Loudspeakers

The latest member of Focal’s Utopia loudspeaker family is clearly cut from a different cloth – and that’s before you lay eyes on its felt cabinet wrap. Sure, at £29,995 the Diva Utopia boasts a similarly ‘high-end’ asking price to the likes of the £34,999 Scala Utopia Evo [HFN Aug ’17] and its overall styling isn’t far off its siblings either. But this is Focal’s first active loudspeaker, the result of a collaboration with Naim Audio, its stablemate brand since 2012. In fact, to call it a speaker doesn’t really do the Diva Utopia justice. It’s more like a full system inside a loudspeaker enclosure.

If you were to attend a classic car show and make a beeline for the enthusiasts exhibiting vehicles made by mass-market manufacturers, it would be easy to predict the kinds of designs you'd see on display. Most space would be given over to the noteworthy models: the big-engined ones, the sporty or luxury variants, the rare limited editions. And yet the bread-and-butter models that carried sales reps up and down the land and took many of us to school as children are largely forgotten. They were workhorses, used until the end of their lives and then replaced.

The rebirth of classic UK brand Epos got off to a flying start when eminent loudspeaker designer Karl-Heinz Fink bought the brand from Creek Audio in 2020. As his first move he created a new iteration of the ES-14, one of Epos’s most beloved products, but this wasn’t a nostalgia project despite some Back To The Future-themed marketing. Instead, Fink took the basic principles of the original model and designed a new speaker utilising modern technologies. That was a clever move, for while the resulting ES-14N [HFN Jul ’23] might not be as true to the original as some would like – it’s undoubtedly better.

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.

The smallest speaker in Technics' three-strong F series has already featured in our Vintage Review section . It was a popular product and sold in decent numbers for something that could have easily been mistaken for a mere novelty. Less well remembered were the larger members of the same family, the SB-F2 and SB-F3. Neither of these was exactly 'large', but the SB-F3 was certainly too big to be considered a miniature model like the SB-F1. It was, instead, in the class of conventional compact loudspeakers intended for shelf or stand placement, a sector where the number of competing models was far greater.

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.

To mark its 50th anniversary, Wilson Audio has resurrected its iconic WATT/Puppy for a ninth iteration - and the first since the dual-enclosure loudspeaker was discontinued in 2011. Called, simply, The WATT/Puppy, it sells for £41,998 in standard WilsonGloss colourways, with custom and premium finish options, plus choice of grille colour, available.