What Hi-Fi? is all about, at the heart of it, music and movies. We provide buying advice on home entertainment kit, the sole purpose of which is to make your listening and viewing as pleasurable and fulfilling an experience as possible – all within a budget, of course.
This month, we concentrate on loudspeakers – both standmounted and floorstanding, with our pick of the best you can get for less than two grand.
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Superb standmounters
While floorstanders have their own merits, and we round up our favourite towers too this month, most people in the market for stereo speakers will be looking at a pair of standmounters. And with good reason.
Standmount speakers tend to be less expensive than quality-equivalent floorstanders, and more flexible too. Don’t push that flexibility too far though – your cabinets might fit that convenient space on your bookshelf, but almost certainly won’t sound their best if you put them there; speakers, like humans, don’t like being boxed in.
Floorstanders generally produce more bass, but standmounters tend to be more articulate and controlled at those frequencies thanks to their smaller, more rigid construction; a quality that also helps with sonic timing and precision.
Curtain up, then, on our 13 favourite pairs of standmounters under £2000, from the surprising Wharfedale Diamond 12.1 to the stunning KEF R3.
Our favourite floorstanders
Floorstanding speakers have a number of advantages over their standmount cousins (which we also look at this issue). Their greater internal volume means it is easier for them to produce more bass, plus they offer more flexibility when it comes to the arrangement of their drivers and any bass ports they might have. Floorstanders do tend to be more expensive than comparable standmounters – but then you don’t have to worry about buying stands for them.
At the most affordable end of this market it is not easy to produce the cabinet rigidity required for good sound, but our budget choices – the Q Acoustics 3050i and Wharfedale Diamond 12.3 – have managed it deftly. Further up the price range we have stand-out entries from Fyne Audio, Dali, Triangle and PMC. We've rounded up all these great towers for your consideration in this month's What Hi-Fi?
’Tis the season
In the words of the great Noddy Holder, "It's Chriiiiistmaaass!" So, obviously, we've packed this month's What Hi-Fi? with a festive gift guide. Come on, there are still a handful of shopping days left, get cracking – with the help of What Ho-ho-ho-Fi!
First with reviews
As always in our First Tests section, you'll find our famously in-depth, impartial and expert reviews of the very latest AV and hi-fi kit.
This month we lead with the Sony A95L, which may well be one of our favourite TVs out there. Sony's second-generation of QD-OLEDs is very special indeed – find out why in our five-star review this issue!
Then we move on to Ruark Audio's R410 hi-fi system. It looks fantastic as a piece of furniture and, crucially, it sounds superb too. We loved Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S2 headphones, and this month we take a good look at and listen to B&W's sequel, the Px7 S2e. These cans, noted our reviews team, are "the complete portable headphones package, inside and out".
Arcam has been on a run lately, with our reviewers praising their recent A5 and A15 amplifiers, both of which earned themselves 2023 What Hi-Fi? Awards. Now, from the same Radia range, we have Arcam's CD5 CD player. Does it follow its amplifier siblings to glory? Find out in this month's magazine!
Rounding things out we have in-depth reviews of Ultimate Ears' Epicboom portable speaker, the impressive Panasonic MZ1500B TV, JBL Charge 5 Wi-Fi and Sony Xperia 5 V.
Find out what our review team thought of all these products in January's What Hi-Fi?
Top of the shop
Our Temptations section of the magazine is where we feature the latest high-end products, and this month is no exception.
It's rare that we get CD players in for review these days, with the compact disc somewhat on the wane, but this month we've had two. Arcam's excellent CD5 is reviewed in First Tests, but at the higher end of the market – with a much higher price too – is TEAC's VDRS-701. It's a superb piece of kit, and if you're in the market for such a premium disc player, it should definitely be auditioned.
Similarly there aren't too many portable music players on the market these days, and here we have a top-end model from Astell & Kern, the A&ultima SP3000. At £3799 it's certainly expensive for a music player, but pound-for-pound it is still an excellent and five-star rated product. Find out more in this month's What Hi-Fi?
Finally, don't forget to check out our Buyer’s Guide, featuring a definitive list of all the best home entertainment kit you can buy – including winners of 2023's What Hi-Fi? Awards. If you’re looking to purchase anything from a pair of wireless headphones to a home cinema speaker system, this section will tell you where to spend your money wisely.
Whatever you do, don't miss the January 2024 issue of What Hi-Fi?. Grab a copy today, or simply download it onto your tablet or smartphone. Enjoy!
You can subscribe or buy the latest issue here, or buy the digital edition on iPhone, iPad, Android devices or Kindle edition
