Loudspeakers

Danish brand Jamo has been exciting home cinema senses for years with killer audio kit that won’t break the bank. A case in point is the £260 S426 HCS3, a system that features a pair of 910mm-high S426 floorstanding speakers at the front, which isn’t something you’d expect for this price. They’re joined by a pair of bookshelf surround channels (S420 SUR) and a centre speaker (S420 CEN). The system doesn’t come with a subwoofer as standard, but you can add the SUB 260, which incredibly costs more (£300) than the rest of the package put together…

Reviewed here are the MilleniaOne and MilleniaSub products from Canadian brand Paradigm, sold as a money- no-object design, yet promoted as still costing way less than equivalent products for the level of technology. That said, the two and a half grand asking price is not peanuts.

PSB, named after founders Paul and Sue Barton, isn’t a particularly well known brand in the UK. Yet this Canadian outfit, distributed in Blighty by home cinema specialists Armour Home, makes some pretty tasty surround sound speaker packages that are worth consideration.

Branding is funny stuff. We expect some gravitas with excellent products – being too flippant about something of high-quality tends to put us Brits right off. There’s been a huge fuss about chavs wearing Burberry and ‘devaluing’ the brand, for instance.

Hi-fi buffs may already be familiar with Tannoy’s Definition speakers, a two-channel range first introduced way back in the mid-’90s and brought back to life in 2009 with an elegant new design for the contemporary market. That’s the very same system you’re currently ogling on these pages, but before you start checking the cover date we should assure you that there’s a good reason for turning back the clock.

At first glance, the Minx looks no more remarkable than the speakers you get with an all-in-one home cinema system made by various Korean or Japanese mass market brands. But we need to look West rather than East in seeking a comparison: think Bose rather than Sony or LG and you get the idea.

Canton has been making sub/sat packages for as long as the concept has been a recognised phenomenon. Its current Movie range features no fewer than 10 separate packages, of which the £500 CD 105 tested here is towards the lower end of the price structure – although there are less expensive models than this.