Loudspeakers

John Atkinson clears space for a towering full-range electrostatic speaker from the Netherlands as Audiostatic’s Monolith II lands on UK shores

Blame Stanley Kubrick. Until 2001 burst onto our cinema screens, the lay conception of outer space had settled down as a mixture of flying saucers and little green men. Why green? Why little? But this was irretrievably displaced by an alien ex machina presence that set the style for, yes, the shape of electrostatic loudspeakers to come.

With the grille on, you’d guess that this was another classic British two-way speaker, though perhaps unusually well-finished. Beneath the black cloth, though, you will find just a single metal-cone driver. So is this a classic British one-way? That drive unit is the Jordan JX92, the work of a notable designer who has spent quite a big part of his long working life perfecting full-range units. Ted Jordan first heard a GEC 8in metal cone while working in the company’s radio lab in the very early 1950s.

Classical horns do not come any more colourful, or compelling, than this 'entry-level' floorstander

Hi-fi can be such a confusing passion, with so many products to explore in the quest for better sound, but enthusiasts often start by upgrading their loudspeakers, as they're where the greatest subjective differences are typically to be found. Most will begin with conventional box speakers, but many then progress to more left-field approaches – the most striking being 'horns'.

AVID's 'sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut' two-way features a massive all-alloy cabinet with tuned mass dampers to kill unwanted resonances – and this is the smallest in its range!

The friend who helped me unload these three AVID Hi-Fi boxes – one for each Reference Four speaker, at £20,000 a pair, plus one for the included (and very hefty) stands – thought he'd nailed it. 'What are these for, then?' he asked, 'heavy metal music?'. He wasn't far off the truth for while most speakers do very nicely indeed with variations on the wooden box theme, the Reference Fours use all-alloy cabinets, with panels up to 15mm-thick, sitting on six 'risers' attached to a thick alloy baseplate. Hence why each of these relatively compact speakers, at just under 37cm tall, weighs 25kg.

Now classier looking and sounding, it's out with the old and in with the new for B&W's latest budget floorstander

'Things can only get better' is a mantra beloved of marketing men and women, and why not? There's an implicit notion that technological progress means everything is automatically moving forward – and those who disagree must be some kind of latter-day Luddite. They're pushing at an open door, because when people treat themselves to something shiny and new, most have already bought into the idea that it is superior to what came before.

Series 3 sees the eighth generation of B&W's evergreen 600 series, headed here by the 603 S3 floorstander

Bowers & Wilkins might be one of the largest loudspeaker manufacturers around, but surprisingly it doesn't have a very broad offering, fielding considerably fewer models than, say, KEF or Focal. Leaving CI products aside (and the iconic but no longer revolutionary Nautilus), there are only three main loudspeaker families coming out of Worthing, and as the 800 D4 series [HFN Nov '21, Feb '22, May & Sep '23] and 700 S3 series [HFN Mar '23] represent the most recent major updates, it was inevitable that the nearly 30-year-old 600 series would follow suit.

The ‘ultimate version’ of B&W’s 700 series flagship gets the Signature treatment, including two bespoke colour options

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.