SPEAKER PACKAGES

JBL’s battery-powered, portable Bluetooth speaker stalwart continues to impress in its fifthgen iteration. IP67 waterproof rated and built to last, it packs a surprisingly potent performance from a small chassis

Most loudspeakers have characteristics that tell you that you are listening to a loudspeaker. Even with your eyes closed, it’s not too difficult to discern that there isn’t a grand piano in the room but instead a pair of loudspeakers attempting to reproduce the sound of that instrument. This, it would seem, is due in … Read more

Sometimes, when discussing top-end products from big names in high-end audio, we describe them as if they were royalty. Maybe it’s the rarity or that they rub shoulders with the audio world’s great and good, but often we treat them with the kind of respect one might offer to those born to the purple. However, … Read more

The Founder series replaces Paradigm’s Prestige series as its second-highest line of stereo/ home-theater speakers, just below the flagship Persona series. The Founders sell for real-world prices, but they are significantly advanced in design and cosmetics. The 80F’s are not only in the middle of the Founde price range, which varies from $ to $ … Read more

The Silver 300 7G is the seventh generation of Monitor Audio’s popular and affordably priced Sil­ver Series. It’s a three-way, four driver, bass-reflex de­sign with dual ports exiting from the enclosure’s back panel. The handsome, columnar midsize tops out at about 42″ tall. At 7″ the front baffle is just wide enough to accommodate the … Read more

There’s something special about a tower speaker that takes two people to carry up a flight of stairs. High-end audio prizes size and weight, and in some cases that preference is borderline fetishistic, but for a tower speaker mass plays a real role, given the delicate balance of physical motion and stasis inherent in a … Read more

In my April 2020 review of Fyne Audio’s inexpensive F301 stand­mount loudspeakers, I wrote, “The Fyne F301s impressed with their exceptional rendering of sound­stage width and depth, reasonably wide dynamic range, extended low end (for their size), and exuberant, I-can’t-stop- spinning-records presentation. The Fynes presented a finely layered, spatially con­vincing soundstage with images that were … Read more

Focal aria k2 906 review – Focal release an Aria 906 loudspeaker with K2 sandwich cone. Noel Keywood checks it out. Focal like using differ­ent loudspeaker cone materials – I recall both flax (Kanta) and slate­fibre (Chora) in their loudspeakers – and they sounded good. By this I mean “neu­tral”, unlike the bright sound of … Read more