Loudspeakers

There are standmount speakers, and then there is Bowers & Wilkins' 805 D4. Priced £6250, blessed with a suite of proprietary cabinet and driver technologies, and finished in a gorgeous blend of aluminium, leather and wood veneer or gloss paint, it's very much a premium proposition. Indeed, the idea here is that buyers either outpriced or out-sized by the floorstanding speakers in B&W's latest 800 Diamond range can still enjoy more than a taste of the hi-fi high-life.

In the frantically fast-paced hi-fi market of the '70s and '80s, it is pleasing to find a product that remained in its manufacturer's catalogue virtually unaltered for years. If something looks good, sounds good and sells profitably why change it? Some products remain available simply because the company making them lacks the resources to do anything different. But that could not be said of Danish brand B&O, which was then at the height of its powers.

Although the largest and most expensive member of Burmester’s B series loudspeakers (which are ranged below its BA and BC models), the £22,700 B38 doesn’t – when viewed front on at least – look quite like the all-singing, all-dancing range-topper you might expect. Yes, it’s marginally taller than the step-down B28 (£17,600), at 1165mm versus 1144mm, but it’s also slimmer, its 210mm width shaving off 13mm. And then there are the drivers, with the B28 having four cascading down its front baffle, while the B38 features just two…

There's no escaping it: sitting in front of Cabasse's Pearl Pelegrina, the £22,599 flagship of the French company's Pearl speaker range, the punning phrase 'the eyes have it' kept going through my mind, so great was the sense of these spherical enclosures fixing me with a beady stare. Of course, this look is nothing new for the designers in Brest, out on the tip of Brittany: at the top of its range is the huge La Sphère loudspeaker [HFN Feb '10], its 70cm globe perched atop a helical stand, and driven by a rackful of dedicated crossovers and amplifiers.

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.