LATEST ADDITIONS

Bowers & Wilkins CM9 - £1,800 This large wood-veneered floorstander with advanced driver technology looks fine value Back to the days when Bowers and Wilkins simply called itself B&W, the company had three distinct ranges of hi-fi speakers: the beer-budget 600s, the mid-market 700s and the upmarket 800s. Perhaps the 700’s external tweeters and asymmetric enclosures were a little too radical, as some time over the last few years they seem to have been quietly replaced by a rather more conventional CM series, featuring real wood veneers or a gloss black finish, but in conventional rectilinear enclosures with normal built-in tweeters. There were just two CMs to start with, but now there are four stereo pairs, of which this £1,800 per pair CM9 is the largest. And, unlike the neat little standmounts in the range, there’s no way anyone could accuse it of looking cute.

Kudos X2 - £1,350 This compact floorstander is Kudos' first attempt to offer its sound quality at a lower cost A relative newcomer on the British loudspeaker scene, the Kudos range has rapidly become popular, despite quite substantial pricetags. The reason behind the new X-series is to provide comparable quality at rather lower prices, though nobody could really consider £1,350 per pair particularly cheap! A simple two-way floorstander with a small 150mm bass/mid drive unit, the X2’s power handling and bass extension will inevitably have some limitations, though it should be more than adequate for normal listening levels, while its simplicity and high-quality ingredients (English cabinetwork, Norwegian SEAS drive units and crossover components from Clarity Caps and Volt) can provide their own reward. The bass/mid unit has a 95mm-diameter flared and doped paper cone, the tweeter a 25mm fabric dome. The 18mm MDF enclosure comes wrapped up in a wide choice of real wood veneer finishes – black, cherry, maple, oak, rosenut and walnut, alongside satin-white.

Spendor A6 - £2,095 A worthy successor to the S6e, this speaker adds extra refinement on several fronts Spendor first emerged from the BBC Research culture some forty years ago. It has been through numerous changes since then, but that original culture seems to have largely survived, albeit somewhat modified by marketplace trends, including the current fashion for floorstanders. This £2,095 per pair A6 is the middle of three floorstanders that make up the company’s A-series successors to the S-series. Very similar in many respects (including dimensions and measured behaviour) to the S6e we reviewed in HFC 257, it’s a good size two-way floorstander, dressed in real wood veneer (black ash, cherry, light oak or wenge) and mounted on a black- painted MDF plinth the same width and depth as the enclosure proper.

Towering strength Triangle's new Lyrr boasts a whole lot of driver tech for just a modest sum. Paul Messenger checks out the finer points of this french fancy Founded some thirty years ago in North East France and one of three major French speaker brands to make a serious impression on the international stage, Triangle’s success is primarily due to its very distinctive drive unit technology. The £3,300 per pair Lyrr is the largest of three stereo pairs in the Genese range, which itself occupies the middle ground between the inexpensive Esprit EX series and the seriously upmarket Magellan range. Both the smaller Genese models, the Quartet floorstander and the Trio standmount, have been reviewed previously in Hi-Fi Choice (HFC 302 and HFC 334), with, it must be said, somewhat mixed results.