Loudspeakers

MartinLogan is famous for creating speakers that blend electrostatic panels with traditional bass drivers, an approach it’s been perfecting since the 1980s. With most brands opting for conventional cone-based designs, it’s ploughing a lone furrow with this tech, but reckons the results are better than anything else available.

Anyone who’s seen Rocky 5 or A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child can attest that the fifth in a series rarely lives up to the original. But hopefully Mercury V – the fifth generation of Tannoy’s budget hi-fi and AV speaker series – won’t fall into that trap.

People in the home cinema industry – manufacturers, PRs and the like – know me for being keen on mad, huge potent audio. Giant 18in subwoofers and speakers the size of Stonehenge. I think they sometimes forget that I am also impressed by the delicate and the clever. So much so, that with this set of skinny tower-style speakers, all housed in an aluminium toothpaste-tube squeezed-out extrusion, I could feel palpable fear from the PR chap as he kept on politely enquiring how I was ‘getting on’ with the Revel Concerta speaker system.

When sizing up 5.1 systems on a budget, it’s reassuring to see a trusted audiophile brand on the box – and KEF is certainly one of those. The KHT-1505 sees the company squeezing its sonic expertise into an affordable compact package, designed to deliver a touch of class without taking up half the living room and all your savings.

Never ever underestimate the ignorance of an AV journalist. We all like to think that we know our stuff, but, truthfully, we’re all running to keep up with the new, all the time. You see, my knowledge of the German speaker market, and how big any one player was within it, has always been pretty minimal. While I knew about the Canton speaker brand, I still find a sardonic chuckle in the fact that it was another German company’s PR firm over here who told me about the sheer size of Canton.

About five years ago Armour Home ceased distributing Mission speakers and made the questionable decision to design and produce its own speaker brand. Q Acoustics was born.

Just for once, I am going to give you the meat and potatoes straight away, we can wait for a moment for the narrative… These speakers are bloody brilliant, in many ways and on a good few levels. They draw upon lots of their predecessors’ technology, and while KEF makes speakers going right up to cost-no-object levels, this new Q Series (as against the still-sold ‘Classic Q Series’) have been made to a remarkably keen price for what they do. This has been done both by cutting corners where possible (the grilles aren’t magnetic, for instance) and using evolved, proven design cunning for the sonic result to be so amazingly uncompromised everywhere else.