Loudspeakers

Calling your speakers ‘Reference’ is quite a bold statement, but then again making grand claims is not exactly unknown in the hi-fi industry! Canton’s Reference speakers – the top-tier of Germany’s largest loudspeaker manufacturer – is the product of a fierce R&D exercise and comes seven years after the previous flagship range, Reference K, was introduced. It’s a comprehensive series to boot, comprising six models of which only one is a standmount (the Reference 9) and all others are floorstanders.

Sonus faber has shown signs of branching out since its acquisition by North American company Fine Sounds - also the owner of McIntosh Group - in 2016. First, in 2019, came its Palladio architectural speakers destined to partner McIntosh custom install hardware, followed in 2022 by the Omnia all-in-one desktop speaker and the Duetto active stereo wireless models in 2023. It then kicked off 2024 with the £695,000 Suprema 2.2-channel system.

Loudspeaker brand B&W launched its first Signature model in 1991, in the shape of the (founder) John Bowers Silver Signature, and has intermittently released further Signature editions in the 30-plus years since. Well, I say intermittently - while only four more Signature speakers came in the next two decades, the 700 S3 Signature range, which also includes the 702 S3 Signature floorstander , comes hot on

Armour Home's Q Acoustics has been busy in recent years, refreshing nearly its entire portfolio of passive and active loudspeakers, and expanding existing lines. The Concept 50 and 30 models were launched in 2022 to fill out its top-flight range, which includes the Karl-Heinz Fink-designed Concept 500 flagship , and a more affordable 5000 series appeared just before High End Munich in 2023. This didn't arrive fully complete either - the largest 5050 floorstander we're looking at here only finally debuted in the Spring of 2024.

Audiovector has returned to the design of founder Ole Klifoth’s first ever loudspeaker – the 1979 Trapez – for a new £15,500 model called Trapeze Reimagined.

It’s only about two years ago that Bowers & Wilkins introduced the S3 generation of its 700 series. A major overhaul of the venerable British brand’s popular midrange offering, its attention-grabbing improvements included a notably curvier front baffle with protruding drivers (housed in ‘pods’) and an elongated tube for the ‘Tweeter-on-Top’. This was all quite familiar for anyone who saw the earlier revamped 800 D4 series, so B&W isn’t being untruthful when it claims to deploy trickle-down technology.

Feeling a bit like the boy who cried ‘Wolf!’, I still can’t help but regard this new range of speakers from Apogee as ‘ribbons for the masses’. But unlike the last models that inspired this sort of reaction – the Stages [p129]and Calipers – the new Centaurs really do make Apogees accessible to a wide range of consumers. And not only by virtue of their cost.