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Although it’s relatively easy to build a large ‘cost no object’ loudspeaker worthy of a brand’s flagship, things get a little trickier when the requirement is for a compact model. Quite apart from the budget constraints – customers believe there should be a direct relationship between size and price – there’s the small matter of ‘you can’t argue with physics’ when it comes to delivering a big, room-filling sound from a smallscale enclosure.

It has been suggested that bands are a dying breed in the modern age. As technology enables individuals to create fuller tapestries of music than ever before without the need to recruit a drummer on the basis of whether or not they own a van, or stick with an annoying keyboard player because his dad lets you use his warehouse for rehearsals, the incentive to go it alone is strong. The costs of touring with five or six people in tow is also pretty prohibitive, and it's a more complicated proposition in the studio. Meanwhile, the relative marginalisation of hard rock and indie pop - genres that traditionally rely on the guitar-bass-drums-vocals formula - hasn't helped.

Early this past summer, I enjoyed dinner with an audiophile friend. While he puttered in the kitchen, I perused his hi-fi publications. Among them was a 2024 equipment guide, an incomplete but aspirational compendium of products currently on the market, and in a couple of cases, no longer produced but still in plentiful supply. The listings included hundreds of items - phono cartridges from US$99 to $20,000 each, and amplifiers and loudspeakers from a few hundred up to the purchase price of an exotic high-performance automobile.