five-star, Award-winning CD players – it's a lineage that runs through two decades, and we've tested nearly every single model. The CD6006 (and its UK Edition), CD6005, CD6004, CD6003 – put these successive models all next to each other and you might have to squint to find the differences.

The Marantz entry-level CD player has had the same design language ever since the CD6003 launched for £300 in 2009, with a sturdy front panel showing symmetrical buttons flanking the disc tray and display in the middle, and distinctive curved sides.

This design was derived from Marantz’s more expensive hi-fi separates at the time (such as the Reference SA-10 SACD player), and not only meant a very recognisable profile across all Marantz models regardless of price, but also that that these budget Marantz CD players looked and felt far more premium than their asking price and rivals.

That same style and format carried on over the next decade across five models, with each iteration tweaking and refining the sonic formula to be that bit cleaner, more detailed, more dynamic, more open and more cohesive. The build and finish remained reassuringly solid with little changes (CD6005 has "shinier buttons", we noted in our review), with the price staying in the £300-£400 range.

The earlier models remained between £300-£350, and it wasn't until the CD6006 launched in 2016 that we noted the first "meaningful" rise in price to £400.

"A fantastic player and immense value for money. Its predecessor was already a winner, and this has topped it"

Such was Marantz's success in the CD player category in the ’80s and ’90s that its more premium "two-digits" models – the CD-63, -65 and -67 – were released in a yearly cycle. For the CD6000 series, it adopted a two-year cycle – a regularity that feels rather alien in today's hi-fi landscape.

When we spoke to legendary Marantz engineer Ken Ishiwata in August 2011 ahead of the CD6003 being replaced, he said, "We've switched to a two-year replacement cycle in stereo products such as these. However, while we might have been able to extend the CD6003 and PM6003 for another year, our competitors are trying very hard to catch up, so we have to make sure our leading position will be maintained."

Most of the times, the differences between the generations have been minor – changes to the circuitry and power supply layout, new DSP decoder, improved headphone amplifier – but every few generations, there is a greater step change, such as a new CD transport mechanism or new DAC chips.

Of all the features, it's the USB port on the CD6000 series that has seen the greatest evolution.

In the CD6003, it could play MP3 files and charge your phone, but when the CD6004 came around, it was a challenge to charge the larger and more power-hungry iPads that were becoming popular – this was “a tough nut to crack”, admitted Ishiwata during our interview. We noted it was done “properly” in the CD6005 review, and you could also play WAV files up to 24-bit/48kHz.

With the launch of the CD6007, you could play hi-res files up to 24-bit/192kHz and DSD for the first time through the USB port.

"Fresh young challenger"

But the CD6003 wasn’t the first of its family to receive acclaim. The CD6002 launched for £270 in 2007 and won back-to-back What Hi-Fi? Awards, and we noted that while previous Marantz players had always sounded pleasingly rich and detailed, this was the first to really shine when it came to dynamics and punch.

Let's go back even further to 1999, which is when the CD6000 series was first launched. We tested the updated CD6000 OSE in the September 1999 magazine to five-star success. It cost £300. The CD6002 and 6000 OSE look distinctly different from the CD6003-6007 run of models, with the disc tray and display on the left hand side and the buttons on the right.

Even the 6000 OSE looks remarkable different from the even more ’90s-retro design it replaced: the CD 67 MkII SE. In the review of the CD6000 OSE, we said this “fresh young challenger” took its design from the more expensive £3500 CD7. This recurring trend of Marantz's budget models adopting the design language of its flagship models of the era continues with the new CD 70 in 2026.

The 1999 CD6000 OSE player featured a newly developed Philips transport, four Dynamic Amplifier Modules (HDAM – a technology still used in Marantz products to this day) in the output stage, and – as it does today, 27 years on – had RCA line level, optical and coaxial outputs and a 6.3mm headphone port. We said that the 6000 OSE sounds typically Marantz: fluid and full-bodied, "eminently musical" and noted "taut rhythms that are crisply delivered" when playing Stevie Wonder or classical pieces. Although, we said in our review, the CD player needed more teeth and bite with, say, heavy metal music.

Marantz addressed this and upped the sonic game in the next release after a gap of a few years in the CD6002, and it continued to improve the sound quality in every generation since. This forgiving, smooth character is even addressed in the CD6006 from 2016, which we noted had "rather more bite and shine to the treble frequencies than we’ve been used to from 6000 series CD players in the past – which is definitely a good thing".

Sometimes the differences between the generations weren’t big enough to warrant a full system overhaul; if you had the CD6004, did you need to immediately replace it for the CD6005? Not necessarily. We said in our CD6005 review that Marantz has perhaps played it a little "safe" while also acknowledging the "greater sense of space, on top of an already-open delivery" and "lovely free-flowing character that’s fluid but not overly rich".

There's no denying that the CD6000 series carried on flying the flag for budget CD players for well over a decade, with next to no competition for the excellent, last-of-its-name CD6007 in recent years as CD’s popularity waned in light of streaming. It’s a product we would still recommend for CD fans today, especially if you see it at a discount.

"The entry-level hi-fi market isn’t what it used to be"

The new CD 70 carries that Marantz mantle, but it has evolved enough that it ends the chapter on the much-loved CD6000 series. For one, there is a marked increase in price, which has now increased considerably to £499. It’s a sign of the times as the price of quality hi-fi separates has increased across the board (components, materials and supply-chain demands all cost more, which all move the price tag northwards) that this is now considered "entry-level" in today's hi-fi market.

The design language has changed considerably, and that alone marks a clear end of the ‘classic’ CD6000 series and the dawn of the new CD 70 model. This new styling might not be for everyone, but it would be foolish of Marantz to stay stuck in the past and not move things forward.

The CD 70 is even more insightful, clearer and punchier than the CD6007, although it has a more assertive and authoritative character that we're used to hearing – a far cry from the smooth, relaxed sound we said needed more of a kick with the early CD6000 players.

It’s a good CD player even at this elevated price, but even so, we can't help but wave goodbye to the much-loved CD6000 series that was a true bastion of budget CD players.

We said in our CD6005 review: "There’s something admirable about a company that just won’t quit, even after it’s fought its way to the top. We’ve lost count of the gongs the Marantz 6000 series has scooped over the years, yet Marantz keeps tweaking."

It's a drive we hope to see carried on with this new generation of Marantz CD players.

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Read our Marantz CD 70 review

Read our exclusive interview from 2011: Ken Ishiwata talks upgrades, keeping ahead of the game and why there's life in the old CD yet

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As part of our 50th anniversary, we’ve been spending quite a lot of time in the What Hi-Fi? archives, poring over back issues of the magazine. We have been reliving good times and the bad and revisiting some of the most memorable audio innovations from the past half-century.

But let’s return, for a moment, to the present. Recently, we’ve had a bulky, impressive-looking pair of PMC M2B SE speakers in our test rooms for review. You can read all about them on our hi-fi and audio editor, Kashfia Kabir’s, most recent Substack post.

Those speakers got us thinking: of all the eye-catching models that have come through the What Hi-Fi? test rooms over the years, which are the weirdest-looking pairs of speakers we have ever laid eyes upon? As it happens, there have been a few strong contenders, many of which arrived around the dawn of the new millennium.

As the year 2000 rolled around, a unique hysteria swept the globe. Fearing the effects of the so-called ‘millennium bug’, many people refrained from booking flights while others stockpiled supplies in case of an apocalypse. Speaker manufacturers, it seems, also went slightly off-piste.

We highlight here five pairs of speakers which we think fit the bill. What do you think? What are the strangest-looking speakers you've ever laid eyes on? Let us know in the comments!

NOTE: To read the full-size text of the magazine images below, click on the arrow sign on the bottom-left corner.

Beauhorn Virtuoso Reference (2000)

Is it a wardrobe? Is it a door? Nope. Somewhat unbelievably, it's a speaker.

Designed by British manufacturer Beauhorn, the Virtuoso Reference showcased the company’s affection for the art of cabinet making – perhaps a little too blatantly for some tastes.

With a 20cm Lowther DX4 driver taking care of the speaker’s entire frequency range, and a sensitivity of 106dB/W/m, this speaker packed some unusual but hefty punches. The doorknob at its centre, we should clarify, is actually an outsize phase plug, designed to improve high-frequency dispersion for a more even and natural sound.

The driver alone cost £540 at the time of writing, and the speakers would have set you back £4946. Not an inconsiderable price even now.

In our review, we said the Beauhorn Virtuoso Reference were capable of producing “wall-shaking levels of volume”, even while connected to an amplifier with a power rating of just seven Watts per channel.

Sonically, we thought these speakers were “fantastically fast and direct”, their lack of a crossover paying dividends, “with sky-high levels of detail and wide-ranging dynamics”, when listening to classical music.

Their gifts don’t come in a small package, however, with the speakers measuring more than a metre tall and 70cm deep.

While playing pop music, as you might have guessed from their gaudy aesthetics, their performance wasn’t “quite as flawless” and they lacked a “certain degree of weight and drive”.

Still, it’s hard not to admire that, as humanity faced a new horizon, Beauhorn stuck to its guns and built these retro wooden giants.

Artifice Audio A1 (1997)*

There is always a bit of preamble before you can get your speakers sounding their best. Conventionally, we would anticipate needing to spend time nailing the positioning and a few days of running them in. Less often does spending five minutes exhaling into a blue PVC bag come to mind.

But that’s exactly what you had to do to get the inflatable Artifice Audio A1 up and running. Of course, you also needed to spend about the same amount of time balancing the pressure between the speakers.

Their materials, or lack thereof, meant that these speakers could be released at a bargain price of just £85. For those savings, however, you would have to negotiate a particularly idiosyncratic quality of the speakers.

Namely, we said that, given a loud signal, the Artifice A1 started “jerking in time with the music like a demented weeble”. But that was part of the plan. By dissipating resonances in the air, the speaker operated under something closer to an ‘infinite baffle’ principle.

Their heavy bases also meant that, despite their grooving tendencies, they stayed put on speaker stands – but if they did fall, they could bounce away unharmed.

In our review we said, “The bouncing speaker performs especially well with high-impact dance music, which benefits from the ever-changing direction of the 15cm doped-paper drive units.”

It wasn’t all good news. We thought the Artifice A1 were “about as attractive as swimming pool armbands”, and found the movement of the drive units caused serious trouble in terms of sound-staging.

B&W Emphasis (1997)

Pushing the concept of a horn speaker close to its visual limit, the B&W Emphasis was the brainchild of Morten Villiers Warren, a furniture designer who approached the company to see if his design fantasy could be made into a functioning reality.

The Emphasis used the same metal dome tweeter as B&W’s Silver Signature Series, mounted on a metal tube growing out of the body next to the main driver, which was a 16.5cm gold Kevlar unit. The more astute hi-fi heads among you will recognise that it was the main driver from B&W’s 600 Series of the time.

Behind the main driver, the horn technology came into play, using the folded fibreglass body as a quarter-wave loading device. In practice, this meant that the body used the rear-firing energy from the mid/bass driver and tuned it for low frequency extension.

But, as Christopher Nolan’s version of J. Robert Oppenheimer once said (repeatedly), “Theory will take you only so far.”

At a price of £6500 in 1997 – an eye-watering £13,200 in today’s money – it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect these speakers to deliver truly top-tier sound. Despite a “good degree of treble clarity”, however, we thought that the Emphasis’s “bass extension [was] hardly reasonable” for the price.

We also found that the speakers “lacked some of the dynamic appeal” that other speakers could deliver, struggling to keep pace with hacking rock and roll test tracks.

Nonetheless, the speakers received a solid overall rating of four stars.

CarfraeHorn (1999)

A seriously premium offering, the CarfraeHorn loudspeakers cost £12,000 in 1999, which would equate to £23,600 today.

Standing at 2.2m tall, these door-sized horn speakers based their design around a tractrix contour – a mathematically derived shape that gives sound waves a clear path through the horn.

The horn itself was made from curved sections of birch ply, while everything else was built from solid maple, a material chosen for its sonic character and good looks.

As the price tag foretells, no expense was spared in the design of the CarfraeHorn. The speakers’ Lowther DX3 drive units, which cost £600 each, were mounted directly into 4cm thick tubes of solid hardwood.

Thankfully, all those premium materials resulted in a listening experience that we described as a “real treat”.

In our March 1999 review, we said that “the detail these speakers produce is breathtaking”. With “a wonderfully evocative soundstage” and “tremendous presence”, the only real issue we could see with the CarfraeHorn loudspeakers was their unwieldy proportions.

KEF KHT 2005 (2001)

Picking up What Hi-Fi? in the early 2000s, you would have been hard pressed to find a magazine that didn’t include several surround speaker systems. As DVD continued to take the world by storm, many of our readers were on the hunt for their first home cinema sound system.

But, as we noted in this June 2001 review of the KEF KHT2005, not everybody wanted to pack their living room with audio hardware. Indeed, many who did may have had partners, or flatmates, who didn’t… some things never change.

As such, we thought this KEF system was one of “the most attractive” subwoofer/satellite combinations we had ever come across, replacing as it did dull rectangular boxes with something curvier and different. Then, as now, a balance between looks and sound was crucial to earn the five-star review that these speakers gained.

So how much tech did £800 get you at the start of the century?

In this case, five egg-like, cast aluminium satellites each used a 10cm KEF Uni-Q driver and featured rotatable, wall-mountable stands, while the 150W subwoofer employed a single, downward-firing 20cm bass driver, and included a healthy variety of connections. The subwoofer even featured a phase-invert control, for easier positioning within a room.

Sonically, we found that the KEF KHT2005 delivered a “quite sensational performance for a package of its type”. At the time, many such speaker systems lacked in midrange performance, whereas the KEFs shone in this regard, making vocal nuances and inflections all the more audible.

They performed equally well with movies and music, and we found these speakers capable of a “meaty sense of cinematic scale”. Closing emphatically, our review said: “It's superb, we can’t really put it more clearly than that.”

*The Artifice Audio A1 was featured in the April 1997 issue of What Hi-Fi? as an April Fools Day prank.

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Just like What Hi-Fi?, the worlds of TV and home cinema have managed to cram in a huge amount over the past 50 years.

TV technology and picture quality have changed dramatically: we have moved from small colour CRT (cathode-ray tube) sets, to huge high-tech flatscreens capable of showing millions of pixels and amazing 4K images.

On the home cinema side, we’ve seen format wars, and a move from stereo to surround sound with newfound levels of immersion; while the age of streaming has introduced a dizzying amount of content for us all to experience.

As part of our own 50th Anniversary celebrations, we reached out to some of the industry’s veterans for their perspectives on how the TV and home cinema markets have changed over the past five decades. Has it all been positive and plain sailing, or have there been challenges along the way?

This is what they had to say.

TV’s transformation

You can’t get away from the fact that the good ol’ TV has changed dramatically since 1976. It’s something that isn’t lost on John Archer, a hugely experienced freelance TV reviewer with more than 30 years of box-watching and box-moving under his belt…

“Everything about them has changed radically over the past 50 years, from their basic shape and size to the types of technology making their pictures, the resolutions and vividness of the pictures they show, the immersiveness of the sound accompanying their pictures, and their profound shift from being totally passive entertainment devices to becoming the smartest product in the room.

Not that this rate of TV change was particularly obvious in 1976. We were in the midst of a Cathode Ray Tube TV run then, that stretched all the way from the 1930s through to the early 2000s - a length of reign that is hard to imagine in today’s ever-changing TV market.

As someone who found himself, early on in his TV reviewing career, having to get a massive Sony Trinitron CRT TV weighing 90kg up two flights of stairs to a flat that felt smaller than the TV, the shift to much slimmer LCD TVs in the late 1990s has to stand out as one of the TV world’s most welcome watershed moments - even though the picture quality of those early ‘flat’ TVs actually left a lot to be desired compared with the best CRTs they superseded.

These early flat TV performance-concerns meant that, even though reviewing TVs had become much less wearing on my back, it wasn’t until plasma screens started to hit their stride in the early 2000s that the flat TV generation really came of age. Using self-emissive pixels enabled these TVs to deliver the sort of contrast, at last, that home cinema fans had craved since CRT left the scene.

The significance of plasma screens grew significantly - literally - as brands found ways of making them at screen sizes that would have been unthinkable in CRT’s day.

I had enjoyed hanging out with rear-projection TVs for a while as brands looked for ways to turn living rooms into home cinemas, but big-screen plasma TVs were just so much more generally manageable than any rear-projection option. Though, having said that, it did take four men and a crane to get a 103-inch Panasonic plasma TV into my test room back in the day…

Ironically, one of the biggest reasons for plasma’s ultimate demise came from the final TV innovation that stands out to me as genuinely revolutionary: High Dynamic Range.

Plasma TVs just couldn’t deliver the sort of brightness and colour intensity the colossally expanded light ranges and colour gamuts associated with HDR without using huge amounts of power or suffering from the dreaded screen burn effect.

OLED TVs came along to pick up the self-emissive TV baton - though it has actually really been only over the past four or five years that OLED TVs have really got to grips with what HDR can truly bring to the picture quality table.

HDR hasn’t been without its problems. It’s still challenging for budget TVs to deliver HDR effectively, for instance, and content creators have been frustratingly slow to truly embrace it. But once you have experienced HDR delivered well, going back to SDR feels like going back to the dark ages.”

Arcam co-founder John Dawson agrees and also notes that changes to TV technology have been mirrored in improvements to the methods and techniques actually employed to help production: “The picture quality of TV has improved beyond the wildest dreams of the 1976 consumer.

Back then, colour TV broadcasting in the UK was less than 10 years old. We only had the cathode ray tube in diagonal sizes of up to about 26 inches, using the shadow mask and, later, Sony's Trinitron technology, to generate a colour image in our living rooms.

Professional archiving was possible only on film or on videotape; the home versions of the latter (VCRs) had picture noise and very poor resolution, about 200 lines compared with the theoretical 576 active lines of standard broadcast TV.

Since then, the advances in TV cameras in resolution, geometry, colour depth and accuracy have been profound, largely driven by the revolution in computing and microelectronics fabrication. This has been mirrored in display performance (think 4K, 10-bit flat panels of all sizes), delivery (over the air, satellite and streaming video) and storage options (DVD, Blu-ray, hard drives etc).”

Dawson also makes the point that there hasn’t been a huge increase in cost for the consumer: “When colour TVs were first sold in the UK in 1968, the average price of a 20 inch set was about £300.

That would also have bought you more than half of an Austin/Morris Mini! Prices remained comparable in 1976, but with larger tube sizes and improved reliability. Interestingly, most sets were rented rather than purchased outright. Miraculously, one can still buy a reasonable flatscreen TV today for the same amount of money!”

Bringing the cinema home

Obviously, picture is only one half of the TV/AV equation. Where does sound fit in? And how has the journey brought us to the immersive formats we have now?

Roger Batchelor is a freelance consultant who has worked with Denon for the best part of 35 years.

“1976 was early days for colour TV in the UK, and for high-quality audio from TV for most people. It always fascinated me, though, that Saul Marantz included a “TV” input on his original Audio Consolette pre-amplifier in 1952!

During the 1980’s, I was branch manager for a UK Hi-Fi/TV retailer. In those days our TV showroom was at the front of the store with a separate Hi-Fi demo room at the rear. Not until the BBC “NICAM” stereo TV sound test broadcasts in the mid-’80s did we consider putting a TV and VCR in the Hi-Fi demo room.

By the early 1990s, AV amplifiers were gaining ground in the UK, and this was the first opportunity for people to experience just how good TV sound could be. These were exciting times and, by 1995, the first Laser Discs with Dolby AC-3 encoded soundtracks were released, providing AV companies with a significant uplift in sound quality for their demonstrations at shows and in retailer demo rooms.

When the DVD format arrived a couple of years later, “Home Cinema” really took off, helped by the rapid development of TVs, from rear-projection sets to plasma screens and eventually LCD and beyond. In addition, front projectors were becoming more affordable for those prepared to dedicate the space to accommodate a large screen.

Around the same time, Lucasfilm THX certification provided a boost to AV products at the high-end for both electronics and loudspeakers. THX also started to provide training courses for AV industry personnel, swiftly followed by associations such as the Home Acoustics Alliance (HAA) and the Imaging Science Foundation (ISF). Along with training from AV manufacturers and distributors, these helped considerably to drive the industry forward in terms of knowledge and expertise.

This period also saw the rapid growth in custom installation, which had a profound effect on the industry with new companies being established to specialise in this market. More training courses and seminars became available from CEDIA and the UK’s Clarity Alliance, and all these organisations continue to offer education for professionals.

On the other hand, AV amplifiers and processors were becoming too complex for customers who wanted a straightforward set-up that they could install themselves.

Manufacturers began to realise this and eventually made it much easier to install an AV amplifier by developing a concise on-screen setup guide to talk the user through each stage of installing an amplifier and multi-channel speaker system.

As TV streaming has become dominant due to its convenience there is the downside of the reduction in sound quality compared to that available from Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray discs.

For the very best sound, you can’t beat a disc with a Dolby True HD or DTS-HD Master Audio encoded soundtrack playing through an AV amplifier connected to a dedicated speaker package. Furthermore, Dolby Atmos is even more effective from a disc than it is from streaming, provided suitable speakers are installed.”

Eric Kingdon, is a technical marketing consultant for Sony and has had a hand in a number of the brand’s Award-winning AV (and hi-fi) products over the years. He thinks a combination of factors have helped get us to where we are today…

“I guess the biggest benefit is the shift to a greater cinematic experience, particularly in terms of quality and sheer size, which applies to both displays and delivery systems. Thanks to 4K, improved internet, superior compression and lossless coding systems, it’s a far cry from a simple Dolby surround add-on processor, with a matrixed mono rear sound.

In a way the industry worked together from recording to delivery, apart from the inevitable competing formats along the way. It’s also interesting how different aspects of technology fed off each other – hi-fi sound on analogue video recorders made people realise the possibilities for home theatre.

Even with optical discs, initially LP-sized, it began with analogue, then digital when more discrete channels brought the experience home. Digital technology has been responsible for the proliferation of content and devices.

The consumer has gained from systems that can integrate into almost any space, both personal and in the home.

DSP with greater power and computation has enabled virtual processing for height and additional channels simply not possible before – technology like 360 Spatial Sound Mapping has added more speakers without the need for further enclosures.

Manufacturers like Sony and stalwarts such as Dolby have all played their part. We’ve gained choice through quality streaming services and fuss-free connection thanks to the use of wireless systems. I also believe the media helped in highlighting the need to bring high-quality music and AV reproduction to a similar level of quality.

The past 50 years have been an exciting story, and we have gained so much – this whole area of entertainment drove innovation.”

The technology has improved, but it’s not perfect

As always seems to be the case with the evolution of technology, it hasn’t been a completely smooth ride. Rob Hay, Director of Marketing at AudioQuest, notes how important it has been to understand the shifts from a technical point of view, so the end user can enjoy the claimed benefits to their fullest.

“Every advance in cameras, microphones, production formats and content delivery has placed greater demands on the connections carrying the signal. From AudioQuest’s perspective, our role has remained remarkably consistent: to understand the technical requirements of each connection and do everything possible to avoid introducing distortion, corruption or disruption.

Even a seemingly simple aerial or coaxial cable deserves attention to its impedance, dielectric and termination. In the analogue era, shortcomings might have produced a slightly fuzzy picture; with digital, they are more likely to cause pixelation, dropouts or no picture at all.

HDMI promised to be the single cable that did everything, but its evolution has not always made life easier for consumers. Successive specifications, confusing “speed” claims, EDID communication problems and HDCP have all added complexity.

Gaming, meanwhile, has progressed from the simple electronic tennis of the Magnavox Odyssey to a vast range of consoles and games with their own demanding video and audio requirements; technology such as Unreal Engine now even helps to create some of our favourite films and television programmes.

Yet confusion is hardly new. From Betamax versus VHS and HD DVD versus Blu-ray to Dolby Digital, DTS and today’s Dolby Atmos systems, we have sometimes made progress feel more bewildering than exciting – and kept consumers reliant on specialist retailers and press to make sense of it all.”

As someone who has seen it change during my near two decades at What Hi-Fi?, these words from Rob ring especially true:

“The experience is unquestionably better than it was in 1976. But as an industry we should remember that innovation only really succeeds when it is reliable, understandable and practical in a family living room.”

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I arrived at What Hi-Fi? in 2008, fresh from a fast-paced time on men’s magazines and with a haircut to match, thinking that my love of music and tech would mean I could, a) have an easier job and, b) have a quieter life. Neither of these things proved true, though the legendary What Hi-Fi? listening room was an excellent place to have a rest.

Soon after my arrival, I looked at previews of a new 32-page supplement on Blu-ray vs HD-DVD that was just about to go to the printers. I then heard rumours that Toshiba was about to can HD-DVD and give the win to Sony and Blu-ray.

Toshiba may have had a problem but I had a crisis as I was digesting this information in a (mild) panic at London Fashion Week, champagne in hand, looking at new LG TVs as they were the key sponsor of the event.

Needless to say, we cut half the supplement and talked about the death of HD-DVD and added a lot more Blu-ray reviews. It’s amusing to write this at a time when PlayStation has recently announced the end of Blu-ray game discs.

Next, it was a trip to Japan with Sony to see the company's latest headphones and Bluetooth speakers, which included the launch of the Sony Rolly (pictured, below).

This was essentially an egg on wheels that could dance to music and also dance with other Sony Rolly products.

The highlight of the trip was seeing the fabled Sony Walkman room, complete with every model ever made and some of the engineering geniuses dusting the exhibits in the otherwise pristine white room. They were not involved with the development of the Sony Rolly to my knowledge...

Elsewhere in Tokyo, I bumped into Brazilian rock band CSS, who arrived in a club from a ladder located in the ceiling. I still love Japan as well as the fact that Sony can pull something wild out of the R&D lab, even to this day.

There were other notable arrivals and announcements in the office which I enjoyed during my time on the magazine.

Number one was the 2001-style space oddity that was a yellow oval internet radio from Pure called Sensia (pictured, below), which I retain was way ahead of its time in 2009 in terms of style, function and connectivity.

The Sensia had a big touchscreen display, just as the iPhone was taking off, and it felt like the future – so we stuck it on the cover. It was not the future of music (as I, possibly, wrote loudly) but you can trace the Sensia's inspiration in many more recent products from Apple to WiiM, Amazon to Ruark.

In a later review we curiously said, “Once all the promised upgrades are in place, it should function as effectively as a social networking tool as it does as a music-making device.”

In 2008, I also got a short, very corporate press release from Spotify and remember talking with legendary fellow editor Andy Clough about how this was huge – but neither of us could imagine how much it would change things.

Unsurprising, given smartphones hadn’t yet taken over the world and apps (and the App Store) were still in their infancy. The impact among artists is well known but the arrival of Spotify, and the rise of music streaming, was probably the biggest change for audio product development since the launch of CD.

The other huge change in the audio world in the late '00s was the arrival of Beats by Dre, which set a new premium price for mass-market headphones, delivered a blow to the traditional headphone market, and then quickly took it over thanks to great marketing. The brand was soon bought by Apple for a staggering $3 billion.

The boom in over-ear headphones ultimately introduced many people to the idea and excitement of hi-fi sound for the first time, and were a world apart from the free buds that came with early music players, iPods and smartphones. From that day forward, a new audience wanted home audio that sounded as good as their portable headphones.

Looking back through the issues, it’s also clear that we were seeing not only an amazing time for turntable development but the first signs of the vinyl revival, which has only gathered pace in subsequent years. The Clearaudio Concept sounded amazing and looked modern – and that convinced me to get back into vinyl.

The biggest revelation for me on my time on What Hi-Fi? (apart from free pizza on deadline) was how products could really push my digital music collection and deliver astonishing results from CD rips, even when played through giant, revealing Focal speakers.

I was lucky enough to work with the Naim team after What Hi-Fi? and still think so many audio brands owe an awful lot to the people of Naim, and specialist brands like them, such as Arcam, Dali, Grado and PMC.

Towards the end of my time on What Hi-Fi?, audio legend Mark Levison showcased some of his new audio products in London and then joined us at a Morrissey concert.

I don’t remember a great deal from the launch, but I did find a Mark Levinson CD in my jean pocket which consisted of his very own music. It was later issued as a free CD with his limited run of mini hi-fi systems.

I can’t see it on eBay but I swear it’s true. I know of only one other person that carries his own music around with him: Morrissey. Coincidence? Who knows, but I like to think both still read What Hi-Fi?.

I miss my time on What Hi-Fi? but founded an audio PR agency after leaving to stay close to all the kind of innovations I’ve mentioned, and I’m still on the lookout for the next big thing.

And I’m impressed with everyone that has worked tirelessly for decades on What Hi-Fi?, which remains the most trusted, independent voice in tech. In 2026, that’s truly something to celebrate.

Well done Team What Hi-Fi? for 50 years – here’s to the next 50!

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How well do you know your hi-fi history? To put you to the test, we’ve created this quiz to see if you can name the very first audio products from some legendary hi-fi brands, from Wharfedale to Technics to Sonus Faber.

We have focused on just 12 hi-fi brands here – otherwise we’d all be here forever – and we are looking for the exact product name of each brand’s very first commercially available hi-fi product. (If you get stuck, the answers can be found in many of the recent features on the site, as part of our What Hi-Fi? 50th anniversary celebrations this year...)

There aren’t any prizes for getting full marks beyond your own personal pride and our congratulations – but we hope you have fun along the way. Enjoy, and post your score in the comments below!

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As celebrating milestone anniversaries typically involves reflecting on the early years, it’s only natural that, as part of our 50th anniversary celebrations this year, we have backpedalled to the ’70s with the dedication of a Led Zeppelin documentary.

We have looked back at the first issue of What Hi-Fi?, picked the 50 best hi-fi and AV products since 1976, and asked hi-fi brands for their perspectives on the biggest shifts in music and hi-fi during our 50-year lifetime. But as nice, warm and fuzzy as it is basking in nostalgia, it’s arguably more exciting to peer into the unknown and take an educated guess at what could lie ahead.

It’s difficult to imagine the music and hi-fi landscapes going through as many changes in the next 50 years as they have done in the past 50, where tactile, analogue and vinyl-led listening has largely transitioned into phone-controlled, digital and networked streaming.

But with those industries currently standing at The Crossroads of Innovation, with AI and spatial audio seeming to be the most brightly lit paths, you’d be brave to bet against that. So, what will hi-fi and music playback look like in 2076? We asked a handful of the most forward-thinking figures in hi-fi to rub their crystal balls…

Highly intelligent systems

Today, with varying degrees of success, spatial audio is challenging the stereo format. Music production and playback are no longer strictly ‘channel’-based, whereby sounds are allocated to and played through specific speakers.

Now, through audio-processing techniques, sounds can be ‘placed’ anywhere in an all-encompassing ‘3D’ soundfield, replicating how the human ear hears everyday sounds.

At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) is brewing up a storm in the music industry by giving anyone the means to use AI music creation software to create full, unique songs with little effort, guidance and, in the traditional sense of music-making, talent.

Such machine-driven algorithms are also driving how we discover and play songs on streaming services, as well as playing an increasing part in how audio systems can adapt playback to their environments and listeners’ EQ preferences.

Both disruptive technologies feel very much in their infancy and will undoubtedly play a significant part in the future, as WiiM’s CEO, Dr Lifeng Zhao, discusses.

“Over the next 50 years, hi-fi will evolve from a collection of fixed components into an intelligent, adaptive acoustic system,” says Zhao. “Speakers will understand the room, the listener's position and even individual hearing characteristics, continuously optimising sound while preserving the artist's intent.

“The most exciting future is not technology that colours the music, but technology that disappears – removing the room, set-up complexity and compatibility barriers between the listener and the performance.”

Touraj Moghaddam, Vertere Acoustics’ CEO, agrees that everyday music playback will be defined by computational intelligence, even envisioning a future audio landscape that wouldn’t look out of place in a new Black Mirror episode.

“I doubt we will ‘put something on’ any more,” he says. “Music will be woven into the environment itself – ambient systems reading mood, activity, even biometrics, and shaping the sonic atmosphere accordingly. Home, car, glasses – even some unnoticeable ‘earwear’ – will simply handle it.”

While AI already curates playlists based on your listening history and voice prompts, Moghaddam believes streamed music will in future be generated in real time to suit specific moments, such as times of day.

“Choosing an album to play while cooking may feel as quaint to future listeners as tuning an analogue radio dial feels to us now,” says Moghaddam. “And I suspect streaming as we currently know it – scrolling through apps and pressing play – will disappear.

“In hindsight, it will likely look like a clunky transitional phase, much as the CD era now appears: functional, slightly soulless and ultimately superseded.”

Interestingly, however, despite envisioning a future shaped by AI and streaming, he believes that human artistry and album concepts will survive – just not as we know it today. “If anything, it will make it more precious,” he says.

“A body of work that builds and develops speaks to something different in us than a shuffled queue. An ‘album’ in 2075 might be an hour-long spatial composition you move through, or a piece that adapts slightly depending on who’s listening and when. But the underlying instinct – an artist making a considered statement – should remain, because artists will always want to make one.”

Moghaddam also predicts a dominance and progression of immersive audio beyond what Dolby Atmos and binaural audio technologies currently offer; an experience that is more personalised to the room and listener, possibly also expanding to other senses.

“Something closer to bone-conduction blended with room-filling soundfields, perhaps with haptic elements,” he foresees.

“An orchestra wouldn’t simply play for you; you’d sit inside it, instruments arranged around and behind you, or even move yourself around for a different perspective. Habitats could even have these built into their architecture.”

Sound quality secondary?

A futuristic picture? Yes, but far from an unrealistic one. Machine intelligence, spatial audio, haptic interaction… but where does that leave sound quality?

Matt Bartlett, managing director of Chord Electronics, recognises the history of the hi-fi cycle “moving from the best-quality listening to simpler systems, but at the detriment of sound reproduction, and then back again once consumers realise what they are missing,” and he doesn’t see that changing in the next 50 years.

“Clearly audio – especially wireless transmission systems – has the capability to improve dramatically,” he says. “Luckily, a large proportion of listeners still strive for different listening set-ups and look for the next best thing, and engineering will have to lead this and provide new solutions and a constant evolution of existing audio components to meet this need.

“Ultimately, the goal of any audio engineering team is to produce a product that can reproduce the original sonic performance in the most accurate way possible. So with advances in technologies, I hope that in 50 years we have the designs to do this perfectly so that the listener cannot tell the difference between the live performance or a recording, and playback.”

Like Bartlett, Paul Neville, senior director of Harman Luxury Audio’s Global Engineering team, also believes higher-quality sound, driven by environmentally sustainable product designs and energy-efficient technologies, will play a major part in the future of hi-fi as melomaniacs and audiophiles look for “time off from the ‘connected’ digital world”.

He envisions more pointed focus “on quality, both in terms of product design and user experience, which is really closing the loop and taking us back to where hi-fi began to try and replicate that live music experience.” A desire to “buy less but buy higher quality”.

A shrinking niche

Hi-fi components haven’t dominated the music-listening hardware market in decades; not since it shifted towards personal listening devices, which has, of course, culminated in the phones and headphones of today.

Karl-Heinz Fink, owner of Fink Audio-Consulting and Epos Loudspeakers, believes mainstream hi-fi is heading in only one direction. “Hi-fi will simply be a commodity, bought in much the same way people buy a toaster today,” he says. “And, much like a toaster, it will increasingly be bought online. The traditional dealer, where customers came to listen and compare before buying, will play a smaller and smaller role.

“Many traditional companies will disappear, and Chinese vendors will come to dominate the market – in the same way Japanese companies did in the 1980s. It is not only the lower cost of Chinese products, but also the technology they have, for example in streaming.

“Their domestic market is so large that they have the volumes needed to bring prices down and to justify developing new technology.”

But while Fink also predicts that an increasingly casual attitude to hi-fi will have a knock-on effect for a shrinking high-end market, he doesn’t predict the extinction of the passionate audiophile anytime soon.

“There will always be a group of enthusiasts who listen to high-end equipment and spend a lot of money on their systems,” he says. “As before, these will mostly be older people with the necessary means, which was already the case when I started almost 50 years ago.

“There will still be fans of turntables, of course, but much like mechanical watches today: we like the way they work, but nobody buys them to get the most accurate time.”

Neville and Moghaddam agree that vinyl will persist. Neville, due to an overwhelming amount of choice in a ruling digital world and a consequential wish to focus on more mindful activities, while Moghaddam doesn’t see it as being as entwined into popular culture or as socially relevant as it is today, but instead as a specialist hobby alongside “the ambient, AI-generated, fully immersive listening” that will dominate everyday life.

“I expect vinyl will sit where letterpress printing sits today: a small, devoted niche with a genuine community and its own folklore – some of it accurate, some exaggerated,” he says.

“There will still be people who insist on vinyl, much like some today insist on shooting film – partly for real technical reasons, and partly because the ritual has simply become part of how the music feels to them.”

He believes that the supply chain will survive to power this niche market, although he makes a point that it could still exist without active cutting and pressing industries due to the permanence of records themselves.

“As PVC doesn’t decompose in any meaningful timeframe, the hundreds of millions of records already out there would still be perfectly playable in 2076 and well beyond. Digital formats depend entirely on platforms, codecs, and infrastructure staying alive and compatible – vinyl just sits on a shelf, indifferent to whether anyone is maintaining it.”

Adapting to a smarter world

The consensus seems to be that an increasing need for ‘disconnected’ experiences in a dictatorial digital age could well keep the tactile hi-fi system as we know it today alive, albeit perhaps in a more niche context.

Even more likely is that the smart digital world will get only smarter, and that the audio industry will have to do what it does now – try to keep up.

Digital hi-fi will have to adapt and find new ways to pander to demands for convenience, while striving for sound quality that gets even closer to the live experience, and becoming intelligent enough to create tailored room- and listener-specific experiences. Spatial audio may even seize the 22nd century.

It’s a tall order, but an exciting prospect.

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Read more What Hi-Fi? 50th-anniversary features

2026 is quite the momentous year: not only is What Hi-Fi? celebrating its 50th birthday, but it's also 100 years since the TV was first invented by John Logie Baird in 1926.

The way TV technology (along with broadcast, film and smart features) has progressed over the past century is nothing short of astonishing: chunky CRT (cathode ray tube) TVs gave way to slimmer LCDs and then even slimmer OLEDs, while screen resolution has gone from cosy standard definition to widespread 4K to futuristic 8K.

We have seen the birth and death of plasma TV, while in 2001, What Hi-Fi? entered a new era of Sound and Vision to expand our coverage to TV/home cinema alongside hi-fi and audio. The 2000s also marked a historic time in broadcast TV as the UK switched from analogue to digital, and the introduction of Full HD resolution was a turning point in TV screen technology that paved the way for constant innovation and advancement in the 21st century.

The What Hi-Fi? review team has been at the forefront of all these technologies, and we've sifted through our magazine archives from the 2000s to today to find the very first instances of when a new TV format of the 21st century – Full HD, OLED, 3D, 4K, 8K and beyond – entered our test rooms to get the full review treatment.

They may not have been the best examples of each TV tech, but they were the very first of their kind to show off just what a new screen technology, format and resolution could offer.

NOTE: To read the full-size text of the magazine images below, click on the arrow sign on the bottom-left corner, and in some cases, further click on 'view original' at the bottom-right corner.

LCD 1080p: Sharp LC-45GD1E (2005)

In today's fast-paced world of constant cutting-edge technology, it's hard to imagine just how big a deal the advent of Full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution was.

Standard TV broadcast was a mere 720 x 576 resolution, and we were perfectly happy with that on the 25-/32-inch CRTs and widescreen LCD tellies that were popular throughout the 90s. Freeview's digital terrestrial service started in 2002 in the UK, while the first "high-definition" BBC HD and Sky HD channels launched in May 2006.

For the best part of the 2000s, most LCD and plasma TVs were 'HD-Ready'. These TVs' native resolution was 1280 x 720 (or 768), but they were able to accept 1080i/1080p videos, and would simply downscale the picture to fit the lower resolution screen.

The first flatscreen LCD TV we encountered with a native 1080p Full HD resolution was this Sharp LC-45GD1E in 2005. We said the picture looked "stunning" when fed Full HD video from a home cinema PC, and that it displayed "an extraordinary absence of noise and motion-smearing."

It was less successful when upscaling standard definition content – a contrast to how advanced upscaling tech has become when dealing with 8K TVs (see below) – and we said cheaper, smaller 42-inch plasma TVs coped better here.

The Sharp's higher resolution came at a premium – £5500 for a 45-inch LCD TV! – so we deemed it more for the "connoisseur" rather than an "everyday TV." Besides, it really needed Full HD content to look its best, and that was hard to come by at the time.

Plasma 1080p: Pioneer PDP-5000EX (2006)

In the 2000s, plasma versus LCD was about as heated as, well, OLED versus LCD is today. Fujitsu launched the first commercial plasma TV in 1997, but it was the legendary Pioneer Kuro sets that everyone still remembers fondly as the peak of plasma screen technology.

Back in 2006, Pioneer was also the first to provide us with a plasma screen that finally did native Full HD 1920 x 1080 resolution. Despite us having already experienced Full HD resolution in LCD TVs, this Pioneer PDP-5000EX was the first set to offer "full 1080p compatibility... with the appropriate input interference" to accept Blu-ray and HD-DVD picture.

Our praise was effusive: "staggering picture quality", "this is the best plasma ever made", "this is what the telly looks like in heaven" – we weren't kidding when we said Full HD resolution wowed us in a way that we never thought possible.

With over two million pixels on screen, we found the definition "extraordinary". When fed 1080p content, the picture was "bright, sharp, colourful and consistently lustrous" and it also coped well with standard-def broadcasts.

Anyone wanting this premium new tech would have to cough up £7000 (a trend for every new TV technology, as we'll see below), but it showed just how revolutionary this new Full HD resolution was to the future of TV as we know it.

OLED: Sony XEL-1 (2008)

LCD and plasma TVs were widespread at the dawn of the new millennium, but a new panel technology – one that was close in spirit to the beloved plasma – was about to change the course of TVs forever.

Like plasma, OLED panels don't need a backlight. Instead, they use self-emissive organic light-emitting diodes that generate their own (white) light, which is put through a colour filter.

The advantage is that when an OLED pixel is turned off, it is truly off and therefore pitch-black. This results in perfect blacks without any hint of backlight bleeding through the image, superior contrast, and richer, punchier colours. Not needing an extra backlight panel meant OLED screens could be much thinner than LCD TVs, too.

The downsides are that the pixels have a limited shelf life due to their organic nature, they can't go quite as bright as LCDs, and at the beginning, larger screens weren't possible to produce due to the difficult nature of manufacturing these panels.

The Sony XEL-1 was the world's first OLED TV. It launched in 2007, with a screen size of just 11 inches and a depth of just 3mm. It boasted a high contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1, while the display resolution was a paltry 960 x 540.

We covered its launch news in the May 2008 issue, which looked at the next-gen TVs entering the market. In 2009, in "the next big thing" TV feature (fifth slide in gallery above), we learned of 21- and 27-inch prototypes of the Sony OLED, while the XEL-1 got even skinnier at just 0.9mm!

Sadly, we haven't been able to find any other coverage or review of this Sony XEL-1 in our magazine archives. It would be a good few years yet before a full-size, full-production OLED TV hit our test rooms, while Sony finally entered the OLED market proper with the stunning A1 (KD-55A1) OLED TV in 2017.

3D TV: Samsung UE40C7000 (2010)

3D wasn't a new technology by any means in 2010. Cinemagoers had been experiencing it since before the television was even invented, with 1922's silent feature The Power Of Love widely considered to be the first commercially released 3D film, shown at the Ambassador Hotel Theater in Los Angeles.

Why would anyone want to watch 3D films at home, while wearing bulky glasses that needed charging? Was it headache-inducing or was it an immersive experience for films and gaming? The jury was split when we tested Samsung's UE40C7000, the first 3D TV to hit the What Hi-Fi? test rooms.

You needed a 3D disc and a Blu-ray player compatible with the format to make the picture (Samsung's own BD-C6900 3D player and a 3D Blu-ray of Monsters vs Aliens, in this case), but it did offer a genuine "depth of field" that was suitably three-dimensional.

If you didn't care about 3D at all, however, then the Samsung UE40C7000 was also a very fine TV in its own right. Across terrestrial TV, DVD and Blu-ray, this 40-inch LCD TV delivered "epic levels of detail", with a subtle colour palette that handled skin tones particularly well. Motion handling was impressively smooth, and the edge-lit LED backlighting balanced black levels, highlights and details well.

An "overall impression of unshakeable solidity" is high praise indeed for this five-star 3D TV.

Read the full review: Samsung UE40C7000

4K LCD TV: Toshiba 55ZL2 (2012)

The Toshiba 55ZL2 made headlines for being the first glasses-free 3D TV – that is, you wouldn't need to wear bulky active or passive 3D glasses to see the picture in three dimensions; the Toshiba's integrated camera and lens technology would track your eye movements and do the hard work for you!

It worked, but with caveats. The subtle depth of field was nice, it was less fatiguing on the eyes, and the picture didn't experience a drop in brightness as it did with 3D glasses. But the tech did require you to sit completely still; any fidgeting or movement would lead to a drop-off in focus, definition and 3D effect, which was less than ideal.

But who cares about 3D? Because the Toshiba 55ZL2 was also the very first 4K TV screen we tested, back when the new reality of "four times the resolution of Full HD/1080p" was still in its earliest stages.

There was no mainstream 4K content yet (and wouldn't be for a long, long time), but Toshiba's 4K picture hinted at what was to come. Fed some demo content of flowers, landscapes, and cityscapes from a hard drive, we said: "native 3840 x 2160 images look, frankly, astonishing. Detail levels are absolutely sky-high, and the most complex patterns remain steady and stable with the sort of casual efficiency that’s the mark of a properly effective device."

With Blu-ray and DVD films, the Toshiba TV's colour balance was "expertly judged", and we praised its black depth for being "excellent by the prevailing standards of LED-backlit LCD screens."

Costing £7000, the cutting-edge 55ZL2 was considerably more expensive than your standard Full HD 55-inch TV at the time, but nowhere near as expensive as the £25,000 84-inch Sony 4K and LG 4K LCD TVs that would hit the market later that same year.

For actual 4K content, we had to wait for another three years: in August 2015, BT Sport Ultra HD launched as the UK's first 4K channel, while the first few 4K Blu-ray discs hit the market in 2016.

Read the full review: Toshiba 55ZL2

Curved OLED: Samsung KE55S9C (2013)

Curved OLED TVs were a short-lived fad, not helped by the fact that you couldn't wall-mount them, viewing angles weren't great for anyone not sitting dead centre of the screen, and the early models quickly became outdated as they didn't support the upcoming 4K resolution.

But the Samsung KE55S9C is notable not for its curved screen, but because it was actually our first time seeing the OLED panel technology on a large screen beyond a mere 11 inches.

As with 3D, the test team argued about the curved screen continuously. Some found it a "distracting gimmick" as the picture distorted according to the curvature when viewing it from the side, while others (those sitting dead centre) found the curve led to greater immersion.

The frame surrounding the 55-inch screen also served as a (rather large) stand, and it was more curved than the screen itself, adding to the illusion. "That curve" was listed as both a Pro and a Con in our review.

What we all agreed on, though, was that OLED looked stunning, handling contrast far better than any LCD TV we had seen. "Dark scenes are some of the deepest and blackest we’ve seen, genuinely resembling the absence of light," we enthused, even if we would have liked subtler shading and variation in the extremes. Colours were rich and vibrant, while the picture was also crisp and clear.

Did we recommend it? Its "prohibitively expensive" £7000 price tag was three times that of our favourite 55-inch plasma at the time, and we can't imagine most people beyond early adopters took the plunge.

We didn't "really understand why we’re seeing curved OLED sets before flat ones" either, but it did point to an exciting future for OLED TVs.

Read the full review: Samsung KE55S9C

4K OLED: LG 55EG960V (2015)

We never tested the £10,000 LG 55EM970V OLED that first arrived in the UK in 2013, but in 2015 we did finally get to test a TV that combined two picture technologies we had been waiting on for years: 4K Ultra HD resolution and OLED.

And the LG 55EG960V was "everything we hoped it would be", delivering the two new technologies with "spectacular results" in a living room-friendly 55-inch screen size. The intensely pitch-dark blacks contrast brilliantly against bright whites, while the 8.3 million pixels on screen were delivered with crystal-clear and precise detail.

"The depth of colours is breathtaking. They aren’t just richer, there are simply more precise shades of them on the screen, giving a wonderfully vivid feel to the picture," we said. There were more subtleties revealed in the deep blacks than before, and while upscaling standard definition content was a little fuzzy around the edges, it was still a punchy picture.

Yes, it was also gently curved (but you could wall-mount it), it did convincing 3D, and its thin screen with floating effect looked rather "gorgeous", too. It was still more expensive than equivalent LCD sets, so we couldn't yet definitely say that OLED was better and better-value.

We can now, though, as OLED has gone from strength to strength and become more affordable in the past decade, delivering even more impressive picture quality with greater subtlety and accuracy alongside unrivalled deep blacks and punchy contrast – from the wildly popular and affordable LG C5 to our TV & AV Editor Tom Parsons' current favourite, the Sony Bravia 8 II.

Read the full review: LG 55EG960V

8K: Samsung QE85Q900R 8K QLED (2018)

Unlike the world of hi-fi, TV manufacturers are in a constant state of innovation and of pushing the boundaries of screen technology. It took ages for 4K UHD broadcasts, streams and discs to become a reality since the first time the screen tech was proposed, but it wasn't long after that 8K was being touted as "the next big thing."

Samsung got there first, with the QE85Q900R 8K QLED hitting our test rooms in 2018. The LED-backlit quantum dot screen (Samsung was still staunchly against using OLED then) had a mind-blowing 33 million pixels to 4K's eight, with this mammoth 85-inch set offering "the same pixel density (104ppi) as a 43-inch 4K model".

4K has pretty high resolution, but if you sit too close to the screen, you can start to see the individual pixels. The advantage of 8K was that you could sit as close to the screen as you want – we sat even a foot away – and still not see any pixels. With native 8K content provided by Samsung, it looked fabulous.

"Predictably, it’s all about sharpness and detail. The image is unbelievably lifelike, and draws you in to an extent that 4K simply can’t match. Naturally, it’s helped by the sheer scale of the 85-inch display – this is cinematic and then some."

The AI-based upscaling technology was almost as impressive, as it had to effectively "make up" so much of the picture on screen when watching 4K, Full HD or DVD content, which was sharp and detailed with no discernible "artefacts, shimmer or noise".

The problems? It's 85-bloody-inches massive, and black levels simply weren't deep enough, with backlight blooming issues pervading the screen.

Also, there was no actual 8K content and, eight years on, there still isn't any. 8K resolution remains an impressive technical feat, but without the practical availability of broadcasts or films (the sheer size of the file/disc needed to accommodate those 33 million pixels doesn't bear thinking), it's unlikely to overtake 4K resolution in the home in the foreseeable future.

Read the full review: Samsung QE85Q900R 8K QLED

Micro LED: Samsung 75-inch Micro LED 4K TV (2019)

While arch-rival LG was leading the way with OLED during the 2010s, Samsung was staunchly working on advancing LED-backlit LCD panel technology, such as its Quantum Dot Mini LED display.

In 2018, though, the brand veered away from LCD in spectacular fashion, with Micro LED, which made its debut at CES in Las Vegas that January.

Micro LED uses tiny, non-organic self-emitting diodes for each pixel, so it's capable of producing the perfect blacks we love from OLED, while also theoretically delivering brighter images, greater colour control, and a longer lifespan of 100,000 hours (just over 11 years of constant use).

Thanks to its modular architecture (each Micro LED screen is constructed using a number of small modules arranged in a grid pattern), these early Micro LED TVs could span huge sizes. They could be even thinner than OLED, too, and their inorganic nature meant they could be left on permanently – great for commercial purposes.

Since then, non-modular, more typical TV-style Micro LED screens have been produced by Samsung, but prices have remained staunchly sky-high – the 146-inch 4K version of Samsung's The Wall Micro LED TV will set you back an eye-watering £199,999 in the UK. Needless to say, both production and adoption of Micro LED haven't been widespread beyond B2B applications.

We did get to see a 75-inch Samsung 4K Micro LED model in 2019, and it gave us an insight into the complexity of its manufacturing process, as well as a taste of its potential picture quality.

The demo footage we saw gave us an impression of "stunningly punchy and vibrant image with truly exceptional colours. Everything looks real and life-like to an extent we've genuinely not experienced before."

"Perfect" bright whites contrast against "perfect" black backgrounds, while there is subtlety amongst the colours too, and viewing angles remain consistent no matter where we were in the room.

Micro LED TVs might well be the true successor to OLED, but even now, they're hard to get hold of at any sensible size, and they're well beyond the means of most people who aren't Premier League footballers.

Read the full hands-on review: Samsung 75-inch Micro LED 4K TV

RGB Mini LED: Hisense UR9 (2026)

With Micro LED parked, TV manufacturers have focused on advancing the backlight quality of LCD TVs, and so RGB Mini LED is the current TV technology du jour.

Unlike conventional Mini LED TVs that use a white backlight shining through a colour filter layer, RGB Mini LED uses independent red, green and blue Mini LEDs to generate colour directly. The result? Brighter pictures and more accurate colour reproduction.

Does that make RGB Mini LED an OLED-killer?

Not quite, at least not yet. Hisense led the charge here, with the Hisense UR9 (65UR9STUK) being the first RGB Mini LED we tested earlier this year, ahead of Sony's recent Bravia 9 II effort. The Hisense UR9 showcases a stable, consistent and controlled picture, with none of the flickering or shifting behaviour we find distracting on traditional backlit TVs. Subtle blooming effects are nicely controlled, too.

We praised the Hisense RBG Mini LED TV's ability to display "consistently strong" black depth, noting "impressive richness and stability to colours", while extra-bright HDR content is delivered with dazzling intensity.

It's impressive stuff for an LCD TV, but it still doesn't quite achieve the three-dimensional quality and solidity of a price-equivalent OLED screen. Deep black levels, subtle colour gradations and even the perception of bright whites against inky blacks are better reproduced on Sony's current best OLED TV.

"Despite its impressive local-dimming system," we said, "the Hisense simply cannot match the pixel-level contrast control of the Sony Bravia 8 II."

Read the full review: Hisense UR9 (65UR9STUK)

Over a decade on, and OLED still rules the roost when it comes to picture technology. Brands have also looked to advance OLED panel technology, with LG Display producing ever-brighter W-OLED panels and Samsung Display firing back with also-ever-brighter versions of its competing QD-OLED technology.

Considering how revolutionary Full HD felt in the 2000s – which was four times the resolution of standard def, which is the same jump in resolution between Full HD and 4K – it has been an astonishing rate of advancement for screen technology.

What will the next 50 years of TV look like? Considering the stunning picture quality available to us these days, it should look pretty darn spectacular.

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With age comes wisdom, so it perhaps isn't surprising that many of the oldest hi-fi brands around today are still at the top of their game.

We've delved into the archives to shine a light on some of the industry's longest-running manufacturers that continue to serve music fans worldwide to this day. These are true veterans of hi-fi – all over 70 years old – who we think deserve to be called out.

Some companies have changed hands or been resurrected from the dead, others have been comparatively untouched. But whatever their journey, all are still making great hi-fi products – and that's something worth celebrating.

Thorens (1883)

One of the oldest electronics companies in history, the legendary turntable purveyor actually started out manufacturing music boxes, clock movements and, at the turn of the 19th century, Edison-style phonographs – several decades before the era of the record player would catapult the brand to world-renowned fame.

Founded by Hermann Thorens in Sainte-Croix Vaud, Switzerland, Thorens produced its first turntable in the late 1920s and went on to become one of the most revered manufacturers of record players in the '50s and '60s.

Many notable models – the TD 124, TD 150 and TD 160, to name just a few – helped build that reputation. The Thorens TD 160HD we tested in 2008 even made our list of the very best turntables of our lifetime.

The brand filed for bankruptcy in 2000, before being revived by Swiss businessman Heinz Rohrer and later, in 2018, by former Elac Electroacoustic managing director, Gunter Kürten. Today, Thorens has a number of decks in circulation, including the TD 1600 and TD 1601, which are based on the classic TD 160 design.

• Best record players: best turntables for every budget

Ortofon (1918)

Cartridge manufacturer Ortofon – a portmanteau of the Greek words “orto”, meaning correct, and “fon”, meaning sound – began life as a very different beast.

In Denmark after the First World War, two engineers, Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen, began their experiments to synchronise sound and picture on film, which they achieved with their 'Petersen and Poulsen System' in the early 1920s.

The duo later transferred their technological know-how to help create a new cutter head for the gramophone industry – a cutter head that record manufacturing companies around the world soon adopted.

That was followed by a mono pickup (or cartridge) and pickup arm so that records cut with the superior head could be reproduced with decent enough audio quality.

Various models of mono cartridges came to the market and, in 1959, the first stereo cartridge arrived. The rest, so it goes, is history. Over 100 years since its story began, Ortofon is now among the most renowned and celebrated turntable cartridge manufacturers.

• Best cartridges: budget and premium options for your turntable

Celestion (1924)

Celestion is a big name in the guitar world thanks to its decades spent manufacturing guitar speakers, but the hi-fi industry also owes a great deal to the British brand.

Soon after it was founded in 1924 by Cyril French (who was later joined by two of his brothers), Celestion manufactured one of the world's earliest cone loudspeakers, based on the design of Eric Mackintosh.

The company became one of the pioneering speaker driver manufacturers in the decades following. It made drivers for the legendary B&W P1 and Spendor BC1 speakers in the '60s, for example, and, amid multiple acquisitions and name changes, the brand continued to make award-winning designs, such as the ribbon tweeter.

• 22 debut speakers from iconic hi-fi brands

Bang & Olufsen (1925)

When engineers Camillo Bang (the tech guy) and Svend Olufsen (the business man) made the transition from experimenting with making radios in their parents' houses to an actual electronics business in the mid 1920s, success came quickly.

The company's first commercially available product was in 1927 with the B&O Eliminator, which enabled a radio to be powered by the mains, as opposed to the huge batteries which were the norm at the time.

The 1930s saw the company outgrow the family home and move into a purpose-built factory in Struer (where B&O still operates), at which point the brand we know and love today began to show its stylish face.

In 1939 it launched the Beolit radio, kickstarting both a successful line of radios and the famous 'Beo' prefix that's still very much in use today. The company later expanded into TVs with the 17-inch Beovision Capri TV, as well as record players and speakers.

• An inside look at Bang & Olufsen as the company turns 90

Tannoy (1926)

To borrow an excerpt from our Tannoy: after 90 years, what does the future hold? piece, "Tannoy wasn’t always Tannoy. It was the Tulsemere Manufacturing Company in 1926, when broadcasting was in its infancy and the first talking film had yet to be shown.

"Radio sets needed huge batteries, which in turn needed huge chargers. Enter one Guy R Fountain, who came up with a new type of electrical rectifier, with the aim of making home-friendly chargers.

"This did rather well, and Fountain founded a company named after the two metals used in the rectifier: Tantalum and lead alloy. The Tannoy trademark first appeared in 1928 and quickly became associated with inescapable public address systems. They even made it into the British House of Commons."

Having provided PAs to the British Ministry of Defence and RAF airfields during WWII, and inventing the Dual Concentric speaker in the years following, Tannoy finally entered the place most of it subsequent efforts would reside: the home. And it has had a fair bit of success...

Roberts Radio (1932)

While many audio companies started life as a manufacturer of radios before expanding into other areas of hardware, Roberts has stuck at that trade for almost 90 years.

You could say that Leslie Bidmead's decision to sell his motorbike, to enable him and co-founder Harry Roberts to pay for the company's first factory, has paid-off. And then some.

Roberts Radio has become as synonymous with British heritage as Harrods and a cup of tea (it even has three Royal warrants to its name), and has successfully kept up with the fast-moving audio industry over the years.

The company launched the first portable DAB radio just before the millennium, a smart streaming radio in 2007, and the award-winning 'Stream' range in 2014.

• Best DAB radios: portable, Bluetooth, in-car

Wharfedale (1932)

Wharfedale has launched enough pairs of anniversary speakers in recent years to remind us that the British brand is fast approaching its centurion.

The company's first speaker was built in the cellar of the llkley home of founder Gilbert Briggs, who designed Wharfedale speakers over two decades and wrote over 20 books on high-fidelity audio.

The Bronze speaker started life purely as a drive unit (enthusiasts assembled their own cabinets) before being housed in a wooden cabinet a year later as an option for those who wanted an ‘extension’ speaker.

Wharfedale's invention of the first two-way loudspeaker in the 1940s, and the use of ceramic magnets in its speakers, have been among Wharfedale's most notable achievements. The brand went on to be defined by the monumental success of its Diamond speaker range, launched in the '80s and still enjoying success to this day.

Leak (1934)

International Audio Group (IAG), the parent company of Wharfedale, Quad and Audiolab, has recently resurrected Leak after a 40-year hiatus.

Founded by Harold Joseph Leak in 1934, Leak was a British hi-fi trailblazer during the mid-20th century.

Its Point One valve amplifier range from 1945 arrived as the first amp to deliver 0.1 per cent total harmonic distortion; its innovative Sandwich speakers heralded true-piston cone action by sandwiching polystyrene foam between outer skins of stiff aluminium foil; and its 1957 Trough-Line is still considered one of the greatest FM tuners ever made.

Electronics and speaker production ceased under the Leak name in the late '70s as then-owner Rank pulled the plug on the brand after years of struggling to compete with Japanese manufacturers – but the brand returned in 2020 with a classic pair of hi-fi separates.

Quad (1936)

Wharfedale has enjoyed a rather special, 70-odd-year relationship with one other audio brand: Quad.

In the '50s, the two brands embarked on a US and UK tour to allow audiences to experience live versus recorded music first hand, and their current position under International Audio Group (IAG) allows them to continue joint amplifier and speaker demonstrations at industry shows to this day.

Quad (which stands for Quality Unit Amplifier Domestic) has had an illustrious history of its own, of course, perhaps no more so than with its 1957 Electrostatic Loudspeaker (ESL), the very first full range electrostatic loudspeaker.

As we've noted in What Hi-Fi? reviews of the many versions that have blessed this world, such as the Quad ESL-2812, few audio designs have attracted such fanatical loyalty from their owners or such fascination from those who covet them.

Today, Quad still has two ESL models in its catalogue, alongside amplifiers and music systems which have helped the brand remain a formidable force.

Pioneer (1938)

While these days Pioneer perhaps has stronger sway in the home cinema market, the Japanese giant has plenty of two-channel pedigree.

We're talking about a brand that began in 1938 when its founder, Nozomu Matsumoto, released the A-8 dynamic speaker after years of research, and which went on to make a name for itself in car audio.

Pioneer manufactured the world's first separate stereo system, component car stereo and in-car CD player, and was a major player in the LaserVision phenomena in the '80s. What's more, Pioneer plasma TVs remain legendary.

SME (1946) 

While SME (originally The Scale Model Equipment Company) is known today for its exceptional high-end turntables, including the SME Synergy, winner of the coveted What Hi-Fi? 2019 Temptations Award, it was in operation for over a decade before it entered the record player market.

SME was formed in 1946 to manufacture scale models and parts for the model engineering trade, before turning its head to precision engineering for aircraft instruments and business machines.

It wasn't until 1959, when the company's founder, Alastair Robertson-Aikman, needed a pick-up arm for his own use, that an experimental model was built. Upon its positive reception from friends and industry folk, the company started commercially producing tonearms – a business it has only recently stopped in order to focus on its core turntable business. Its first turntable, the Model 30, came in 1991.

In 2018, SME also acquired the rights to the iconic Garrard turntable brand – another revered hi-fi veteran – from IGB Gradiente S.A, a Brazilian firm that took over the brand in the late '70s.

Sony (1946)

Everything and everyone has to start somewhere to get anywhere, and for consumer electronic conglomerate Sony that was with a small company called Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation.

It built Japan's first tape recorder, the Type-G, and in 1958 changed its name to Sony – a combination of the Latin word 'sonus', meaning sound, and 'sonny', which was seen as a desirable word to describe a young gentleman. Yes, really.

The Sony branding had already been used three years prior on its TR-55 transistor radio, the first of many transistor radios and the first Sony product to be sold overseas (in Canada).

Sony's history is, of course, full of landmarks in radio, audio and TV: its first TV, the TV8-301 8-inch portable transistor, launched Sony's TV business in 1960; the first-generation Walkman went on sale in 1979; and it was one of the leading developers of the Compact Disc and the Blu-ray Disc.

It's pretty remarkable that Sony continues to have such a presence, and success, in almost every corner of the audio market to this day, arguably now most notably by dominating the headphone and wireless earbud market.

Klipsch (1946)

It all started with one man (Paul W. Klipsch) and one idea (horn-loaded speakers). In a tiny tin shed in Hope, Arkansas in 1946, Klipsch designed, hand-built and patented the now-legendary Klipschorn, the only speaker in the world that has been in continuous production for over 70 years – and yes, they're still made in Arkansas, albeit no longer in a shed, and largely unchanged from the original design.

The first commercial production run of 12 units was built by the Baldwin Piano & Organ Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, with another built by hand in a local cabinet shop, before the first actual Klipsch factory (now the company's museum) got up and running in 1948.

Other early Klipsch horn-loaded speakers, such as the Heresy and Cornwall from the late '50s, also continue in modified form in the company's line-up today.

JBL (1946)

You may have noticed by now that 1946 was a noteworthy year in hi-fi history. JBL was yet another now-notable name to come onto the scene in 1946, named after its founder James Bullough Lansing, an audio engineer and speaker designer who, by that time, had already enjoyed success with his Altec Lansing electronics company.

JBL's first products, the D101 15-inch loudspeaker and D175 high-frequency driver, were unsurprisingly, then, mimics of Altec Lansing designs. Soon came the 375 high-frequency compression driver – the first 4-inch diaphragm driver – and recognition from Leo Fender, who chose to implement one of JBL's drivers into its guitar amplifiers.

Lansing tragically died, and in 1969 JBL was sold by vice president Bill Thomas to the Jervis Corporation (now Harman International, owned by Samsung), pushing JBL into the world of pro and consumer audio.

The JBL L-100 speakers were launched at CES Chicago back in 1970 and were a huge hit for the company, not only JBL's all-time, best-selling loudspeakers, but the best-selling system of that decade from any brand. Fortunately for the brand (and fans of it), JBL was able to honour that legacy with the JBL L100 Classic.

McIntosh (1949)

Founded in 1949 in Maryland, USA, McIntosh has been making its iconic products in Binghamton, New York since 1951. Known for consumer and professional electronics, the company's distinctive front-panel teal illumination has meant McIntosh amps are always easy to pick out of a line-up.

Famously used to power Woodstock and the Grateful Dead's 'Wall of Sound', the company also branched out into speakers and turntables, bringing its trademark styling to a new audience.

The signature power meters even made their way into in-car audio in the 1990s, supercharging the next couple of decades alongside a resurgent high-end audio and home cinema market.

The McIntosh Group, including the McIntosh brand, Sonus Faber and Sumiko, was acquired by Bose in 2024, having previously been owned by an American private equity group.

New products continue to appear, with the DS200 streaming DAC showcasing how McIntosh has moved with the times while maintaining their distinctive style and overall brand identity. Long may that continue.

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We've already looked at the impact that Apple, especially the iPod, had on the audio world over the past 50 years, ushering in portable music listening and speaker docks that eventually led to the wireless/Bluetooth speakers of today.

But when looking back at the history of hi-fi – especially as we're celebrating 50 years of What Hi-Fi? this year – it's usually the 'glory' days of hi-fi, i.e. the '70s and '80s, that we pore over, ogling vintage turntables, the first few CD players, affordable speakers and hefty stereo amplifiers.

What we don't do often enough is to look at the more recent history of the 2000s; it may feel recent, but there is so much technology peppered through the mid-00s that just doesn't exist anymore.

Case in point: iPod docks. It's easy to forget just how rife the things were after the introduction of the Apple iPod. iPod speaker docks and systems came in a variety of shapes and styles, from cheap and cheerful to premium and approaching hi-fi quality. There was something about that post-Y2K era, in the dawn of a new millennium, that allowed audio brands to experiment and be creative with their speaker dock designs.

You had simple, discreet (all Apple-white, of course) models rubbing shoulders with beefy one-box speakers that experimented with all kinds of curves and unique silhouettes, while a surprisingly tall iPod dock speaker existed alongside a valve-based system.

The iPod dock is now extinct, and the original 30-pin connector with it, but it paved the way for the modern Bluetooth/wireless speakers that we use to stream music from our smartphone every day. Here, we've paid tribute to the five iPod speaker docks that stood out to us in that short-lived but exciting era.

1. Bose SoundDock (2004)

£249
4 stars

The original Bose SoundDock was one of the very first speaker systems dedicated to the iPod. Launched in 2004, it catered to all varieties of the iPod with the 30-pin connector in a compact unit, with a credit card-sized remote letting you control playback and volume. It was a slick system. The cons against it were the slightly loose cradle fit, and no aux-in for non-iPod MP3 players.

We praised its impressive musical credentials, calling it "terrific" thanks to its solid, full-bodied sound, with clear, natural vocal delivery. It had none of the thinness blighting poorer-quality rivals; a lively, punchy rhythm, good bass and detail levels completed the set.

This being the 2000s, we did call the white-and-grey, SoundDock "ultra-stylish" and it was the "most sophisticated" iPod dock around.

That was, until...

2. Monitor Audio i-deck (2005)

£250
5 stars

Monitor Audio launched the i-deck in 2005 and swiftly nabbed five stars and a Product of the Year win at that year's What Hi-Fi? Awards. It was the first iPod speaker dock system that truly impressed us in terms of sound quality. We said "it gives you the looks, flexibility and sound quality of a good hi-fi micro system" and praised its "tremendous" sound quality that went loud with composure and offered a healthy-size soundstage.

"Tunes race along with infectious energy and plenty of enjoyment," we said as the i-deck won yet another group test. A drop by £50 in 2006 further cemented its status as a great sound-per-pound value buy, even as new models from Altec Lansing, Jamo and Apple's own iPod Hi-Fi tried to get in on the action.

The i-deck featured swappable bezels to fit the different styles of iPods around at the time, and even came with a 3.5mm mini-jack input to plug in other MP3 players. It's not the most compact system as it involves three boxes, but the beauty is that you can upgrade those speakers for a better pair too.

We also have to give props to Monitor Audio for making one of the most eye-catching designs – the 'tulip' shaped i-deck 100 from 2011 (£200, 5 stars) – which looks more sci-fi than its earlier efforts.

3. JBL OnBeat Xtreme (2012)

£400
5 stars

JBL is ubiquitous with the best Bluetooth speakers these days, so it should be no surprise that the brand had a whole range of iPod dock speakers. In fact, in November 2012, JBL was the very first brand to launch iPod docks with the new Lightning connector – the OnBeat Micro and Venue LT – when Apple ditched its long-lived 30-pin connection.

Before then, the JBL OnBeat Xtreme snagged the best iPod speaker dock Award in 2012. The OnBeat Xtreme could play music from your portable player in two ways: docking it, or be wirelessly streaming over Bluetooth. It brought non-Apple players into the fold, expanding its versatility and becoming a viable replacement for ageing hi-fi microsystems.

The 'crossed-arms' design was eye-catching, with a solid, appealing build quality for the relatively high price. It sounded great – a fun presentation, ample low-frequency heft (impressive, given the relatively small drivers), and plenty of detail in the clear highs and sweet midrange.

There’s certainly no shortage of low-frequency heft here – impressive, given the OnBeat’s relatively small drivers. Instruments get plenty of breathing space and dynamically it's plenty enjoyable. It can go loud enough to be at neighbour-baiting levels, although the midrange could harden up at this point.

The OnBeat Xtreme was so good it not only was the What Hi-Fi? team's office speaker in the old Teddington office for a good few years, but it also beat a legendary icon...

4. Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin (2007)

£400
5 stars

This is the big one. If it wasn't for the iPod, we wouldn't have the now-iconic blimp-shaped Zeppelin speaker dock. When we first reviewed it in the February 2008 issue, it didn't appear in our usual "First Tests" section at the start of the magazine – it appeared in our dedicated "Temptation" section that was reserved for pricier, "most desirable" high-end models.

That's how much of a novelty the premium, luxuriously built Zeppelin was in comparison to the other humdrum iPod docks of the day. It gave permission for other brands to aim higher – the JBL OnBeat Xtreme (above) and NAD Viso 1 both launched at £500 after the B&W.

The distinctive curved, elongated shape isn't just for style points; it helps minimise the cabinet around each driver unit, which improves dispersion. The drivers underneath were ones used by B&W loudspeakers: a 13cm Kevlar bass driver powered by a 50W digital amp is flanked on either side by 9cm midrange drivers and 25mm metal dome tweeters, each powered by 25W amps.

The resultant sound exceeded all our expectations. "You'll be amazed at the Zeppelin's pace, scale, weight, rhythmic ability and timing," we enthused in our five-star review. Its sense of attack and energy was "thrilling", with our only complaint being that it didn't image as well as rivals with widely spaced speakers.

It was also a tactile joy to use, and its combination of style, build quality and sound left us "smitten".

The Zeppelin gave birth the smaller, less expensive Zeppelin Mini a couple of years later, while you can buy a fully hi-res wireless version of the Zeppelin Pro Edition these days.

5. Fatman iTube Carbon v2.0 (2008)

£350
5 stars

If you don't remember Fatman Audio, you're not alone. The brand specialised in combining iPod docks with valve-based systems, and rather successfully, too. The year after the Zeppelin launched to rave reviews, the Fatman iTube Carbon v2.0 got put in a Group Test with the iconic speaker dock in the September 2008 issue... and won.

The iTube Carbon was far from a discreet-looking iPod dock. "Alongside the Zeppelin's sleek, Manhattan-skyscraper aesthetics it does look like a bit of a shanty town," we said, and not everyone was enamoured of a multi-box system that required separate speakers. You could buy the system sans speakers for £100 and provide your own pair, though.

Despite the inelegance, the Fatman was praised for being the best-sounding iPod speaker dock – it had an "endlessly listenable sound". The warm, eloquent valve characteristics gave songs like Steely Dan's Any Major Dude Will Tell You low-end weight and substance, while percussion and vocals were polished and bright enough. The Carbon "integrates and separates the differing elements confidently" and "excels when it comes to stereo focus and imaging" – the benefit of having separate speakers.

The first iteration of this unit was marred by build and reliability issues, even as we praised the the rich musical insight and "stunning" sound for this price; this v2.0 model addressed our concerns and smartened up the cosmetics considerably, and featured a 3.5mm socket alongside RCA stereo inputs.

Versatile, great-sounding and a unique valve-dock design – the Fatman may not be as fondly remembered as more famous iPod docks, but its spark burned bright at the height of the iPod dock's popularity.

Apple's stronghold over the audio world with the iPod and its 30-pin connector faded when it switched to the smaller Lightning connector. Adoption for the new connector was slow, as having to completely re-haul current audio products proved a pain for many brands.

The introduction of wireless AirPlay and rising popularity of Bluetooth around the same time carved a path towards today's wireless speakers that ditch the dock and feature streaming via Bluetooth, AirPlay, Google Cast and more – proving you don't have to be dependent on the whims of one (giant) tech brand.

But if it were not for the iPod, we wouldn't have such daring, creative, fun and, yes, silly designs that were affordable, compact, and made music available for all.

Below, you'll find a gallery of the variety of iPod docks and speaker systems we tested in the 2000s/2010s, straight from the pages of our What Hi-Fi? magazine archive. You can click on the arrow sign in the bottom-left corner to read the full-size text on each image.

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A few months into my new job as Managing Editor of What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision, the ink barely dry on the ‘S&V’ rebrand, an Apple press release arrived about a new portable music player, roughly the size of a pack of cards, that could hold a thousand songs.

I had joined What Hi-Fi? in 2001 from the computing and technology press, already fluent in digital and the impact the internet was having. I’d even met Steve Jobs. But in the rarefied world of hi-fi, all the iPod warranted in our November 2001 issue was 70 words in the News in Brief section, headlined “Apple’s MP3 Jukebox”.

But hey, What Hi-Fi? had been going 25 years by then – it had already seen a lot of newfangled things come and go.

A quarter of a century on from that passing mention, the iPod that changed everything is itself a museum piece – while the physical formats that downloads then streaming were supposed to kill are having the last laugh. The vinyl revival continues apace, CD sales are enjoying a resurgence, and even cassettes are back in style.

And still, What Hi-Fi? covers it all – informing a growing global readership on how to enjoy more from your music, TV and movies – however and wherever you choose to consume them.

In my ten-year tenure at What Hi-Fi?, I was Managing Editor, Editor, Editor in Chief and Brand Director. I oversaw the launch of international editions, moved our test rooms to Teddington, hosted a decade of What Hi-Fi? Awards, and sat through more format wars than I care to remember – SACD vs DVD-Audio, Blu-ray vs HD-DVD, DTS vs Dolby vs THX and more. I watched plasma televisions rise, peak with Pioneer’s extraordinary Kuro and then quietly surrender to LCD (until OLED entered stage left).

I’d seen the hi-fi industry begin to consolidate, some great names disappear, and a few genuinely visionary engineers transform the way the world enjoyed music and movies.

We were never afraid to tell people what NOT to buy, either, especially during those febrile format wars. In the short-lived era of DVD recorders, with competing ‘standards’ to choose from, we urged consumer caution – our national media campaign of ‘Don’t buy a turkey for Christmas’ cost us a lot of advertising pages from irked manufacturers (my name was mud in the C-Suite).

But first, back 25 years to a day when all these things seemed utterly insignificant. On 11th September 2001, I was at a far-flung printing plant with our Production Editor, press-passing the latest issue of What Hi-Fi?. We weren’t entirely happy with the colour balance of the magazine since the redesign, so we were onsite to work with the printers to get things spot on.

Back then, a press pass involved much sitting around in a break room – TV news on in the background – waiting for the presses to be loaded up with the next section of the magazine. You’d then go into the print room – roaring presses churning out thousands of pages a minute – to review and agree output with the technicians.

Just before heading in to pass the first magazine section, the TV cut to pictures from New York, where it seemed a plane had accidentally hit the World Trade Center. By the time we took our next break, the second plane had struck the Twin Towers, and we realised the news was much, much darker.

The rest of that afternoon was surreal. Around us, other magazine makers and print staff were moving between stunned silence and urgent phone calls – frantically checking whether anything in their forthcoming issues needed to be pulled, whether any feature or advertisement was suddenly, horribly wrong for the moment. The ordinary machinery of publishing, grinding on, because it had to.

Somehow, we completed the press pass, before spending the night in a regional hotel, drinking endless cups of tea, glued to the TV watching history unfold through our tears. Magazine making had never felt more futile.

Let’s lighten the mood with tales of when things went wrong for more innocent reasons. Such as the Moscow launch of What Hi-Fi? Russia, where one magazine executive slid off his stool mid-presentation after too much local vodka. Or the time the repro house forgot to add any of the adverts into the Buyer’s Guide section (plenty of white space to write notes in that issue).

Or the infamous cover-flap incident.

We had a big subwoofer test that month, and the cover promised – in the largest, boldest type we could fit – BIGGER BETTER BASS. What nobody thought to check was how it sat under a promotional cover flap that was running on that issue. Which is how a magazine about high-performance audio came to sit on the nation’s newsstands with BETTER ASS screaming at passing shoppers in giant capitals…

My ten years at What Hi-Fi? raced by, in a rhythm of CES launches, Bristol Hi-Fi Shows, manufacturer press trips, ‘Summer of Sport’ TV-test specials, IFAs, What Hi-Fi? Awards, bumper peak-season issues, and the growing demands for online content.

All this and many, many hours sat on a test-room sofa, evaluating products with the best team – energetically debating up to (and beyond) publication about the merits of particular products and technologies, discovering new music, perfect test tracks and more. (The ‘new’ music I introduced was most likely something recorded before I was born. Sorry not sorry.)

It was a magazine of many Andrews – four of them in the editorial team at one time – including the inimitable Andy Clough, editor extraordinaire, whose dry wit, attention to detail and peerless industry contacts powered What Hi-Fi? into the 21st Century. ‘Cloughie’ was taken far too young, as was legendary Buyer’s Guide editor, Caroline Osborn, who notched up four decades of What Hi-Fi? service. The team was hugely enriched by her diligence, kindness, and cake tins of awesome chocolate brownies.

Because brands and technologies rise and fall, but it’s people – yes, even in the age of A.I. – that make the difference. Happy 50th Birthday, What Hi-Fi?!

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The year is 1998, and Mission is on a roll. Its entry-level 700 speaker range is already a success. Rather than basking in the glory, the company rams home its advantage with a new step-up option, in the form of the elegant 77 series.

It is a four-strong range, and the smart 771 standmounter is the starter model. They cost £170 (around $255), which puts them up against tough competition such as Mordaunt Short’s MS20i and Tannoy’s mighty Mercury M2, but are good enough to hold their own.

The 771 stands just 31cm high and is barely wide enough to enclose its 13 cm mid/bass unit. This makes them the kind of speakers that could slip into even the smallest of rooms without intruding.

Mission’s driver engineering is cutting-edge for the time, particularly the use of an Aerogel cone for the mid/bass driver. Aerogel combines Kevlar and carbon fibres in an acrylic polymer to create a light, rigid and well-damped diaphragm. The promise is of greater detail, stronger dynamics and improved transparency than more traditional materials.

Rather than use a conventional dustcap at the centre, the 771’s mid/bass has a solid metal phase plug. This conical component improves the mid/bass driver’s off-axis performance and smooths the top end of its frequency response.

The 771’s tweeter is the same soft-dome unit as used in the rest of the 77 range. Rather than being mounted rigidly, as is conventional, it is isolated from any front baffle vibrations (generated by the mid/bass unit) through a clever leaf-spring arrangement.

It also helps that the drive units are positioned so close to each other. The bigger driver cuts into the tweeter’s faceplate, improving the alignment of their acoustic centres, so aiding the 771’s integration and dispersion characteristics.

Even Mission's slim proportions hide a chunky 38mm thick MDF front baffle, with rounded-off edges to reduce diffraction effects. The rest of the cabinet is made of 15mm particleboard.

In 2026, the use of real-wood veneers isn’t particularly common below the £1000 mark, so it comes as a surprise to find that they were standard on a budget offering made decades ago.

There are three finish options: graphite black, rosewood or the cherry of our sample. We even like the textured leather look of the front baffle. It all adds up to a classier-looking speaker than is normally found at this level.

Our samples are the 771e, a mild update introduced a couple of years after the original and sold for £200 (around $300). The differences between the two generations are mild and amount to a few component swaps in the crossover and an extra set of speaker terminals to allow bi-wiring.

The 771e speakers' claimed sensitivity of 87dB/W/m and nominal 8-ohm impedance are both par for the course, and won’t worry any decent price-comparable amplifier.

These Missions were budget speakers, so it makes sense to partner them with appropriately priced electronics. Something such as the Marantz PM 6007 integrated amplifier, fed by its matching CD6007 CD player or the Cambridge Audio MXN10 music streamer, would work a treat. Chuck in a Rega Planar 1 turntable and you have the makings of a very fine (and affordable) system.

A used pair of Mission 771e currently costs £60 – £110 (around $90-$165) depending on condition. For that kind of price, they are a no-brainer.

As we play Lenny Kravitz’s Are You Gonna Go My Way, it is hard not to get caught up in the energy of the music. These speakers deliver rhythms with unusual verve, capturing the music’s hard-charging nature superbly.

They are small, though, so don’t expect lots of bass. The lows they do produce are decently taut and agile. In comparison with Dali’s Oberon 1, a close modern equivalent in terms of size and price (adjusted for inflation), it is surprising just how much more solid and authoritative the little Oberons sound with basslines.

They also trump the Missions in terms of clarity, detail resolution and the rendering of dynamic contrasts. The Dali’s superiority in these respects is obvious and a clear indication of how far affordable speakers have come in the past quarter of a century.

Yet, as we go back to the Missions, it is still easy to fall under their spell. The 771e may be limited in certain aspects of performance, but there are fundamentals they get spot on. Alongside their excellent timing, we have seamless integration between the drivers, and an open and articulate midrange.

Voices are well projected and expressive, so that we really understand Michael Jackson’s anger in They Don’t Care About Us.

While the level of detail is no longer anything special, they have an appealingly cohesive way of organising the information they do resolve. Each sound and instrument fits naturally into place, and the piece of music as a whole makes sense. This applies as much to the dense electronica of Radiohead’s 15 Step as it does to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.

The 771e was the product of a company at the height of its powers. Mission’s attention to cosmetics was second to none, while the inclusion of clever technologies and engineering showed real ambition.

Modern alternatives have certainly pulled ahead in terms of clarity, authority and dynamic punch, but the Mission 771e’s blend of musical cohesion and rhythmic prowess still holds plenty of appeal, particularly at the prices these speakers now command. They are well worth a punt if you find a pair in good condition.

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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.

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Mark your calendars: we have set the date for the What Hi-Fi? Awards 2026. And this year, we will not only crown a fresh set of winners, but we’ll also be celebrating our 50th birthday!

Yes, on 12th November, the crème de la crème of hi-fi and home cinema will don their glad-rags and descend on London to celebrate not only the best products of the year, but also some of the most revered products of the last five decades.

Ahead of the big night in November, there are a few more dates that you should mark in your calendar.

Firstly, submissions for new products to be considered are now closed, having been open up until 12th August.

Next, once we have decided which products are truly the best of the best in each category, we will reveal the What Hi-Fi? Awards 2026 Best Buy winners, right here, on 13th October.

From these winners will come an overall Product of the Year in each of our categories. These winners will be revealed at the black-tie event on 12th November in London.

While the event itself is closed to the public, you can follow along on our social media feeds, where we’ll be posting updates and sharing all this year’s winners.

• Are you part of the UK hi-fi and home cinema industry? Book your seats now

If you want to get more involved in the action, we will also be running our annual Readers’ Award. This lets you vote for your favourte product of the year based on a shortlist drawn from our most popular reviews of the year.

Voting will go live on 14th September and closes a couple of weeks later on 28th September – so make sure to mark the date if you want to get involved.

On top of all that, as What Hi-Fi? is turning 50 this year, we’ll also have two extra categories – and we will need your help to decide the winners. We’ll reveal details of that closer to the ceremony – so watch this space!

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Rega's Roy Gandy wins What Hi-Fi?'s Outstanding Contribution Award for 2025

If you search online for a soundbar, you will be flooded with oodles of options. From budget bars to premium models with Dolby Atmos for immersive surround sound, there is a soundbar out there for everyone.

When done right, they will upgrade the sound from your TV’s built-in speakers to deliver a more enveloping audio experience without the need for multiple extra speakers and reams of wires.

But we were not always this spoilt for choice. The only alternative to making do with your TV’s audio was investing in a multi-speaker sound system that took up a lot more space and cost a lot more money.

It was Yamaha that changed all that with the YSP-1, a "digital sound projector" that acts as the forefather of the soundbar category we know today.

The Yamaha YSP-1 came out more than 20 years ago, and the What Hi-Fi? team reviewed it back in April 2005.

This revolutionary product crammed 40 small driver units – each backed by an individual amplifier – and two bass drivers in to one long speaker bar.

These drivers were paired with a clever processing system that beamed sound around your room, bouncing off the walls to create a convincing surround sound experience.

We loved the idea of Yamaha’s YSP-1 from the moment we heard it, and the bar received a four-star verdict for delivering a “sizeable dose of energy and drive”.

Some issues held it back from five-star greatness. For one, properly configuring the soundbar to your space wasn't easy. As we noted: “Set aside an evening and work through the expert menu, adjusting beam angles, focal lengths and levels, and the sound will be significantly better.”

That set-up process is a far cry from soundbars now, with the majority of brands offering a much easier calibration process where the system can gauge the dimensions of your room using built-in microphones or even a dedicated set-up app.

Despite its fussiness we were still ultimately enthusiastic: “The Yamaha isn’t perfect, but the concept is spot on. It’s an alternative to a sub/sat system, and it could be a signpost to the future of surround”.

And call us fortune tellers, because the YSP-1 was indeed a catalyst for more brands to produce their own takes on the all-in-one soundbar.

Yamaha also continued to build upon its inaugural product in the category. Take the Yamaha True X Surround 90A (pictured, above), which includes a main soundbar, subwoofer and two surround speakers.

We were impressed by its well-controlled subwoofer and powerful audio from the soundbar, even if the speakers felt a little disconnected from the rest of the system.

While the soundbar category has evolved, not least with premium options offering serious surround sound powered by Dolby Atmos, the YSP concept remains surprisingly unchanged. Yamaha, and the YSP-1, we salute you.

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If you told vinyl enthusiast John Smith in 1976, when the first magazine issue of What Hi-Fi? occupied coffee tables around the UK, that, in his lifetime, all of the world’s music could be accessed affordably at the touch of a screen and played without a cable in sight, he might well have asked what streets your dealer occupied.

Indeed, you would only need look at the cover of that first magazine side by side with What Hi-Fi?'s latest issue to see that the music and hi-fi landscapes have changed astronomically in the past 50 years.

Discussing those five decades’ worth of hi-fi evolution in a single 2000-word article might sound as ambitious as covering the history of Christianity in a 30-minute podcast. So, full disclosure, this isn’t that.

Instead, it’s the perspectives of some of the hi-fi industry’s longest-serving members on the biggest shifts hi-fi has experienced in their careers and lifetimes – and not just the many gains but also the losses that have occurred along the way.

Every album in your pocket

All hi-fi roads lead back to music, so it isn’t surprising that the astronomical change in how we consume it over the past five decades is frequently cited as one of the major causes behind, and indeed catalysts for, hi-fi progression.

“The last 50 years have seen 1000 songs fit into your pocket with the original iPod, and now more than 100 million available instantly,” remarks Steve Sells, technical director at Naim. “We can explore music so effortlessly these days – that certainly wasn’t the case back in the late '70s,” adds Alan O’Rourke, who founded Ruark Audio 40 years ago.

As it is difficult to imagine anything in the foreseeable future having as much omnipresent impact on life as the birth and evolution of the internet in recent decades, it is also hard to envisage something influencing the music world more significantly than streaming, although AI music creation will no doubt have a good crack in the coming years.

Eric Kingdon, who has spent over four decades at Sony, appreciates the modern coexistence of streaming and physical media, with today’s popularity of the latter somewhat a byproduct of the retro resurgence.

“Thanks to streaming and downloads, the doors have been blown open for people to experience and try new music,” he says, noting that some artists and recordings can now be remembered due to their renewed focus and attention.

“Any change which opens the ears of people to listen has to be a positive.” He points out that music fans are then going to music (vinyl) stores and interacting with and handling music.

Today’s retro revival and its promotion of interactive, tactile experiences is influencing not only music mediums (even CD is now experiencing a mini resurgence, it seems) but also product design, with touch surfaces and screens now somewhat making way for a return to ‘old school’ buttons and dials.

While the old (vinyl and analogue) fully and determinedly transitioned to the new (streaming and digital), has some back-pedalling since seen the industry now settle on a happy medium?

The social switch

That shift in music consumption media has impacted our interaction with it on a social scale. Fifty years ago, the act of listening to music was more deliberate, more limited. It was the choice between a few radio stations that didn’t necessarily cover all music genres, a weekly music television show like Top Of The Pops, and buying an album on vinyl.

Buying ‘a hi-fi’ was a financial and domestic decision akin to a sofa or telly, and an oft-planned listening experience between family and/or friends. It was listening to an album from beginning to end – an exercise that is now far from an everyday one for most, the decline of which has spawned the ‘album listening party’ community-promotional event.

It would soon start to become a more personal, insular experience as the Walkman encouraged private, portable listening, and today those kinds of encounters dominate our interaction with music. It’s not such an ‘event’; it’s everywhere, all the time, it’s short-form, and I couldn’t count on the What Hi-Fi? staff’s collective fingers how many times I’ve heard seasoned hi-fi hobbyists cite that change as “a shame”, or a phrase carrying similar sentiment.

Hi-fi has become more niche, existing on the sidelines alongside the headphone-wearing, portable speaker-owning masses of more convenient, accessible products. “Being a hi-fi enthusiast evolved into quite a lonely passion or hobby, certainly a very individual one,” says O’Rourke. “It became very insular and even nerdy.”

Flat-panel TVs arriving in the ‘90s arguably stunted hi-fi’s mass appeal further. “Music definitely lost its way a bit and became secondary for quite a while,” says O’Rourke, “with flat-panel TVs taking all the attention away from sound. People were happy to spend £6k on a 42-inch plasma TV, but spending that on a hi-fi system would seem crazy to many.”

That said, the Ruark CEO is seeing progress, arguing that the industry is now shifting to cater to that change by producing hi-fi that appeals to modern tastes and common budgets, and is now all the more sociable again for it.

“Now, it's probably more about hi-fi for the whole family, which is a bit like a radiogram being the centre of home listening again!” he says. “The market has moved towards making hi-fi more accessible and ensuring it has a wider-ranging appeal.”

We may not have come full circle – it isn’t back-to-back album listening on the sofa with mates, per se – but user- and domestic-friendly, high-appeal wireless speakers and systems are indeed encouraging social music listening again, whether that’s within the household or beyond it.

Hi-fi gains the computer

Naturally, we know more about psychoacoustics and the behaviours of materials than we did 50 years ago. There have been improvements in measurement tools and manufacturing processes, and technologies and materials that were once so costly that they were exclusive to high-end applications have become increasingly accessible, trickled down and experienced.

Software development is advancing, as is the hardware/computational power that facilitates that. Kingdon notes our deeper understanding of recording technology and technique, and the higher audio resolution we can now offer in both services and products. And, similarly, Arcam co-founder John Dawson acknowledges that “the advances in lossless digital audio across the signal chain – from studio microphone to point of delivery – have greatly improved overall sound quality”.

The technical ‘shift’ between the 1970s and today is both extensive and enormously valuable. “Five decades of steady technological progress have reshaped almost every aspect of audio design,” Sells puts it in a neat nutshell.

The direction many brains would’ve bolted towards in response to this article’s headline, however, would be the transition from analogue to digital. The ‘70s – the first full decade dedicated to stereo playback – was vinyl and turntables, reel-to-reel tapes and recorders.

Today, it’s cloud-based streaming and computer-based playback. Essentially, many of the talking points here exist within the giant technological and cultural gulf between them, created in what, contextually, was a very short timeframe. Dawson comments that “advances in the wider electronics industry, driven by the revolution in microelectronics and computers” have significantly improved product reliability and performance.

Actual, measured, objective performance… and perceived performance. Sells discusses how digital software has transformed how we perceive sound quality, too, with advances in DSP (digital signal processing) particularly allowing audio equipment to sound much bigger and deeper than its size would suggest.

“Where electronics once merely ‘matched’ speakers, ensuring compatibility in impedance and power, modern systems ‘know’ the speaker,” he explains. “DSP models the drive units’ behaviour in real time: it understands their mechanical limits, the music signal at any moment, the listening level and even the instantaneous position of the diaphragm.

“At low listening levels, its low‑frequency response can be intelligently extended beyond what the enclosure would normally allow. When that extended bass would exceed the driver’s safe limits, DSP anticipates the excursion and reshapes the signal to keep the driver within bounds, without audible distress. Crossover integration is equally precise, with minimal phase error and bit‑perfect time alignment between drive units.”

He also points out how certain technical hardware developments have literally changed how we perceive music. “Paradoxically, we have more ‘nothing’: silence,” he says. “Pre‑amplifiers, power amplifiers, and loudspeakers have been relatively low noise and low distortion for decades, but the overall noise floor of recording and playback systems has steadily fallen.

“In the 1970s, it sat around 70dB; by the 1990s, it approached 90dB, and today it has been pushed further still. Once noise falls below roughly 90dB and remains spectrally smooth, the auditory system adapts, and the noise itself can [with the right environmental factors] disappear from awareness.”

Casualty of change

Expansive music discovery is one of streaming’s priceless gifts, and few would argue that generally having access to all the music on the planet for a little more than a tenner a month isn’t a blessing. But for all of its door-opening, the convenience of streaming has closed one that Harman’s Mark Hockey, who has represented brands such as JBL for over 30 years, fears will be closed forever: the traditional art of the mixtape.

“For the best part of three decades, the mixtape cassette was the only way to share music with friends, family and a possible new loved one – to present them with a lovingly prepared compilation that could, in some cases, have an encoded message hidden within the tracklist,” he says.

He explains how choosing the order of the tracks could convey that message, and that it was a skill to fit them just right on each side. You would need to source the desired tracks from your (or others’) collections, purchase the cassette (“‘normal’ for mates, chrome to show how much you care!”), balance the tracks’ tempo and pace, and even write the inset labels and perhaps design artwork for the cover. An art indeed.

“Every mixtape was a real labour of love, often completely unique. By comparison, sending a streamed tracklist mix only takes minutes to tick a few boxes and then ‘share’. This compilation might possibly carry the same sentiment, but the art of careful planning, time and uniqueness of a real mixtape may now be lost forever.”

Not a one-way street

Of course, hi-fi is, by its very nature, a compromise in that it cannot reproduce a recorded music signal exactly and is inherently impacted by the environment it operates in, but technological progression hasn’t prevented new compromises from being introduced, as one particular repercussion of digital audio shows.

“The advent of digital was not an unambiguous improvement,” says Sells. “It introduced a new family of distortions, often less sonically forgiving, and the subjective impact of their errors was underestimated.

“Non‑harmonically related alias products, jitter and signal‑dependent noise register as distinctly unnatural; we are typically an order of magnitude more sensitive to these than to equivalent levels of harmonic distortion.”

Fortunately, Sells explains, such artefacts, while still present, are now increasingly suppressed by advancing DSP, while AI-based systems are turning the focus from recovering an audio signal (by removing noise and distortion from it) to “reinterpreting” it.

“By learning the statistical characteristics of voices and instruments,” he explains, “they can infer what may have been lost, rather than simply stripping artefacts away.”

Kingdon recognises how many people who fly the sound quality flag are cautious that DSP can alter the original intention of the recording – and sometimes with good reason. “When done properly, however, it can be a revelation,” he says.

It’s a natural segue into another point he is keen to make: the great importance that we, as an industry, don’t chase technology for technology’s sake; that every technological improvement should meaningfully upgrade “the user’s emotional and physical experience”.

The word ‘convenience’ is a huge part of modern life as we strive for easier, uncomplicated experiences, and hi-fi hasn’t been exempt from this increasing expectation.

After all, Bluetooth speakers and lossy music formats haven’t prevailed in the 21st century because they bring sonic advancements over what came before! Dawson fears that convenience is commonly prioritised over quality today, “leading most people to accept ‘good enough’ rather than strive for excellence in music reproduction”.

That shift hasn’t been helped by what Heinz Lichtenegger, CEO and founder of Pro-Ject Audio Systems, calls “solution manufacturers”, who he says aren’t interested in good sound but pump the audio market with cheap products, pushing sound-prioritising hi-fi companies to the sidelines.

“Some of the worst times for this were the ‘90s,” he says, “when we saw cheap tower products (lots of us will remember those plastic midi systems!) made with poor quality materials for super-cheap prices. I believe we have regained a lot since then, but we must always be aware of cyclical market forces that work against those of us who still care.”

Kingdon, too, warns that we should avoid “treating music like a fast food experience” because we can. “Compression is a powerful tool to allow people to enjoy large volumes of content in a variety of environments. But as always, it’s the quality of music reproduction that counts in any environment the user chooses.

“As a famous impresario from the film The Red Shoes once said, ‘The music is all that matters. Nothing but the music.’” No matter how monumental the changes in music and hi-fi, past and present, when it comes down to it, that’s the sentiment we hope will never shift.

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There are many bands with deserved reputations for making exquisitely-produced records, but if you’re looking for the final boss of sonic perfection, Steely Dan can’t be beaten.

Steely Dan were formed in 1971, but within three years the band’s only permanent members, founders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, had decided to give up playing live and become full-time studio dwellers.

From 1974’s Katy Lied onwards, the pair scoured the United States for session musicians who were capable of bringing their sophisticated compositions to life. With The Royal Scam, released half a century ago this month (yes, it shares the same big 5-0 birthday with What Hi-Fi? this year), they set themselves a lofty new standard to beat.

The Larry Carlton Show

Most Dan aficionados will tell you that Aja, which came along just a year later in 1977, is the album to choose if you want to hear the band at their absolute peak, and I’m not here to start an argument.

Aja is the record that was added to the USA’s National Recording Registry in 2010 for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", and the one that has an absolutely brilliant episode of Classic Albums dedicated to it. Both accolades are very much deserved.

Aja has Deacon Blues, it has Home At Last, it has the title track, and it has arguably Steely Dan’s most famous song, Peg (sampled by De La Soul for their song Eye Know), but what it doesn’t have is Kid Charlemagne, one of the greatest songs in the band’s extensive repertoire of great songs.

The Royal Scam’s opening track is built around Fagen’s organ and Don Grolnick’s Fender Rhodes piano, but it’s also home to some of the most impeccable guitar-playing you’ll find, well, anywhere.

Larry Carlton, who contributed to just one track on Katy Lied after the departure of original guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, had obviously impressed Becker and Fagen, because his workload goes up fourfold here.

Carlton’s multiple solos on Kid Charlemagne are a masterclass in restrained virtuosity, played purely to serve the song and not his own ego. It’s complex but not needlessly complicated, and you’ll need a suitably competent system to reproduce the wonderful tone and texture they captured in the studio.

His playing on Don’t Take Me Alive is almost equally brilliant, leading you through a song about a lone wolf with “a case of dynamite” who also may or may not be an android. And while Carlton isn’t the only incredible guitarist to appear on the album, it’s his playing that stands out the most.

Shuffle your beat

Steely Dan’s search for the crème de la crème of session musicians also led them to Bernard Purdie, a drummer whose CV includes work with Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, James Brown and Frank Sinatra, but is perhaps most well-known in musical circles for his trademark ‘Purdie Shuffle’ beat.

Purdie plays on every track on The Royal Scam bar Don't Take Me Alive and Everything You Did, so his laidback vibe is all over the record. There’s often a loose but still very precise feel to what he plays, and with a lot of prominent hi-hats it’s an album that will really test your system’s ability to reproduce treble without sounding harsh.

Purdie’s partner in groove is bassist Chuck Rainey, who also played with him on Aretha Franklin’s Young, Gifted And Black and With Everything I Feel In Me, and it’s hard to imagine a better pairing.

Just listen to this isolated rhythm section from Kid Charlemagne to hear two artists meshing absolutely seamlessly. They’re not perfectly in time, but the whole thing has so much more life as a result. A good system will be able to really communicate that wonderfully organic feel.

Listen to the intro to Haitian Divorce, and while the piano and distinctive talk-box guitar dominate it, you should also be able to hear Purdie’s delicate cymbals in the background just before Rainey’s reggae-infused bass comes in.

Play it on a good enough system and you can almost taste the Zombie cocktail “in the coco shell” that Donald Fagen sings about in the song’s second verse (although the less said about the slightly dodgy accent he occasionally affects the better).

Sing on stranger

Fagen was a reluctant lead singer, only taking on the role after failing to find a suitable alternative earlier in the band’s career, but you’d never know it – he’s not afraid to have his vocals front and centre in the mix.

Whole books have been written about the shady characters you’ll encounter in Steely Dan songs – well, one, the excellent Quantum Criminals by Alex Pappademas and Joan Lemay – and the occasional sneer in Fagen’s voice makes him the perfect narrator for their tales.

You can hear it when he sings about extraterrestrial fixers with scars “from ear to ear” on Sign In Stranger, and a “wooly man without a face” on Caves Of Altamira, while Kid Charlemagne describes an in-demand drug dealer who has to make a quick getaway (inspired by a chap called Owsley Stanley who supplied LSD to California’s chemically curious in the ‘60s).

It’s not just Fagen’s voice you’ll hear either. Michael McDonald, who is most famous for being an on/off member of the Doobie Brothers, sings backing vocals on Kid Charlemagne, and good midrange performance from your system will ensure his distinctive voice sounds its very best.

Elsewhere there’s an ensemble cast of backing vocalists, including Clydie King, Sherlie Matthews, Venetta Fields and Timothy B. Schmit, whose other credits include Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, The Rolling Stones and the Eagles. So while Fagen might not be the strongest singer on the record, there are plenty of legendary voices you’ll want your system to do justice to.

• Listen to The Royal Scam on Tidal
• Buy The Royal Scam by Steely Dan at Amazon

By royal appointment

You could pick almost any Steely Dan album to give your hi-fi a proper workout. The band's meticulously crafted songs are a particularly good test of transparency and how well your system organises its soundstage, but if you’re looking for a record that has more of the rock and less of the jazz that defined their later releases it’s hard to look beyond The Royal Scam.

While it’s easy to see why some people think of their music as being overly polished and clinical – although I've never thought the ‘yacht rock’ tag fits them – there’s more of an edge to The Royal Scam. It’s probably Steely Dan’s most energetic album, it’s definitely the darkest, and almost certainly the one that’s most fun to play air guitar along to.

Aja remains the ultimate Dan record, but the 50th anniversary of The Royal Scam presents the perfect opportunity to lose yourself in the band’s seedy world.

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It’s the pulsating heart of your hi-fi system and, as anyone who’s read this publication knows, to ignore its sonic relevance in your setup would be foolish in the extreme.

Several long-established and highly revered audio firms started out when one or two individuals shared a common goal: to release a decent stereo amplifier – something better than whatever was currently powering their system.

We have seen and tested many (though not all) of these amplifiers and their successors over the 50-year history of What Hi-Fi?, and here we’ve picked out nine of the very best, in our humble collective opinion.

These little powerhouses have left indelible marks on hi-fi history, paving the way not just for the brands that blossomed in their wake, but for the agile, transparent and joyous music systems we enjoy today.

Naim NAP 200 (1973)

Julian Vereker’s shift from building cars to designing amplifiers and loudspeakers (for London’s Capital Radio, no less) led to the founding of Naim Audio in 1973.

With both Julian and his co-founder Shirley Clarke as directors, their shop in the centre of Salisbury, England, was the birthplace in that same year of the company's first consumer product: the NAP 200 power amplifier.

Vereker originally designed the NAP 200 in 1971 and, although its descendants differ greatly – the line continues to evolve with products like the excellent NAP 100 to this day – Naim still shoots for the same performance goals of pace, rhythm and timing.

Cyrus One (1984) 

The Mission Cyrus One – back when Cyrus was a part of Mission – was a piece of kit very much aimed at audiophiles, despite its budget-friendly price tag.

It had no tone or balance controls and carried plenty of inputs for sources. Early examples had a plastic case to eliminate the distortion effects of eddy current, but later versions switched to a cast metal case – sophisticated for a budget amp.

In the What Hi-Fi? review, we concluded that the inaugural One communicated a precise soundstage, but it was also capable of handling low-level details that other amplifiers "repressed or simply rendered messy".

Combine that sound with the superb build quality, and you had an amp whose performance could rival pricier options.

• Old amplifier vs new amplifier: which is better?

Cambridge Audio P40 (1968) 

Cambridge Audio's first ever product, the P40 integrated amplifier, was also the first ever amp to use a toroidal transformer – a significant innovation at the time.

These days, it's a standard component inside high-end amps; a sure sign that what the firm tried back in 1968 worked out really rather well.

The follow up to the P40 arrived just a few years later in 1970 with the P50, a much more powerful amplifier with a unique active volume control.

However, one glance at the lines and craftsmanship on the P40 is to know that this is a stunning debut amp.

A&R A60 (1976)

Amplification & Recording Cambridge was founded back in 1976. Now known by a far snappier moniker, Arcam (see what they did there?), the company’s success was built on its first amplifier, the A60.

Pictured above is our review from August 1981, though the product was launched five years earlier.

Back in the early 1980s, this slimline integrated amp would set you back £190 and was considered the go-to middle-market amplifier, comparable to the Crimson 510/520 pre/power combination (remember that?). It proved the ideal upgrade from budget champions such as NAD’s original 3020 (which we will get to shortly).

It was a functional unit with a decent array of line-level inputs plus a capable moving-magnet phono stage – hardly a surprise considering vinyl was still the dominant media of the day.

The tone controls were subtle in their action and as such could, on occasion, prove useful when any recording or partnering kit wasn’t quite balanced.

The A60 also had a filter switch which progressively rolled off frequencies above 7.5kHz in a bid to reduce hiss from a tuner or the impact of a pop from vinyl.

NAD 3020 (1978)

A power output of 20W per channel was hardly earth-shattering but, at £85, the 3020 could drive speakers better than pretty much any of its rivals. The 3020 amplifier put NAD on the map, such was its impact.

The story goes that when NAD’s managing director, Marty Borish, hired a quiet audio engineer called Bjorn Erik Edvardsen, the pair noted a space in the market. Edvardsen got the bit between his teeth.

Initially headquartered in London, NAD’s growing team, led by Edvardsen, obsessively experimented and refined the electronic designs, seeking a eureka moment. When it finally came, NAD delivered perhaps the best-selling hi-fi amplifier in history.

The original NAD 3020 had a balance that was smooth and full-bodied, delivering a good, coherent sound which worked well with the some of the less–refined budget kit of the time.

The cult-like following generated by the 3020 was so great that NAD would have been foolish to shelve it. In 2013, some 35 years after its initial release, we gave the latest NAD D 3020 iteration a coveted five-star review and a What Hi-Fi? Award.

Burmester 777 (1977) 

As a musician, Dieter Burmester (founder of Burmester Audiosysteme) always wanted to make his sound system reproduce music as naturally and purely as possible, and it was the malfunction of his preamp that led to him fashioning the first Burmester product.

Preamps on the market couldn’t satisfy Dieter Burmester’s high demands, so he built his own from parts of medical machines – the Burmester 777.

According to the firm, the 777 – so named because it was released in the seventh month in the year 1977 – remains a core element of Burmester's products today.

In 2007, Burmester even released a 30th anniversary update in its honour, a preamp called the Burmester 077. Did we like it? You could say that. In our review, we concluded, "If you can afford it, buy it right now."

McIntosh 50W-1 (1949) 

Before you write in, the amp pictured is the 50W2 (two pieces, which form one 50W-per-channel mono amp), McIntosh's fourth amplifier, circa 1951 – think Elvis and Frank Sinatra territory.

Why are we not showing you the original 50W-1? Well, photographs of hi-fi separates from 71 years ago are quite hard to come by, it turns out.

In 1946 Frank McIntosh, a design consultant for broadcast and TV stations, hired Gordon Gow to help him design a high power, low distortion amplifier for his clients. This amplifier would be the 50W-1.

It included McIntosh’s first patented circuit, the Unity Coupled Circuit – still used in the company's current products.

Musical Fidelity Dr. Thomas Power Amplifier (1982)

Musical Fidelity chose to keep the naming of its inaugural product simple with The Preamp. It was released in 1982 and quickly racked up rave reviews.

Evidently, the designer of its shoebox-style power partner, Dr. Martin Vincent Thomas, didn't like the idea of designing 'The Power Amp', and chose to take matters into his own hands when it came to establishing a moniker for Musical Fidelity's first power amplifier. Thus, the Dr. Thomas was born.

With its black acrylic casework and name (what a name!) illuminated in red on the fascia, the 100W+ Dr. Thomas power amplifier cut a fine figure – a great visual match for the similarly-styled Preamp.

It was also surprisingly powerful. Sadly, this casework design was dropped quite quickly – but what a lovely-looking setup it must have been.

Audiolab 8000A (1983)

Audiolab's 8000A caused quite a stir in the early 1980s thanks to its "superb finish and styling" – just take a look at our review (below).

Admittedly, today it looks a lot like a grey-tinged box with lots of dials, but it offered excellent sound and features, including bass and treble controls, a stereo balance control and a separate record selector, so you could "listen to one source while taping another". And the sound was smooth with "plenty of presence and detail".

Audiolab was formed in 1983 by Philip Swift and Derek Scotland, quickly earning worldwide acclaim in that same year with the 8000A – an integrated stereo amp that was both a natural ‘step-up’ from budget models of the time and, latterly, a classic hi-fi component.

Thanks to its fine build and features, the 8000A was great value for money too.

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13 debut decks from iconic turntable brands

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Turntables ruled the roost when What Hi-Fi?'s first issue landed in October 1976. As we're celebrating our 50th anniversary this year, we've been taking some lovely nostalgic strolls down memory lane, and looking back at some of the most iconic hi-fi and home cinema products throughout our lifetime.

Of course, turntables predate us considerably, with plenty of brands – Dual, Garrard, Pioneer – starting life long before we did, while many others, such as Rega, Linn and Michell, were still in their infancy during this decade. Here, we're looking back at the very first turntables made by some of the world's most legendary hi-fi brands; first efforts that, in many cases, continue to define each brand's legacy and products even today.

Our list below looks at the first record players made by Audio-Technica, Pro-Ject, NAD, Roksan, Wilson Benesch and more. Bonus points – and please comment below – if you ever owned one of these original models.

Rega Planet (1973)

In 1973, Rega’s co-founder Roy Gandy set out to make something structurally solid. According to Rega’s historical records, sound quality was secondary at that time (gasp!).

Gandy wanted to produce a reliable turntable that he knew would last, but would also look different. “Why can a turntable not have three outrigger points spinning round, that people might buy as a piece of sculpture?” he asked.

Thankfully, better overall performance was also soon the goal. And as Gandy took his prototypes to potential manufacturers, the outcome was the Rega Planet, with its three-spoke, steel and aluminium platter and Acos Lustre tonearm.

• We take the Rega Planet for a spin in our test rooms
• A behind-the-scenes tour of Rega's factory

Linn LP12 (1973)

Still going strong 50-plus years after its inauguration, Linn’s debut turntable has some stamina – even if it has had more updates over its lifetime than Trigger’s broom.

The company’s very first product, designed by founder Ivor Tiefenbrun (who argued the source was always the most important part of any system), the LP12 is still one of our all-time favourite decks.

Interestingly, the first version came without a plinth, but soon moved to the more recognisable version (pictured). The LP12 remains arguably one of Scotland's finest hi-fi exports ever.

• We visited the company's Glasgow HQ for The Making of: Linn Sondek LP12

Michell Reference Electronic (1977)

While the 1982 GyroDec is probably the company’s signature deck, its first was the Reference Electronic. This deck was hatched from Transcriptor’s Hydraulic Reference, which famously appeared in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

In the late 1960s, Michell GyroDec founder John Michell started manufacturing parts for Transcriptor turntables, eventually making them under licence.

When the companies parted ways in 1977, Michell began its own production. And so, the Reference Electronic, which came with a coloured mirror finish or marble plinth, was born.

• Read our recent Michell Gyro SE/Cusis S review

Wilson Benesch Turntable (1989)

It’s ironic a company now making loudspeakers costing six figures was founded on a shoestring less than 30 years ago. Wilson Benesch dedicated its first year to research and development, and the outcome was the Wilson Benesch Turntable. Clearly the creativity went into the design and not the name.

The Turntable featured two world-firsts: a carbon fibre composite sub-chassis and carbon fibre tonearm, the A.C.T. One. Carbon fibre was used for its torsional stiffness and damping of structural vibration within the system. The material now goes some way to defining the brand, having been used in its designs ever since.

The Turntable's success allowed Wilson Benesch to reinvest in new product development, paving the way for the company’s first pair of loudspeakers.

• Read our Wilson Benesch The Full Circle review

Pro-Ject 1 (1991)

The Pro-Ject 1 laid the foundations for what has been a virtually unblemished record of success for the company. The 1 was essentially a modified version of the Tesla NC-500, originally made as an affordable turntable for distribution in the Eastern Bloc.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Pro-Ject founder Heinz Lichtenegger modified a batch to sell in his shop in Vienna. When these proved a success, he re-opened production at the original factory in the Czech Republic. It’s the same factory Pro-Ject turntables are made in today, and still houses the original Tesla machines.

The 1 range still lives on today, the 1 Xpression Carbon being the latest version. Because of its legacy, Pro-Ject can still supply all the 1’s original parts – so, if anyone has one...

• 12 of the best Pro-Ject turntables of all time
• Read our recent Pro-Ject Debut Evo 2 review

VPI HW-19 (1980)

With a suspended sub-chassis and an aluminium platter with lead attached underneath, the HW-19 was VPI co-founder Harry Weisfeld’s first work and marked the first chapter of the US company’s story.

Three versions followed over the next two decades, during which the design moved to an acrylic platter and acrylic-stainless steel sub-chassis. It's a far cry from the brand's impressive deck aesthetic today.

The HW-19 is no longer in production, but upgrades are still available for it.

• Read our VPI Prime Signature review

Technics SP-10 (1970)

The superb Technics SL-1000R, the company's “most premium turntable ever” (and also part of What Hi-Fi?'s reference system), is actually a reimagining of the company’s very first deck. Built in 1970, the SP-10 was the first to use a direct-drive system, and it spawned a long line of legendary turntables.

The motor rotated at the same speed as the record, therefore eliminating the need for a speed-reducing mechanism (such as a belt) and the mechanical vibrations it caused.

In short, direct drive meant lots of torque, instant start-up and excellent speed accuracy.

• The history of Technics

Clearaudio Reference (1993)

The Clearaudio name might conjure up the classy, matt-black aura of the multi-Award-winning Concept, but the German brand first entered the turntable market several years prior with the Reference.

The Reference’s chassis had a resonance-optimised shape, rather than the typical rectangular build. Made from acrylic, with brass metal parts (later stainless steel), distinctly placed feet, heavy arm pillars and resonance control weights, the Reference considered materials and geometry at length.

And a year later, the more advanced Clearaudio Master Reference brought a new power supply and tonearm, among other developments.

• Inside the Clearaudio factory: building £145,000 turntables and assembling cartridges by hand

NAD 5120 (1983)

NAD’s turntable debut could possibly date back to a 1981 model, but this mystery proved beyond our detective skills – so the 5120 belt-drive turntable goes down as the company's first.

Instead of isolating the turntable from external vibrations by placing the rigid unit on rubber feet, NAD instead fixed the platter and tonearm on a separate sub-chassis floating on springs. Unusually, the 5120 originally came with a flat tonearm – though this was soon changed to a conventional design.

The NAD 5120 was notable for its interchangeable tonearm assembly, allowing use of more than one cartridge or arm, and its de-coupled, spring-suspended counterweight which absorbed resonance by vibrating at the same frequency.

“Despite its ugly ducking looks, this inexpensive deck gives a performance that far exceeds its price,” read the What Hi-Fi? review.

Pioneer PLA-1 (1955)

Pioneer is renowned for its DJ turntables, but the company's first deck appeared several years before the club disc-jockey was a thing.

Back then it was described as an ‘induction rim-drive’ (i.e. an idler-wheel drive) turntable, with a rubber wheel connecting the motor shaft to the edge of the turntable platter. This drive method was later replaced by the popular belt and direct drives.

The PLA-1 offered three speeds, weighed 13kg and was priced ¥29,900 (about £190).

Garrard 301 (1954)

From 18th-century jewellers to manufacturers of military rangefinders in WW1 and, eventually, turntable manufacturer, Swindon-based Garrard Engineering & Manufacturing Company has some story.

Its first deck, the Garrard 301 Transcription Turntable, came in oil- and grease-bearing versions and was used by the BBC’s radio stations (pictured). The equally notable 401 followed in 1965, introducing a redesigned exterior, more powerful motor and different braking speed control and bearing.

In 1979, Garrard was bought by Brazilian firm Gradienete and production moved to the other side of the world. Today, British company SME owns the Garrard brand, and is looking to develop the brand further in the near future.

Roksan Xerxes (1985)

Despite being named after a Persian king, the Xerxes wasn’t the company’s most oddly-named product of the 1980s – that award goes to its 'Hotcakes' speakers.

The Xerxes was notable for a number of technical innovations. Its motor rotated on a spindle to even out speed irregularities, and it had a clever suspension system for the platter/sub-platter, using rubber blobs instead of springs. It also made its lightweight platter heavier on the outside, to maximise inertia.

Roksan entered a turntable market dominated by the Michell GyroDec and Linn LP12, but we boldly predicted it would give the latter a run for its money.

• Read our Roksan Xerxes 20 Plus review

Audio-Technica Sound Burger (1983)

It might surprise you to know that Audio-Technica's very first turntable was the very unconventional Sound Burger. Released in 1983 – just as compact discs and CD players were taking off – this battery-powered, compact "stereo disc record player system" was unlike any other deck we had seen. The slimline design had a 9cm platter, could play singles and albums, had a built-in phono preamp, weighed just 1.2kg, and came with a pair of foldable wired headphones.

We noted in What Hi-Fi?'s June 1983 issue (second slide, above) that the original Sound Burger looked like a toy at first, but it was "full of surprises" and the reviewer quickly warmed to its quirky but well-made charms. Despite a rich, "congested" midrange, and somewhat one-note bass, the sound was "exciting and clear" and could "give some conventional turntables a run for their money" – especially considering its great-value price of just £89.

While never reaching mainstream success, the Sound Burger was resurrected for Audio-Technica's 60th anniversary, this time with Bluetooth streaming powers. We found the styling and build quality to be well thought-out when we reviewed the most recent model, and its mid-forward sound has a lively, appealing sense of flow that is simply fun to listen to.

• Read our Audio-Technica Sound Burger review

Oracle AC (1979)

Oracle’s first turntable was simply called ‘Oracle AC’, but is often considered part of the long-spanning Delphi line launched the following year. There were eventually six variants, with the MkV in 1995 seeing bigger developments in its manufacturing.

This first belt-drive turntable was competing with the Linn LP12. At $800, they cost roughly the same, but Oracle didn’t use a two-piece platter. Instead the belt ran on a rim located underneath the platter, making it fiddly to change speed manually.

The Oracle's sub-chassis was suspended by a three-point mount on stretched springs and, to help eliminate horizontal movement of the suspended platter, its centre of gravity was moved to the same height as the suspension fixings. It also featured a screw-down clamp to pin the record firmly to the mat.

Dual 1009 (1964)

Considering Dual's long history with record players, it's surprisingly tricky to pin down exactly what Dual's first complete turntable was. Brothers Christian and Joseph Steidinger began the company in 1907 making precision parts for gramophones and watchmakers. But it wasn't until the "Dual-Motor" was created in 1927 – a combined spring-loaded clock mechanism and electrical motor – and became so successful that the company adopted the Dual name in 1935.

An early model most certainly would have been a portable gramophone, and we're told two complete 'turntable systems' called W1 and W3 both appeared in 1934. It's hard to track down more information about them. Much of the development of Dual products in the early ’30s was driven by two engineers, Emil Knecht and Herman Papst – they would go on to design the first European direct-drive turntable, the Dual CS 701, in 1973 – and by the '50s, Dual became the biggest manufacturer of turntables in Europe.

But the first modern 'hi-fi' turntable from Dual? That would be the legendary Dual 1009 from 1964 – considered to be Dual's first "audiophile" record player. This four-speed deck was fully automatic, and had a sterling reputation for its robust build quality and reliability of the automatic mechanism.

• Read our Dual CS 518 review

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How does a vinyl record make a sound?

What Hi-Fi? Vinyl Week 2026 is in full flow, and we are celebrating all things related to the format as we build up to Record Store Day 2026 on Saturday, 18th of April.

We are rolling out a mix of reviews, features and buying advice, whether you’re a seasoned vinyl-spinner or taking your first steps as a budding collector.

As part of the celebrations, we’ve reached out to some of the biggest players in the turntable space to ask their opinions on turntable design and where they think the biggest scope for improvement is. Here’s what they had to say…

Never heard of the Rega Planet turntable? We wouldn’t blame you. It was the company’s first product and was introduced in April 1973. Rega made it for only four years before phasing it out for the more conventional-looking and hugely talented – and now iconic – Planar 3 model.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

The inaugural Planet was originally supplied without a tonearm, which wasn’t unusual back then. Most buyers went for something such as the highly regarded SME 3009 arm with good results. However, Roy Gandy, Rega’s co-founder, wanted to sell complete units, and the search for a suitable tonearm for his new deck led to a company called Cosmocord.

Cosmocord had plenty of stock of the Acos Lustre tonearm, and a deal was struck whereby it would supply the tonearm to Rega and take care of the distribution of the complete deck. The record player became the Acos Rega Planet while the agreement lasted (around a year), and then the Acos branding was dropped once Rega took charge of its own distribution.

Take a close look at the sample provided to us by Rega, and it is remarkable just how much of the Planet’s design is still reflected in the company’s current turntables.

To our eyes, the Planet ooks for all the world like an early Planar 3 with a fancy trio of pods to support the record. And, to a large extent, that’s exactly what it is.

That distinctive platter-less design was inspired by the premium Transcriptors decks of the day, with Gandy deciding that his first product needed something distinctive to stand out in what was already a crowded turntable market.

Early versions of the outriggers used chrome-plated brass, which was later changed to silver anodised aluminium with an inlaid rubber ‘o’ ring, as on our sample. The outrigger arrangement still looks stunning, and it is hard to keep our eyes off the deck when the pods are spinning with no record on top.

There is, however, a reason that just about every turntable on the market uses a flat platter to support the record. Those pods leave large parts of the record unsupported, and those sections pick up airborne vibrations, which adversely affect sound quality.

This is why the company moved to a more conventional platter design (though ultimately in glass rather than aluminium) for the Planer 3 that followed.

The Planet’s plinth will look entirely familiar to those who know Rega’s turntables. In this earliest incarnation, it is a chipboard piece that is black laminated on all its surfaces. This makes the structure relatively light and rigid – parameters that the company’s turntable designs have continued to prioritise over the years.

Gandy’s early experiments with plinths led him to conclude that excess mass was a bad thing, due to high noise-transmission and energy storage.

There was a long search for an appropriate motor. Rega eventually settled on one made by Philips and imported into England by a company called Impex. The motor was principally used in pinball machines, but it had qualities that Gandy wanted.

It ran at a lower speed than the others he had tried, which meant he could use a larger pulley and smaller centre drive hub. The result was a quieter operation with less vibration.

It took months of development to engineer a suitable way to mount the motor onto the solid plinth. In the end, a combination of a rubber ‘o’ ring and a suitably positioned metal plate did the trick. This arrangement allowed accurate motor alignment and good decoupling, while providing enough motor-body movement to compensate for any irregularities in the drive belt.

Those belts were bought as 3mm continuous cylindrical lengths of rubber, cut to size and then hand-glued end-to-end by Gandy. Enabling the drive system to cope with belt irregularities was certainly sensible.

As for the Planet’s feet, these were from a company that made rubber door stops. Originally, Gandy bought off-the-shelf designs, but after a number of weeks (and regular orders, we suspect), the company made bespoke feet for Rega. These were deeper and softer for added clearance and better isolation from support vibrations.

How does the Rega Planet sound today? Our test sample is straight from Rega’s vaults and is an early Acos Rega Planet fitted with the Acos Lustre arm. The cartridge fitted is Rega’s current entry-level moving magnet, the Carbon, which is a solid, balanced performer for its modest £35 / $75 price.

We connect the Planet to our reference system of Cyrus Phono Signature/PSX-R2 phono stage, Burmester 088/911 MkIII amplifier and ATC SCM50 speakers, as well as a more price-compatible combination of Rega Brio Mk7 and KEF LS50 Meta speakers. Regardless of the partnering system, the Planet turns in a charming though not flawless performance.

Speed stability could be better, and the Planet isn’t the most dynamic performer. It’s fair to say that any current Planar turntable, including the entry-level Planar 1, gets more out of the record groove. Yet, we can’t help but enjoy ourselves.

We spend a few days working through our record collection, taking in large-scale classical symphonies such as Beethoven’s Fifth, old jazz classics such as Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis and modern pop productions such as Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever set. The Planet succeeds in putting a smile on our faces.

This is no sonic microscope. It doesn't dig out the last grain of information from the record groove – and the fitted Carbon MM isn’t going to do that, either. However, the Planet is a fun and interesting listen.

The information it does dig up is presented in a cohesive and balanced way. Music flows when played on this record player and, even by current standards, communicates the emotional content well. The latter point may seem like a throwaway line, but it is still surprising just how many hi-fi products, almost regardless of price, fail in this important respect.

While rhythmic precision isn’t impeccable, we get a good sense of musical momentum and involuntarily tap our feet with tunes that encourage such behaviour. Large-scale dynamic swings, such as in the Beethoven symphony, are soft pedalled, but lower-level intensity shifts still come through satisfyingly.

The tonality of a record player is largely dictated by the cartridge, and the Carbon is a nicely balanced performer. It doesn’t go overboard at either frequency extreme, avoiding any annoying peaks or troughs in frequency. The Carbon may be modestly priced, but it steps out of the way of the music better than most moving magnets at its price.

That sentiment applies to the Rega Planet as a whole. It isn’t massively revealing or insightful by modern standards, but put on your favourite record, and we’re sure you’ll enjoy it. When that record ends, we think the temptation to put another one on will be strong.

Ultimately, when a piece of hi-fi encourages you to listen to another piece of music, it's doing its job well. Judged in this context, the Rega Planet still does the job.

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There are plenty of well-remembered classic turntables. The Thorens TD160, Linn LP12 and Technics SL1210 come to mind, and we wouldn't have to work hard to add another dozen famous names.

However, we're not interested in those well-loved decks here. Instead, we've dug deep into the past 50 years of What Hi-Fi?'s history to find a few gems that seem to have slipped the collective hi-fi consciousness.

Not all of these record players were sonic class leaders, but they all have something that has us longing for an evening playing records in their company.

Bang & Olufsen 1800 (1984)

What Hi-Fi? is all about performance above most things, but even we aren’t immune to the stylish charms of Bang & Olufsen’s 1800 record player. This was a belt drive budget turntable, costing around £99 back in 1984, yet still managed to pack automatic operation and all the style the brand is so famed for.

Surprisingly, considering its ultra-slim plinth, the 1800 featured a fully-sprung sub-chassis to make it less sensitive to external vibrations. There was no platter mat as such; here, it is replaced by thin rings of Nextel that were claimed to reduce any static charge on the record.

The 1800’s arm was a thin, wand-like affair. It was fitted with one of B&O’s MMC (Moving Micro Cross) cartridges, a range of moving magnet cartridges designed specifically to work with the low-mass arms fitted to the company’s record players.

Most 1800 turntables would have been bought to complement Bang & Olufsen’s electronics, and so they featured a DIN output. Users would need a suitable DIN to phono adaptor if they had a more conventional third-party amplifier.

What did the B&O 1800 sound like? Our review at the time talks of a sweet, clear and organised presentation, built on a taut and tuneful bass performance. Lows were considered a little lightweight and perhaps the treble lacked a touch of precision compared to the best at the price, but the combination of the 1800’s elegance, ease of use and tidy sound makes it something of a budget classic in our view.

Cranfield Elite Rock (1982)

Linn’s LP12 had become a dominant force in the UK high-end turntable market by the early ’80s, and its suspended sub-chassis design was mirrored in many other decks of the day. So, the arrival of the Cranfield Elite Rock, with its solid design, heavy plaster-loaded structure and silicon damping trough was something of a shock.

The Rock originated from research done by the Cranfield Institute and was packed with innovative engineering solutions. However, it was the use of silicon fluid (sitting in the trough over the record) to damp arm resonances that proved the most controversial aspect of its design.

This added another step before playing a record, as the trough needed to be swivelled out of place to put the record on the platter, then pushed back. Also, if you weren’t careful, it was possible to spill the silicon fluid onto your records, which was messy.

The thing is, the whole arm-damping idea really worked, giving the cartridge a much more stable base to work from. This arrangement also made the sonic differences between tonearms less significant, and so the Rock got great results from affordable but capable options such as Rega’s RB300.

If you think that records sound warm and smooth, listening to the Elite Rock will prove a real shock. It had a dry and precise balance with some of the tautest bass of any record player.

Detail levels were exceptional, as was the Rock’s composure when playing demanding music. The Elite Rock may not have been the best finished high-end deck on the market, but it was right up there with the very best sounding options at the time.

Dual CS505-2 (1984)

Back in the early ’80s, if you wanted a good-quality, affordable turntable but couldn’t stretch to Rega’s Planar 2, you bought Dual’s CS505-2. This was a well-engineered and decently made budget deck that delivered a sound well above that achieved by most rivals.

The low price, around £75, didn’t stop Dual from offering a suspended sub-chassis, though, which served the deck well when positioned on less-than-perfect supports. The CS505-2 also included an auto-stop and arm-lift function at the end of a record side, making it more convenient to use than the competition.

Sound quality? Pretty good, with the Dual sounding enjoyably energetic and decently detailed. There was a good sense of balance about the CS505-2’s presentation and enough composure to stay organised when the music became demanding.

Sure, if you had more to spend, better sound was possible, but for the money, for a few years at least, nothing budget bettered the Dual as an all-round proposition.

Michell Syncro (1984)

Michell’s Syncro was introduced as a more affordable alternative to the company’s high-end Gyrodec. The Syncro was still a suspended sub-chassis design, though, which made it less sensitive to external disturbances than more rigid options such as the Rega Planar 3.

The Syncro’s platter was made of glass and covered by a felt mat. It was driven by an AC motor via a long rubber belt. Changing speed was a manual affair and involved moving the drive belt from one step of the motor pulley to the next.

While the Michell could be bought without an arm, it was usually fitted with a Mission 774LC or Linn LV-X in the early days, and a version of the Rega RB300 tonearm later on. Regardless, the Syncro was considered a lucid and detailed performer that could dig deep into the fabric of the recording.

This record player was a well-engineered and capable alternative for those who couldn’t stretch to the range-topping Gyrodec. Looking at it now, we can’t help but be tempted to search eBay for a sample in good condition.

Roksan Radius (1989)

Roksan’s first product was the legendary Xerxes turntable, released in 1985. The Xerxes was a truly ambitious and innovative record player that set the cat among the pigeons in the UK high-end market.

While the Xerxes established the brand, it was a pricey product, and the company needed a more affordable offering to help with growth. That new deck was the Roksan Radius (£399).

This was aimed at a more mainstream audience and came with the new Tabriz tonearm. Speed change was electronic, and the deck used a simplified version of its big brother’s clever isolation system.

The result was a truly capable performer that not only delivered a class-leading performance but did so in a package that was easy to use and much more affordable..

The Radius’s sound was agile and informative. It had a lovely top-to-bottom consistency and a low-frequency performance that prioritised tunefulness and articulation over outright weight and warmth. If you find one in good condition on the second-hand market, you won’t be disappointed.

Pink Triangle Tarantella (1998)

It is hard to believe that the Tarantella is almost 30 years old. Its styling still feels so fresh. This talented deck was something of a revelation back in the late ’90s, combining a striking appearance with class-leading sound quality at an entirely reasonable £850.

Our sample was fitted with the then-ubiquitous Rega RB300 tonearm and proceeded to dominate its price class for a number of years. The Tarantella sounded clear, detailed and musically coherent; a blend of talents that meant that it sounded at home with all types of music.

True, build quality wasn’t perfect, but if you got a good one, it was a pleasure to own. Speed control was electronic rather than manual, and the plinth-mounted LED lights made it look stunning in a darkened room. All in all, this is a modern classic.

Pro-Ject Elemental (2014)

Pro-Ject has long been the master of great-value turntables, and the Elemental was one of its finest. This was a wonderfully minimalist design that cut back on every luxury, leaving just the essentials. Elemental was truly an apt name.

Costs were saved by reducing the plinth size. It was just big enough to house the arm and cartridge. There was no means to level the deck and no form of suspension to isolate it from its surroundings.

However, there was an artificial stone mass anchor below the main bearing to add structural stability and act as an energy sink for noise generated by the main bearing and motor.

The platter was made of MDF and drive was delivered by a smooth-running DC motor. Speed change was manual, of course, but at least the Ortofon OM cartridge was factory fitted and the arm adjustments for bias and tracking weight already set. This was truly a plug-and-play turntable.

Sound quality was great for its £150 price, with good detail and a fine sense of organisation. This was a nicely balanced performer for the money, with a well-rounded presentation that would work well in the kind of budget systems it was designed for.

In the end, despite great reviews, its stark appearance proved too much for customers. Pro-Ject soon reverted to conventional rectangular plinths for its budget offerings, which we think is a shame.

Wilson Benesch Full Circle (1999)

While Wilson Benesch is now best known for its terrific range of high-end speakers, its first product was a record player. It was simply called The Wilson Benesch Turntable and was a determined effort to get more out of the record groove by using careful engineering combined with cutting-edge materials (such as carbon fibre) for the sub-chassis and tonearm.

That first record player was a well-received product, but by the early ’90s it was clear that the turntable market was in decline – thanks to the introduction of the Compact Disc – and so the company focused on speaker production.

However, it didn’t ignore vinyl replay altogether, releasing the Circle turntable around the turn of the century. When it was partnered with the company’s carbon fibre tonearm and cartridge, the package was called The Full Circle.

The Circle replaced the original record player’s suspension system with cantilevered carbon fibre rods. The deck was built around a layered construction that separated the motor (and all its inherent vibrations) from the sensitive cartridge/record interface.

The result was a beautifully simple-looking design that was superbly made and class-leading in performance. So much so that it garnered multiple Awards and five-star reviews from us over its production run. We think it remains an attractive and sonically competitive product to this day.

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Our back issues and bound copies of What Hi-Fi? magazine live on the shelves of our hi-fi listening rooms. Not only are they a handy reference tool, but they also serve as useful acoustic room treatment that gives the rooms a more balanced sonic character.

It always amazes me, when I venture in to the room – more often than not disturbing Kashfia, our long-suffering and extremely patient hi-fi and audio editor, in the process – to delve into our archives, how both very different and yet reassuringly familiar the magazines I leaf through are to me. The more things change, the more they stay the same, etc and so on and so forth.

The January 1981 issue of What Hi-Fi? serves nicely (well, of course it does) as a case in point. I mean, that’s a loooong time ago. (Although I, sadly, remember it only too well.)

Generally, when I go back a few decades looking at issues past, I like to put things into musical context and check out the big hits of whichever year I happen to be referring to.

1981 is a decent one, to be fair – certainly for the purposes of a nostalgic look back. Yes, pop pickers, the first thing that I could recall from that time was that Joe Dolce’s legendary Shaddap You Face fended off Ultravox’s all-time classic Vienna from the number one slot in the UK charts, thus denying one of the great singles of the entirety of the 1980s its rightful place on any number of lists.

It would, at least, be good pub-quiz knowledge, were it not asked so often that everyone already knows all about it.

Backing Sweet Joe up that year, though, were some tracks that can hold their heads up just as high. It was the year of Adam & the Ants, so Antmusic, Stand & Deliver and Prince Charming were all in the best-selling singles of the year, along with Ghost Town from the Specials, Human League’s Don’t You Want Me, Let’s Groove by Earth Wind & Fire, and not forgetting that track for the ages, the Tweets’ Birdie Song. Terrific stuff.

Sounds familiar

As for What Hi-Fi?, our January 1981 issue led with a real staple of our trade: helping readers get the very best bang for their buck with a new pair of speakers.

“Move to real hi-fi with the latest £100 speaker” is precisely what we at What Hi-Fi? are all about. Were we to have that headline today, it would be for £500 speakers – so right in the middle of some brilliant upgrade speakers from the likes of Acoustic Energy, Bowers & Wilkins, Monitor Audio and more.

And, when we go to the test inside the magazine, we see some familiar names: Acoustic Research, Monitor Audio, Mission, Wharfedale and Tangent. And it was the Missions that took the verdict in the end, with our reviewer raving about the £115 boxes: “Overall then the Missions represent real value for money and are worth auditioning by anyone in the market for speakers at under £250, let alone £100!” Praise indeed.

On the bottom of the cover runs the line, “Plus computerised guide to over 2000 units”. Little did we know in 1981, of course, just how far the “computerised” part of that would take us over the next four decades. What Hi-Fi? has been accessed for the most part by computer for the better part of a quarter of a century.

Entertainment for the home – and the road

It was also immediately impressive to me just how broad the remit was for the brand 45 years ago.

Car stereo gets a cover hit and a five-page group test within the magazine, with a three-way battle testing models from Pioneer, Philips and Sharp. Radio cassette players all, they give a sharp (sorry) reminder of what was classed as pretty much state of the art back in the day.

Let’s just say that one of the “dislikes” in the verdict box for the Sharp RG-6600E was “No rewind on cassette”. There’s a fast forward function, at least.

Contrast that, though, with telling your voice assistant to skip a track these days, and it’s safe to say that the youth today doesn’t know they’ve been born. And that’s without taking chewed and stretched tape into account. Ah, happy days.

Top of the format wars

There is also a page in the news section at the front of the magazine that has not only a car-stereo story, but also one on “Lighter, portable VCRs”.

And that mention is followed later on in the mag by a test of the Sanyo VTC-9300, with the sub-head “Sanyo are the first company to offer a current video at under £400”.

What’s this I read, though? Ah. The Sanyo is “a Beta format model”. Happy days once again, eh? Who doesn’t love a format war?

It regularly jumps out at me, though, in my happy time in the brand’s archive, that What Hi-Fi? has always had a broad coverage of all things home entertainment (and even beyond the home, of course, with car stereo tests).

The main principle remains the same now as it did in 1981, and even before that, when the magazine began half a century ago: to bring the reader honest straightforward, independent reviews that allow them to make an informed decision about the best products to buy for their budget. And long may that continue.

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1976 was a big year for music. Joy Division formed after seeing the Sex Pistols play at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall; Phil Collins took over vocal duties in Genesis after the departure of Peter Gabriel; and the Eagles released Hotel California.

But it was the formation of Apple in the north of said state that might just have had the biggest impact of the lot.

Its founders, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, originally called it Apple Computer Company (amended slightly to simply Apple Computer, Inc a year later) and for the first 25 years of its existence in Cupertino, California, that name was more than suitable.

The company’s focus was on PC alternatives such as the Macintosh, iMac and Powerbook, but in October 2001 Apple revealed a product that would change everything: the iPod.

The thin white jukebox

The launch of the iPod didn’t just turn Apple into a household name, it started a process that would eventually touch almost every part of the way we listen to music.

Portable music was nothing new – the Sony Walkman had been around for more than 20 years by this point – and the iPod wasn’t even the first digital music player.

But Apple rarely innovates in that way, preferring to let others test the water and then swoop in with a more finessed version of a product that appeals to the masses rather than just early adopters.

And appeal to the masses is exactly what the iPod did, selling around 70 million units worldwide in the first five years after its introduction.

Unlike its main early rival, Creative's DAP Jukebox, the iPod was genuinely pocketable, and the wheel-based navigation made scrolling through the 1000-odd songs that its 5GB hard drive could hold an absolute joy.

The What Hi-Fi? review in the February 2002 issue of the magazine called it: “A delightful, simple device that looks and sounds the business.”

Tech companies such as Griffin and Logitech soon saw a gap in the market and began to produce small speaker systems that allowed iPod owners to 'dock' their thin white jukeboxes, but they were invariably cheap and plasticky with sonic performance to match.

Apple introduced their own version in 2006, but the iPod Hi-Fi was only hi-fi in name.

The What Hi-Fi? three-star review couldn’t fault how loud it went, but its uninspiring design and lack of detail, pace and refinement meant that Steve Jobs’ declaration that he was replacing his stereo with one seemed disingenuous at best, particularly considering he claimed to be an audiophile.

Fortunately, genuine audiophiles didn’t have to wait long before something more worthy of the tag came along. Bowers & Wilkins introduced the Zeppelin in 2007, when premium-priced iPod docks were practically unheard of, and while it wasn’t perfect it proved that Apple’s portable music player had a place in home hi-fi setups.

In iTune and on time

It wasn’t just the iPod’s hardware that would be influential. A couple of years before its debut, Napster had arrived on the scene and sent the music industry into disarray by allowing people to share songs online for free.

Record labels struggled to cope with the sudden drop-off in CD sales, but Apple was already working on a solution. It launched the iTunes Store in January 2001 and suddenly gave music lovers a way to download tunes without breaking the law.

As well as legitimising digital downloads, the iTunes Store helped to change how people listened to music. People could now buy individual tracks even if they hadn’t been released as singles and gradually the importance of the album started to diminish.

As people filled their hard drives with collections of digital files they began to look for ways to play them that didn’t involve the tinny little speakers that came with their computers.

2003 saw the release of Roku’s SoundBridge streamers, which could be used to play digital music from an iTunes library through a connected hi-fi system, and in 2004 Apple introduced AirTunes – a precursor to AirPlay that allowed streaming over a Wi-Fi network.

It didn’t take too long for ‘proper’ hi-fi brands to get involved either. Linn and Naim were relatively quick to board the bandwagon, with the former’s Klimax DS arriving in 2007 and the latter’s Uniti, which combined streaming skills with a high-end CD player and amp, winning our System Product of the Year award in 2009.

With the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, and the launch of Spotify a year later, the era of music streaming had well and truly begun.

Today, it's rare to find an audio product that can’t stream, hence the popularity of products like the WiiM Ultra, Cambridge Audio MXN10 and Naim Uniti Atom, and it explains why NAD launched a version of its NAD C 3050 amplifier with an optional MDC2 BluOS-D module.

Despite the enduring appeal of CD and vinyl for some of us, it's clear that streaming music won over the masses and for most people downloads, let alone discs, are a distant memory. And once again, it's easy to trace this shift back to Apple.

RIP headphone ports

Those 19 years since the launch of the iPhone have been transformative from a technology point of view, but design-wise things have become rather homogenised – and to some extent that’s Apple’s fault.

The company’s influence can be seen almost everywhere. Its less-is-more approach has been adopted by countless other brands; Mac-like brushed metal finishes have been de rigueur for years; and slick touchscreen navigation is often preferred to physical controls (although with smartphone apps now often the main method of interaction, those days are probably numbered).

It’s all part of a shift towards products that people want to have on display rather than tucked away out of sight, which can probably be traced back to the original translucent iMac in 1998 – an all-in-one computer that was a genuine object of desire rather than something purely functional.

Back then most headphones you could buy were black, but during the development of the iPod Apple decided to make the buds that came in the box white to match. It was a stroke of marketing genius (albeit one that was largely accidental) that created a new status symbol almost overnight and made the type of headphones you wear a fashion statement.

Other brands suddenly started adding white headphones to their ranges so that even those who didn’t own Apple products could feel part of the crowd. In fact, there’s a strong case to be made that the headphone industry wouldn’t be as massive as it is right now without that simple decision to invert the colour.

Not all of Apple’s decisions regarding headphones have been quite so well received, but while its removal of the 3.5mm port from the iPhone 7 annoyed a lot of people at the time, it seems pretty prescient 10 years later.

Wired headphones are now largely reserved for serious home listening (and influencers), and Apple’s own AirPods wireless earbuds, which it launched at the same time as the iPhone 7, are everywhere.

Of course, for sonic purists many of these developments are not seen as improvements because they often come at the expense of sound quality, or are seen in some way to dilute the fundamentals of the hi-fi hobby.

Apple’s next move is unlikely to change that, particularly if it turns out to be a new screen-toting version of the HomePod, but there’s no denying that its influence has made hi-fi and audio products more accessible, more user-friendly, and more fashionable. Not bad for a computer company.

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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.

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As you may already be aware, here at What Hi-Fi? we’re currently celebrating our 50th birthday.

As part of our celebrations, we've been looking back at some of the iconic films that hit the big screen in the same year that we were founded. As it turns out, a string of classics are also celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, including one of Scorsese’s best, an iconic comedy duo pairing up for the first time, and the start of one of the most enduring franchises in film.

1976 was, undoubtedly, a great time if you fancied heading to your local cinema to catch the latest release. Below, the What Hi-Fi? editorial team has highlighted 10 films from that year that we think are brilliant examples of silver screen magic – and if you haven't watch them yet, we highly recommend them for your next movie night.

Taxi Driver

There are few films as harrowing as Taxi Driver. The movie is one of director Martin Scorsese's finest works, at least in my mind.

It’s a brutally honest piece of cinema history that follows Vietnam veteran turned taxi driver Travis Bickle as he slowly descends into madness.

The expert cinematography exudes the lonely isolation, slow detachment, and eventual resentment that Bickle experiences while navigating New York, ferrying everyone from child prostitutes to elite businesspeople around the city at night.

With Robert De Niro as lead man, backed up by an incredibly young Jodie Foster, it’s hard not to feel for the characters, trying to live in the uncaring world it documents – which is one key reason it remains so relevant 50 years after release.

And, as an added perk, there’s now a pretty decent 4K remaster, with Dolby Vision HDR, available on Blu-ray and most streaming services, including Apple TV and Amazon.

If you’re a fan of dark, emotionally complex films that offer a bleak take on the human condition, I’d strongly recommend giving it a watch, if you haven’t already.

Just make sure you’re in a good place mentally before you click the play button. Even now, half a century on, the film will get under your skin.

Words by Alastair Stevenson

Buy Taxi Driver on Blu-ray at Amazon

Rocky

Sylvester Stallone’s boxing film franchise may have gone on too long, but the original Rocky will always be a classic. I mean, would movie training montages have ever been the same without it? The theme song from those scenes alone is so iconic that it even inspired some of the most memorable 118 118 adverts from the 2000s.

Set in mid-1970s Philadelphia, the film marks the birth of one of the most legendary characters in action film history, Rocky Balboa. It follows the fictional tale of how this small-time boxer/debt collector gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fight the heavyweight champion of the world, Apollo Creed.

Creed is played by Carl Weathers in what many consider his most iconic role, although Predator (1987) and Happy Gilmore (1996) fans may disagree. For the record, I think he’s great in all three films.

He is joined by a quality supporting cast in the form of Burt Young as Paulie Pennino and Talia Shire as Paulie's sister, Adriana, nicknamed “Adrian”. Rocky just wouldn’t be the same without her, and the movie's climax is an emotional demonstration of the couple’s love for one another.

If you’ve got a thirst for some action, sticking this bonafide 1976 classic on your TV or projector will quench it in no time.

Words by James Cook

Buy Rocky on Blu-ray at Amazon

Carrie

It’s an iconic image in horror film history: Carrie, bathed in pig’s blood, the whole screen going red with her rage.

Carrie was the very first of Stephen King’s many, many written works adapted into film, with Brian De Palma directing this now-iconic coming of age film with highly emotional performances with lasting impact, and scenes fraught with tension.

Sissy Spacek is magnificent as Carrie: shy, sheltered, vulnerable, tortured yet full of innocence and hope; her constant bullying at school and the oppression at home from her religiously fanatic mother are viscerally felt.

Everyone around her is perfectly horrid, and Spacek elicits so much sympathy that we’re constantly on edge for her – even in the tense seconds leading up to the inevitable, infamous bucket of blood scene at the prom, you wish you could save Carrie from the pain and embarrassment. But it makes her violent revenge all the more satisfying, even if it is still horrifying.

Blending real-world pains with the supernatural in a way that feels both heightened and natural (this is Stephen King, of course, so there’s some telekinesis involved), the film uses the high-school teen experience to maximum effect, which in turn has created legendary moments and clichés that have been repeated in teen horror TV shows and films since (the mean girls, the gym burning down, the hand reaching out from the grave…).

Throughout it all, it’s Carrie who remains the force driving the film – from her innocence and burgeoning powers to the eventual bloodbath, it’s her enduring story that remains a terrific watch and has us at the edge of our seats, even 50 years later.

Words by Kashfia Kabir

Buy Carrie on Blu-ray at Amazon

Bugsy Malone

When I was a kid, I absolutely loved this film. I thought the title character, played by Scott Baio, was especially cool, and I have fond memories watching groups of young New York gangsters being wiped out by splurge guns, a pie-shooting Tommy Gun spoof.

Set during the Prohibition era, the film is loosely based on the exploits of real-life gangsters such as Al Capone and Bugs Moran. With its ensemble cast consisting entirely of child and teenage actors, including a young Jodie Foster as Tallulah, though, the violence has been massively toned down to make it suitable for younger audiences. The actors converse in a distinctive 1920s way, though, which is a nice touch.

I’m not much of a musical fan, but there are some catchy tunes in Bugsy Malone too, particularly my personal favourite, So You Wanna Be a Boxer (featured in the video above).

It might have been years since I’ve seen it in its entirety, but I can’t think of any other gangster spoof movies that are as iconic. I must admit, though, that as an adult I’m not quite sure it will resonate with me quite so strongly as it did during my formative years.

Still, there’s only one way to find out and that’s by watching it again.

Words by James Cook

Buy Bugsy Malone on Blu-ray at Amazon

Marathon Man

1976 was quite a year for William Goldman. Not only did it see the release of All The President’s Men (for which his screenplay would go on to win an Oscar), but also Marathon Man, another multi-award nominated thriller, again starring Dustin Hoffman. But instead of an adaptation, this one was based on Goldman’s novel of the same name.

Hoffman plays Thomas Babington Levy – aka "Babe" – a history student and marathon runner who crosses paths with a Nazi dentist (played with malevolent brilliance by Laurence Olivier) who’s on a mission to retrieve his ill-gotten diamonds.

The scenes where Dr. Christian Szell (Olivier) tortures Babe in the dentist’s chair are a real highlight, though not to be watched if you already get nervy around your annual checkup at the dentist.

“Is it safe?” Shudder.

As you would expect from the pen of Goldman, it’s a taut thriller that really ratchets up the paranoia.

He has written in his memoirs that the story idea occurred to him during a walk through a predominantly Jewish diamond district and he imagined a Nazi on the run placed in the same location.

Like a lot of classic thrillers, the hero is just a normal person placed in extraordinary circumstances and forced to find out what they are capable of. And it’s executed beautifully, with the kind of pacing that’s more typical of a sprint than a marathon.

Words by Joe Svetlik

Buy Marathon Man on Blu-ray at Amazon

Silver Streak

While Stir Crazy (1980) is my personal favourite Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor pairing – I haven’t actually seen their final film, Another You (1991) – Silver Streak was the first time the two American comedians worked together for a feature-length showing.

Released in early December, the thriller comedy is mostly set on the titular train, which is travelling from Los Angeles to Chicago when a murder takes place. Pryor and Wilder team up during the ensuing chaos and, despite their contrasting comedy styles, the two begin hilariously bouncing off one another.

There is a reason that Pryor and Wilder are regarded as an iconic comedy duo and Silver Streak is the first time you see just how good their chemistry was.

But due to the era in which this film came out, it contains parts that have aged like milk and would not be considered appropriate by modern audiences. So, bear that in mind if you do decide to add this comedy classic to your watch list.

Words by James Cook

Buy Silver Streak on DVD at Amazon

All The President’s Men

If ever there was a film to show you how the world has both changed enormously in half a century and yet in so many ways stayed the same, All The President’s Men is surely it.

The story of two Washington Post reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, uncovering the Watergate Scandal that brought down the sitting president of the United States, it inevitably draws sobering comparison with the political situation in that country today.

It’s a terrific story, and a fascinating insight into how almost unimaginably difficult reporting – proper investigative reporting – was in those days. There was no internet, no Google to run to in the 1970s, of course; these guys had to rely on libraries, shoe leather and personal contacts (most famously, in this instance, the high-profile whistleblower “Deep Throat”).

Screenwriter William Goldman, who also wrote a couple of my other favourite movies, The Princess Bride and Marathon Man (featured above), does a wonderful job of keeping what is remarkably complex political intrigue and information both understandable and enjoyable.

Having said that, this is, admittedly, a movie of its time – necessarily rather slow-moving by the standards of 21st-century filmmaking.

You can’t really go wrong, though, with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford – Bernstein and Woodward, respectively. They are backed up by a strong supporting cast, including Jason Robards and Jack Warden, and superbly directed by Alan J Pakula.

Being 50 years old is all well and good, and the historical differences between eras are fascinating for those interested in any way about old-school journalism. It is, however, the movie’s clear political relevance to today that has become rather more sobering.

The contrast between the media from half a century ago, skewering “Tricky Dicky” Nixon, and the polarised options available to US citizens today could not really be much starker; and, of course, the controversial presidency of today can only hold an appropriately worrying mirror to the events of more than 50 years ago. Whither the Woodward and Bernstein of 2026?

And I write this, of course, just weeks after the announcement that The Washington Post has laid off as many as one-third of its employees. Perhaps there is still plenty for us to learn about the methods, morals and ethics of a world before the worldwide web.

Words by Jonathan Evans

Buy All The President's Men on 4k Blu-ray at Amazon

Logan’s Run

An apocalyptic world where humanity lives in domed communities, blissfully following the instructions of an AI computer overlord.

Yes, this is a hair’s breadth from describing our reality in 2026, but believe it or not, all the way back in 1976, it was the premise of one of cinema’s finest pieces of dystopian science fiction.

And while, like The Warriors, which came out three years later in 1979, Logan’s Run’s take on what people at the time thought was a worst-case scenario for the human race now looks pretty tame, it’s still a cinematic masterpiece worth watching.

For one, there’s the clever use of, at the time, revolutionary special effects. These included the use of actual holograms, rare wide-angle lenses and Dolby Stereo on 70mm prints to help create the effects that outright blew viewers’ minds – and eventually nabbed it a Special Academy Award for its visual effects.

And while they may not be as clever or slick as the schlop AI artists are chucking out every week, the innovation remains worthy of applause.

But its themes and the questions it raises about the human condition have also aged well. The film is set in a future where humanity lives a hedonistic life protected from the ruined outside world, with a computer overlord providing for all their needs until they reach the age of 30, and must enter the Carousel.

It follows Logan, a former “Sandman” who used to kill any citizen who refused to enter the Carousel voluntarily, as he turns into one of the runners he used to hunt when he turns the big three-O. Given the state of today’s world, where we’re ceding more and more control of our lives to AI and big tech, how could the film not still at least partially resonate with audiences even now?

Which is why, 50 years on, I’d wholeheartedly recommend that any sci-fi fan give it a watch, even if it’s not quite as scary as it once was, and it's yet to get a 4K remaster.

Words by Alastair Stevenson

Buy Logan’s Run on Blu-ray at Amazon

The Omen

Fifty years since its 1976 release, Richard Donner’s The Omen remains a masterclass in atmospheric dread – and a surprisingly rigorous workout for a modern home cinema system.

While many 70s horrors rely on dated jump scares, The Omen sustains its power through a suffocating sense of impending doom, which is only enhanced by a high-quality sound system.

Now remastered in 4K, the film delivers the soft, naturalistic grain of the era but the deep, inky shadows of the film’s Gothic architecture have been brought up to present day standards.

You’ll want to look for shadow detail in the infamous "nanny" scene; a lesser display will crush these blacks, losing the terrifying nuances of the Roman backdrop.

However, the true star is Jerry Goldsmith’s Oscar-winning score. From the visceral, chanting of Ave Satani to the piercingly sharp violins, the soundtrack is a benchmark for dynamic range. Try the cathedral sequence to check your system’s mid-range clarity and overall sense of scale.

Half a century later, The Omen isn’t just a horror classic; it’s a reminder of the timeless power of a thrilling score and expert cinematography.

Words by Joe Cox

Buy The Omen on Blu-ray at Amazon

Assault On Precinct 13

A low-budget exploitation film starring a cast of mostly unknown actors that nonetheless sets a movie-night standard, thanks to John Carpenter's masterful direction, brilliant pounding synth score and peerless pacing.

A soon-to-be defunct police precinct and its few remaining staff, plus a couple of transported convicts that have been waylaid there, are besieged by a patchwork, 'cholo'-styled gang hell-bent on revenge for a police massacre of gang members.

The movie takes obvious influence from westerns (most specifically Rio Bravo) as well as Romero's Night Of The Living Dead, and indeed Carpenter's career-long talent for horror is given an early preview in what was only his second movie. The relentless, kamikaze waves of gang members are essentially zombie hordes (that run and fire weapons), and this plus the beleaguered, claustrophobic setting laid out the blueprint for just about every survival-horror video game, zombie flick or 'urban western' that followed (including Die Hard).

There's a dystopian element too; the deserted South Central LA neighbourhood feels menacing, hostile and alien, while America's contemporary real-life fear of rising gang lawlessness in its cities set a chilling tone.

A highway patrol cop is the movie's hero-type, but more notable is death row-bound convict Napoleon Wilson, whose cynical cool set the anti-hero standard and surely helped sketch Han Solo's character a year later (there's even an "I know" moment).

Assault still, crucially, looks great thanks to Carpenter's filming in his favoured Panavision widescreen format – a real treat, that's all the better on a big-screen home cinema set-up.

Words by Chris Burke

Buy Assault On Precinct 13 on Blu-Ray at Amazon

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Lucky, that’s what I call it. The chances of having three of the most significant small speakers of the past 60 years all in one place at the same time, and in proper working order, are small. But here I am, listening to mini-monitor royalty and loving every minute.

Two of the speakers in this group, the BBC-designed LS3/5A and the Acoustic Energy AE1, can rightly claim to be legendary. I think the third, KEF’s LS50, has done enough in the past decade or so to lay claim to that status in the future.

The LS3/5A arguably originated the high-quality mini-monitor speaker category. This is a properly small speaker (about the size of a shoebox ) with an internal volume of around five litres.

It was originally developed for use in outside-broadcast vans and cramped studios, primarily to monitor speech, but was quickly hijacked by hi-fi enthusiasts who loved its gorgeous midrange performance and exceptional stereo-imaging skills.

The LS3/5A was one of the fruits of an extensive BBC research project into speaker design and was first introduced in 1975. The BBC isn’t a speaker manufacturer, of course, so the speaker’s design was made available under license to third-party manufacturers to make.

KEF was the supplier for both of the drive units, but didn’t make the complete speaker until the mid-’90s. Its version of the LS3/5A, the gloss black one we have in our test room, was made to celebrate the company’s 35th anniversary. Only 500 pairs were ever produced.

Given that the BBC had some of the best audio engineers in the business at the time, and resourced them well beyond the capabilities of any commercial speaker manufacturer, it's no surprise that the LS3/5A turned out to be a technical tour de force back then.

The use of a Bextrene cone in the 11-cm mid/bass was considered cutting-edge technology in a world where just about everyone else still used paper; and the thin multilayer birch-ply cabinet was intentionally designed with a bit of ‘give’ to move any resonances out of the midrange and down into the bass frequencies, where our hearing is less sensitive. The sealed (non-ported) enclosure was heavily damped to control those resonances.

The LS3/5A’s high frequencies are delivered by a 19mm Mylar dome tweeter with a perforated metal cover. The felt strips that surround it reduce reflections off the front panel and cabinet edges

KEF lists the LS3/5A sensitivity at a miserably low 82.5 dB/W/m and a modest power handling of just 30 watts. Essentially, high volume levels and wide-ranging dynamics are off the table if you want the speakers to survive.

This is where Acoustic Energy’s AE1 came in. It launched in 1987 and was a determined attempt to produce a small speaker that ticked all the boxes. The company succeeded, proving that a small box (about the same frontal area as the LS3/5A but a fair bit deeper) could really produce wide-ranging dynamics, high volume levels and a decent dose of bass. Its detail resolution was exceptional for the time.

This performance was made possible by a formidable-looking all-metal driver array that was cutting-edge back then, and an engineering ethos that focused on minimising dynamic compression. An ultra-rigid cabinet that was lined with plaster to reduce internal standing waves and an unusual straight-edged mid/bass cone profile also helped.

The new Acoustic Energy AE1 40th Anniversary model (£1499/$1999) we have isn’t identical to the 1987 original, though. Think of it as a resurrection that is faithful to the original’s character and engineering principles, but tweaked with the benefit of four decades' worth of progress.

The first-generation drive units are no longer available, so AE’s engineers had to remanufacture them. The new drivers adhere to the original’s design ethos, but are tweaked for improved performance where possible.

Both have ended up a few millimetres larger than before (the tweeter is 29mm in diameter and the mid/bass is 12.5cm). Modern manufacturing methods and advances in design mean that both are better behaved than before. The improved drive units have allowed the engineers to simplify the crossover network, so improving the speaker’s performance.

In addition, the cabinet, which is the same size as before, has also improved. It forgoes the mess and complexity of the earlier model’s concrete-lined interior, and is now made with composite sandwich panels tuned to retain the original’s sonic character while being easier to manufacture.

All these things have incrementally improved the AE1 without changing its distinctive sonic signature. I have to say that the build of this 40th Anniversary edition is light-years ahead of the first generation, and the speakers look lovely in their high-gloss finish.

The third of our speakers is KEF’s LS50 Meta (£1299/$1599). This has become something of a modern classic. The LS50 was first introduced in 2012 to celebrate KEF’s 50th anniversary – it seems that KEF likes its anniversary models – and was upgraded to include the company’s clever metamaterial technology eight years later.

The heart of this speaker is the Uni-Q driver array that mirrors the AE1’s use of aluminium diaphragms, but places the 25mm dome tweeter in the throat of the 13-cm mid/bass rather than above it.

This coaxial configuration aligns the acoustic centres of the drivers, giving the LS50 even dispersion characteristics, which ensure an impressively wide listening sweetspot and enviable soundstage stability as we move around the room.

As touched on above, the ‘Meta’ in the KEF’s name refers to a technology that absorbs a claimed 99% of the rearward sound from the tweeter dome, reducing distortion and improving clarity in the process.

Elsewhere, the LS50’s curved front baffle is made of BMC (Bulk Moulding Compound), a material that provides a rigid and well-damped foundation for the Uni-Q array, and the speaker’s rear-firing reflex port is flexible to reduce resonances. Build, fit and finish are as good as we would want them to be.

I listened to all three speakers using the What Hi-Fi? reference system of Naim ND555/555 PS DR music streamer, Technic SL-1000R/Kiseki Purpleheart record player and Burmester 088/911 MkIII amplifier.

The LS3/5A is first, and its excellence with voices is obvious. It may not have the outright resolution of more recent designs, but there is a naturalness to its delivery that is hugely appealing. This is a fleshed-out performance that has a palpability that leaves many modern alternatives sounding thin, clinical and lacking in natural warmth.

If placed with care – a little away from a rear wall and on proper stands – these speakers also stereo image beautifully. That’s down to the well-damped enclosure, controlled dispersion and an impressive pair matching that is within 0.5dB of the BBC-specified reference target.

Given the age of the design, there are shortcomings, of course. Play any music that requires scale and dynamic reach (Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, say) or demands low-end muscle and punch (Massive Attack’s Heligoland or Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy), and these BBC speakers wave a white flag. They sound small, dynamically limited and rhythmically flat-footed with music such as this.

In comparison, the AE1 40th Anniversary speakers respond to such challenges with all the enthusiasm of a two-year-old bribed with a bucket of ice cream. These monitors sound bold and punchy, and are capable of sustaining high volume levels without issue.

Detail levels are clearly better than from the LS3/5A, though it has to be said that these all-action monitors don’t have the sweetness and body of the BBC design through the midrange and treble.

They are a more demanding listen, sounding harder edged without erring so far as to be unrefined or fatiguing. Tonally, they are more balanced, though the KEF LS50 Meta goes even further in this respect.

The AE1 are small boxes, so while they appear to bend the laws of physics when it comes to bass reach (given a muscular amplifier), listen carefully and you will find that properly deep bass is still missing.

Much the same can be said of the similarly sized KEF LS50 Meta. If anything, the Acoustic Energy sounds more muscular in the bass and is certainly more assertive generally, though the newer design’s progress in performance is obvious.

In comparison with the others, the LS50 Meta are clearer, cleaner and more spacious-sounding. They dig up a layer of fine detail that even the mighty AE1 don’t quite manage and deliver all that information in a wonderfully cohesive and balanced way. Their low frequencies may not be quite as burly as those the Acoustic Energy produces, but they are impressively agile and articulate.

In most ways, they are the most insightful and balanced speaker here, just as they should be given the age of the other designs. However, that doesn’t diminish the greatness of the others.

There is a reason that LS3/5A remains so beloved by many hi-fi fans. It has a sweet, easy-going manner that suits certain types of music beautifully, and if that’s what you listen to, these speakers remain as hard to beat today as they have always been.

The AE1 is my personal favourite. It is the small speaker that won’t wilt under pressure. It goes loud and delivers wide dynamic swings with enthusiasm. Sure, by current standards these speakers aren’t the last word in transparency and subtlety, but listen to a pair in full flow and the chances are that you won’t care. Feed them a quality signal, and the AE1 40th Anniversary will shine.

KEF’s LS50 Meta speakers have been What Hi-Fi?’s go-to premium standmounters for well over a decade. They are wonderful all-rounders that deliver a breadth of performance that few rivals get close to, let alone better. Of the three sets of speakers here, they get out of the way of the music most effortlessly. We can’t give them a higher compliment than that.

My conclusion? A great speaker remains a great product even as technology marches on. Sure, some limitations become more obvious over time, but the charm of classics such as the LS3/5A and AE1 doesn’t fade.

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