ATC
The headline launch was of the new £49,500 ATC EL 50 Anniversary active floorstanding loudspeaker. Featuring ATC’s own 25mm soft-dome tweeter, the company’s own 75mm midrange dome and 230mm bass driver, all driven by a new three-channel active ‘Amp-Pack’. This features a 50W amp for high-frequencies, a 100W for the midrange and 200W for the bass, with 4th order active crossovers and more surface mount devices as often seen in the company’s other products. The elegant, wide-baffle oval shape, with leather front section and wooden side cheeks, is – like almost all of ATC’s output – UK sourced. Despite sitting very close to the left loudspeaker in the press demonstration, this speaker showed good range and scale. As the name suggests, just 50 pairs will be made.
Audio Note
I wrote a review of the then-new Audio Note Oto integrated amplifier for the now-defunct Hi-Fi World magazine. This EL84-based single-ended amplifier has been a staple of the Audio Note range ever since, with standard, SE and silver SE versions. And now, there’s a special edition made to celebrate 35 years of the Audio Note Oto, priced at £4,850, £7,150, and £11,350 respectively. 35 years! I feel old.
Audio Resurgence
Some with very long audio memories might recall the Alchemist Products Kraken amplifier from the 1990s, a small, unique looking integrated amplifier from the pen of late, lamented amp expert Tim de Paravicini. Alchemist Products has long gone, but Audio Resurgence holds the Intellectual Property rights to Alchemist’s circuits, and it’s first product? Release the Kraken! The Kraken AR6A was first seen last year, and uses the same circuit as its predecessor, but in a better case with improved heatsinking and optional power supply upgrade. Priced at £1,250 for the standard PSU, £1,400 for the double PSU and just £75 for the MM phono stage module, this blast from the past is both great sounding and excellent value. A pre and power versions are also available, while a new AR102A Class A integrated and AR09A dedicated phono amp are coming ASAP.
Creek Audio
Creek Audio announced the Cymatics loudspeaker range, beginning with the £2,800 Cymatics 6 stand-mount at the show. These two-way, rear ported speakers featured a 25mm aluminium dome tweeter in a large horn, with a custom 170mm fibre mid/woofer. Playing through a mix of modern and classic Creek Audio equipment, with a prototype of a new integrated amplifier being fed by a Wyndsor turntable of 15 years ago, these loudspeakers hold promice
Connected Fidelity
Connected Fidelity’s Unity range of power cords now includes the Unity Wirewound, priced from £1,000. This includes an in-line box. Unlike most such boxes – which usually feature some kind of resistor-capacitor filter – as the name suggests, the Wirewound system relies on a unique technique of winding wire that is claimed to make the power cord behave more like a balanced power circuit in terms of reducing noise.
Cyrus
Shown in pre-production form at Munich, Cyrus’ new range abandons the ‘singing shoebox’ half-width form factor that has suited the brand so well. The £5,399 Cyrus 80 Streamer Amplifier was playing through a pair of Kerr Acoustics K200 stand-mount loudspeakers and making some exceptionally good sounds. Normally, systems that have £20,000 worth of loudspeakers are uneven when used with a less expensive amplifier, but here the system sang. Testament perhaps to the performance of both.
D’Von Audio
New audio brands are rare. New audio brands with really good products that don’t cost as much as a Boeing are both rare and very well received. D’Von Audio (from Devon, naturally) is that rare combination. The company makes a range of two stand-mounts (the two-way SQ-10 from £1,700, and SQ-20, from £2,500) and two floorstanders (the SQ-30 from £3,200, and the SQ-40, from £4,000) in its Aurora line. There are also isolation feet and loudspeaker stands available from the brand. Aside from the entry SQ-10, the Aurora line use HDHMR instead of MDF due to its higher density. These sounded extremely promising and look forward to testing a pair soon.
DALI
While there’s something great about high-end products where prices have no limits, there’s also something truly wonderful when you walk out of a room, saying “I can’t believe how much they aren’t!” That was the resounding response to the DALI Sonik 7; the middle of three floorstanding loudspeakers in the range that replaces DALI’s popular entry-level Oberon series. These rear-ported slimline towers with twin 7” woofers and a hybrid dome/ribbon tweeter sounded exceptionally good when partnered with a Lyngdorf TDAi-2210 Room Perfect equipped integrated digital amplifier. The loudspeakers cost £1,299 per pair, and with a £3,499 amplifier, this set the bar for systems costing well over £5,000.
Dual
Not all the ‘coming soon’ products were hidden away. Dual’s new CS 718Q direct drive turntable (in pre-production form) was playing in Decent Audio’s room, driven by Advance Paris APEX amplification and Scansonic M-Series loudspeakers, with van den Hul cable throughout. The price of this excellent looking turntable is still to be confirmed, but is expected to cost around £2,500 when launched later this year.
Harbeth
Harbeth has been rolling out its XD2 variant loudspeakers across its range over the last year. These feature upgraded crossovers and the new fourth generation RADIAL cones for midrange and woofers. Across three rooms, the company showed its £2,635 P3ESR XD2 small monitor stand-mount (with Harbeth’s £3,295 Nelson bass extender stand), the new £5,295 SHL5plus XD2 (pictured above) with 200mm RADIAL4 mid-bass (running from a Hegel integrated) and the latest version of its NLE active speaker project; the three-way NLE3 (starting at £22,000) with built in Hypex nCORE amps and DSP control. All three sounded fantastic. We’d love to look at them, but as Harbeth already has a waiting list longer than an English Public School, the company is not seeking out reviews
Harman Kardon
Hidden in a corner of the JBL room is the evergreen SoundSticks system. This satellite/subwoofer system was developed in association with Apple back in 2000 and has been in production – in various forms – ever since. The latest SoundSticks 5 can support Bluetooth or Wi-Fi (the Bluetooth/HDMI version was on demonstration) and now sports a display that looks like something out of an Iron Man movie. But what really grabs the attention is the price. At £350, it’s unchanged from the launch price of the SoundSticks 4 from six years ago.
Innuos
Innuos’ Stream series of server/streamer/DACs has been around since the tail end of 2025. It was shown at Warsaw. But this is its first outing at a UK show, and the company didn’t hold back. Playing everything from the Stream 1/LPS1 half-width system with Performance DAC output, through the Stream 3 with Performance right up to Stream 3 with Phoenix DAC, the upgrades (played through a Chord amplifier into ATC loudspeakers) were easy to hear. Prices start at £2,100 for a storage-less Stream 1 with no output board or upgrade poser supply, to £11,750 for a Stream 3 with 8TB SSD storage and a Phoenix DAC board.
The Innuos Stream 3 was also platform of choice for a number of manufacturers demonstrating elsewhere in the show. Which is useful when as a photographer, all your images of the Innuos room are out of focus! One of the best was the CAD/Trilogy/Wilson Benesch room (pictured above).
Leema Acoustics
Leema Acoustics announced its new 100 Series at the show, with four integrated amplifiers in the line-up. The £1,710 i85 analogue-only was playing at the show, with the £2,170 DAC-equipped iD85 variant, the larger £2,600 i150 and £3,040 DAC-sporting iD150 waiting in the wings. The Leema amplifier features a hefty, UK-sourced toroidal, has three times the number of high-quality Toshiba output devices and more reservoir capacitance than expected from an amplifier at this price… and sounded damn good too.
March Audio
Australian direct-sales brand March Audio began as an idea by ex-Rolls Royce engineer, passionate audiophile and former Bristolian, Alan March. He founded the company in 2018, putting his noise and acoustics training in making aircraft engines to good use in the manufacture of amps and loudspeakers. The company uses Bruno Putzeys Purifi Class D amplifiers and drive units extensively in its range. March Audio used the Bristol Hi-Fi Show to highlight its Kuoro loudspeakers (c£5,000 per pair, white models in the centre of the image), which not only feature Purifi’s Ushindi drivers, but is one of the first models to feature the company’s tweeter too.
Michell Audio
We’ve seen the Michell £3,995 Revolv and £5,995 Gyro turntables at a press presentation last year, but Bristol was the first public outings for the two new decks. As discussed earlier, the Revolv occupies a new point between Michell’s TecnoDec and the new Gyro, while the Gyro is the replacement for the evergreen Gyrodec. They were shown in a permanently packed demonstration in the PMC room (playing through Michell’s own Apollo phono stage, into a PMC Cor integrated amplifier and a pair of PMC prophecy5 floorstanding loudspeakers).
Mitchell Acoustics
One of the kings of high-performance, high-value audio, Paul Mitchell of Mitchell Acoustics has produced a range of active Bluetooth stereo loudspeakers under the uStream banner, the latest being the uStream One, Two and Three, the most expensive of which is the £1,200 tall, three-way uStream Three with 240W of on-board amplification and is designed to work with WiiM’s £90 Mini AirPlay 2 wireless audio streamer. The company also makes two turntables, the £199, Bluetooth output uStream TT1 was playing at the show.
Neat Acoustics
From the largest to the smallest. Next door to the tall ATC, Neat Acoustics was showing the latest version of its diminutive £1,995 Iota Alpha II. The Iota Alpha II retained the slim, easy-to-place pedal-bin footprint of the original, but the presentation suggested a meaningful lift in refinement: cleaner leading edges, a more continuous midband, and bass that was notably more agile – and a lot deeper – than its size implies.
ProAc
ProAc’s popular Response DB1 stand-mount two-way is part of a tradition that stretches back to the original Response One S from the early 1990s, with the Response DB1 dating back more than a decade. However, since its outset the small super-speaker has always featured a dome tweeter. At the show this year, the company announced the Response DB1R, which features a ribbon tweeter and runs in parallel with the current model, rather than superseding it. This follows in the footsteps of the D20R, Response D2R and K-Series loudspeakers. The price of the loudspeakers are £2,945 in standard finish, and £3,465 in premium finishes, including the outstanding Liquid Ambar shown at Bristol.
Pro-Ject
We are used to the Pro-Ject Debut turntable. It’s a high-value, high-performance no-frills turntable, but not one to feature anything too far out of the ordinary. But not this time. The new top of the Debut line is the £999 Debut Reference 10, which uses a 10-inch aluminium sandwich tonearm with a carbon-fibre armtube. This features the company’s Pick-it Pro cartridge and includes both conventional phono and Mini-XLR connections. The belt-driven deck features an acrylic platter with diamond-cut aluminium sub-platter, height-adjustable feet, a MDF chassis and comes supplied with the company’s Puck E clamp. It sounded promising in one of Henley Audio’s many rooms.
REL
Last year, REL really went for it with a system costing hundreds of thousands, including Stenheim loudspeakers and Audio Research amplification. This year, to help showcase its new REL Carbon Special Black Label subwoofer, it had a more down-to-earth system… if a £70,000 pair of DALI flagship speakers and Hegel mono power amps count as ‘down-to-earth’. With a stack of three Carbon Special Black Labels per channel, this array gave space and height to the sound of the system as well as quite a lot of punch and dynamic range. As you might expect from a sextet of £4,800 subwoofers in a system.
Roksan
The latest version of Roksan’s popular Caspian preamplifier and power amplifier were given their first public outing at Bristol. This takes the elements of the Caspian 4G integrated amplifier, adds a phono stage and allows the Euphoria-based power amplifier to be bridged, creating a 420W per channel behemoth mono power amplifier. The price for each unit is £6,500.
Ruark
Ruark didn’t expect to have the Talisman R ready in time for Bristol, and in fairness what we heard was an advanced prototype. But, the front-ported two-way floorstander recalls one of Ruark’s classic loudspeakers from a generation ago. People often forget that while the company is best known for small, integrated audio systems, the brand cut its teeth making excellent, value-driven loudspeakers. The Talisman R shows those skills at speaker building never went away and the short two-way tower had plenty of room-filling charm. We’ll hear and know more when officially launched at the High-End Show in Vienna later this year.
Rega Research
The Planar 6 is one of Rega’s best sellers, but there’s a bit of a jump in price and performance to the skeletal Planar 8. So, the new Planar 6 RS (‘Rega Special’) Edition turntable is the perfect solution, combining elements of both. The Planar 6 RS Edition takes the existing Planar 6 and adds the extra rigidity of brushed aluminium outer layer on the plinth, the two-belt sub-platter and RB880 tonearm from the Planar 8, and includes the company’s new top Nd9 moving magnet cartridge and the Neo PSU Mk 2 power supply. The Planar 6 RS Edition will cost £2,000, but were you to buy the parts from the Planar 8 and add them to the £1,655 standard Planar 6 with Nd7 cartridge, it would cost more than £2,700, or more than £250 than the price of the Planar 8 with Nd9. It’s expected to be available around the end of April.
This is joined by the new £1,500 Aos MC phono stage, which replaces the Aria Mk 3 MM/MC phono stage. Unlike the Aria, the Aos is essentially a pared back version of the company’s flagship Aura MC phono stage. The half-sized box eschews balanced output, but is fully adjustable and has precisely none of that nasty digital stuff inside! A Rega Aos MM moving magnet stage (also priced at £1,500) is in development
Ultrafide
Ultrafide announced its first integrated amplifier, the £3,500 Enso Int 125. As the name suggests, it’s a 125W amplifier (which doubles its power to 250W into a 4Ω load). It has the same output stage as the company’s well-regarded power amplifiers, with a built-in AKM DAC and MM phono stage (with variable gain and capacitance). This sounded really interesting playing a Vertere DG-X turntable into a pair of Kudos Titan 505 loudspeakers.
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