Loudspeakers

While Danish brand DALI offers a varied speaker range across the worlds of home cinema and hi-fi, its products share design characteristics at all price points. The most obvious is the use of wood fibre drivers – which differ from more conventional paper cones thanks to the employment of longer untreated fibres in their composition to add to the overall strength – in different sizes with varying degrees of sophistication in all DALI lines. These are then partnered with a soft dome tweeter, sometimes augmented by a ribbon unit as well.

Pico is a scaled-down version of DALI’s impressive Zensor 1 standmount, cramming the same driver technology into a box that’s around 30 per cent smaller. With its dinky dimensions and attractive design, it could be a good bet if you want to squeeze a full 5.1 system into a small or medium-sized living room.

My desktop computer costs over £1,000 (yes, I’m one of the mugs who can’t break out of Apple’s clutches) and has superb picture quality. It’s good enough to watch hi-def movies from Netflix and programmes from BBC iPlayer, and I’m not averse to enjoying the odd tune or two whilst I bash away at the keyboard. But my iMac, like most computers, has sonics that are weedier than a wild meadow. Therefore, investing in a decent set of desktop speakers is essential for transforming your aural enjoyment for those times when you’re stuck in (or have escaped to) the study.

Like Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit, Dynaudio’s latest Excite speaker range is on a quest. In this case, to unite the armies of high-end and budget audio buyers to defeat the dragon of bad sound quality. These speakers are designed to sound great with any partnering kit, from entry-level amps right up to reference gear.

Ever since the arrival of the original KEF eggs nearly a decade ago, sub/sat packages have come in some interesting shapes and sizes. Spherical satellite speakers have been released before but few of them have the pedigree behind the baubles you see here. 
As one of the oldest French electronics brands, Elipson has 
been making spherical speakers for longer than many of its competitors have existed.