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Fortunately, the Reference 5 Meta is the £17,500 flagship of KEF's 'conventional' speaker range, bettered only by the striking-looking Blade designs [HFN May '22]. Fortunately? Well, yes, because this is an imposingly huge design, standing just over 1.4m tall, even if some of that impression of scale is minimised by the slenderness of the cabinets. Indeed, if the enclosures were any narrower than their 205mm, there wouldn't be room on the front baffle for the quartet of 165mm aluminium-coned bass drivers, arranged in pairs above and below the company's 12th-generation Uni-Q treble/midrange unit.

There's a perception that tube amplifiers are aimed at a specific segment of the hi-fi community, one that favours analogue sources over all others, whether reel-to-reel tape or vinyl. While tube-equipped outboard DACs are not uncommon, DAC-equipped tube amplifiers like the £7999 Synthesis A100 Titan, from the Italian manufacturer's Action series, most certainly are. The Bluetooth-equipped Western Electric Type 91E [HFN Feb '23] is another rare example, although whether either of these 'digitally inclusive' integrateds represents the beginning of a trend is hard to say.

It struck me, around halfway through the first track, that designer/CEO Dan D'Agostino was emulating the way supercar companies delineate their model ranges. Hey, I needed something to explain why the new Progression S350 Stereo power amplifier at £34,998 costs just over half that of the Momentum S250 MxV's £54,998, and yet it is over two times the size and rated at 100W more per channel: 350W vs 250W. Also, at 454x230x584mm (whd) against a Momentum's 318x133x546mm, the Progression S350 dwarfs the dearer unit. It was like the comedy Twins, with Schwarzenegger standing next to DeVito.

As safe bets go, that you've never seen anything quite like the £70k Monitor Audio Hyphn speaker is pretty much a dead cert. Yet look closer and there's actually a lot of 'form following function' going on here in those two columns with a gap between them, linked by a central belt. And while to unsympathetic eyes they may look like two huge clothes pegs, it won't take long for audiophiles to understand the thinking behind the configuration, however unusual the speakers look by comparison with traditional 'box, domes and cones' designs.