Take the floor

Looking for speakers that don't just do bass but continue to sound better as your system improves? David Vivian doesn't have the answer, he has six of them

- David Vivian

TIME WAS WHEN the words 'budget' and 'floorstander' would trigger any self-respecting audiophile's Spidey sense, and for good reason. Budget floorstanders hardly ever sounded as promising as they looked, too often relying on an expedient amalgam of lightweight, unbraced cabinets, cheap drivers and cheesy crossover components. The best that could be hoped for was generous loudness, appreciable bass of questionable quality and an impressive amount of fibreboard for your money. They weren't all terrible, of course, but 30 or so years ago, the standard advice was to do yourself a favour and buy a budget bookshelf loudspeaker instead where the more favourable component-to-MDF ratio at least diminished the severity of the inevitable compromises present in building to a price and offered significantly better value for money.

Thankfully, none of this holds true now. The march of technology, material design applications and computer-aided hasn't just banished the nasties, but turned modestly priced floorstanders into one of hi-fi's bigger bargains, possessing the sonic skills not to be wrong-footed by upgrades to source and amplification down the line. Then there's the bass benefit, which now tends to marry quality with quantity and extension hard to extract from even some of the most upmarket standmount offerings.

Although the idea that one size fits all hardly ever occurs in hi-fi life, there is a remarkable degree of conformity among the group contenders here, all but the two-way Fyne Audio being a three-driver, 2.5-way design. After that, though, things get more contested with agreements about size and weight, driver tech, porting arrangements and build and finish harder to find. We've set the net quite wide at £500-£950, but - as we often discover there's no obvious correlation between price and quality. Let's get to it...

ON TEST

Acoustic Energy AE1092 £600