Loudspeakers

Forty years young, Dynaudio’s Contour series is raised to a new level in this ‘Black Edition’ standmount, featuring improvements to every component. Welcome to the dark side!

True to form, Dynaudio showed a slew of products at last year’s High End Show in Munich [HFN Jul ’24] – including a new loudspeaker styled by Tokyo’s Keiji Ashizawa Design studio, plus a turntable built by Thorens. Also shown was this Contour 20 Black Edition standmount, now finally in production. This is a range of one – an elegant two-way with no floorstanding partner – but it serves a useful purpose, offering Dynaudio fans an option to bridge the £4500 Contour 20i and the premium £9600 Confidence 20. Okay, at nearly £6000 a pair, it’s not exactly midway in price, but does represent a tempting step up.

Inspired by its long-running Studio series, born in the 1980s, this modern-day D’Appolito standmount also illustrates Monitor Audio’s long-term use of metal-coned drivers

As anyone who tried to buy tickets for Oasis’s 2025 reunion tour will have discovered, nostalgia is big business. The hi-fi industry knows it too, and in recent years has been scouring the 1970s for speaker and amplifier designs to either leverage into new models or directly resurrect. Monitor Audio, however, has now jumped a decade ahead, launching a new speaker ‘inspired by the 1980s’. Seeing as Hollywood has been tapping into that decade with revisits to the Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun and Ghostbusters franchises, the British manufacturer might be onto something.

Situated squarely in the middle of Canton’s five-strong set of floorstanders, is the Reference 3 the sweet spot?

First seen at High End Munich in 2023, Canton’s Reference range brought a major renewal to the flagship offering of Germany’s largest loudspeaker brand. Introducing a new design aesthetic, with a rounded lute-shape cabinet profile made popular by Sonus faber many years ago, and integrating new drivers, it heralded a major course change from the previous Reference K generation [HFN May & Aug ’22]. Yet Canton’s penchant for sprawling ranges has not changed, so the Reference series contains no fewer than eight models – and that’s not counting the exclusive GS edition, nor the two Alpha models revealed at Munich in 2024.

With uprated tweeter, internal wiring, crossover and terminals, the Diamond edition Parker Trio is a jewel in Marten’s crown

Marten Parker Trio is not, of course, the name of a new jazz act. Marten is the Swedish loudspeaker manufacturer, established as a family business by Leif Mårten Olofsson in 1998, and Parker Trio one of its floorstanding options. Yet the jazz angle still applies, as the company's other speaker ranges are Coltrane, Mingus, and Oscar. Perhaps Olofsson, who heads up the company as its chief designer, has Monk or Davis in mind for the future...

Relaunched in mk2 guise, ELAC’s most compact two-way gets a boost from the latest generation of its iconic ‘JET’ tweeter. We fuel up the afterburners and listen at Mach 2

In the last few years audiophiles have witnessed a spate of companies celebrating 50th anniversaries, a reminder that the early 1970s were a hotbed of hi-fi development. ELAC, however, can claim a much longer heritage, having been founded in Kiel in Germany in 1926, originally as a specialist in sonar technology before expanding to consumer audio. No doubt it is working on a 100th anniversary product launch – having previously marked 90 years with the Miracord 90 turntable [HFN Jul ’17] – but in the meantime it has delivered an update to its Vela series of loudspeakers.

British company steps up with a three-way reflex-loaded loudspeaker with a twist, but will its sound have Trevor Attewell head over heels in love?

The Point 5 from Nightingale Acoustics is a very unusual loudspeaker, which might be said to wear its heart on its head. Starting at the other end, its body is a basically rectangular cabinet made of 19mm particle board with an integral front panel that is stepped inwards by 24mm over the top 180mm, the two levels being joined by a slope.

Flagship of the new KORE-derived Epikore range, DALI’s big floorstander boasts impressive tech and in-room presence

With not just so many ranges in its catalogue, but also many models in those ranges, it’s hardly surprising that Danish speaker company DALI is no stranger to the concept of trickle-down technology. After all, once the development cost of a new component, or an entire loudspeaker, has been spent, why not spread the love by finding ways of carrying over that thinking to other products?