STEREOPHILE'S 33RD ANNUAL - PRODUCT OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024

When Stereophile's Product of the Year Awards were first published, in 1992, we decided that unlike some other publications and their awards schemes, we would keep the number of categories to a minimum. That way, we would avoid what the late Art Dudley once described as the "every child in the class gets a prize" syndrome.

- JOHN ATKINSON

This decision led to some interesting contests. In Loudspeakers, for example, high-value mini-monitors compete with cost-no-object floorstanders. In Analog Products, turntables compete with tonearms, phono cartridges, and phono preamplifiers. And in Amplification, single-box integrated amplifiers go up against separates, and low-power tube designs compete with high-power, solid-state behemoths. In Budget Product of the Year and Product of the Year, products from every category competed against each other: Out of all the products that Stereophile reviewed over the whole year, which product offered the best bang for the buck or sounded the best overall?

The competition is for a whole year, but it's not the calendar year. To be considered for our 2024 awards, only products subjected to a full review or considered in a column published from the November 2023 issue through the October 2024 issue qualify. Every product was subjected by the reviewer to a thorough evaluation over a period of weeks or months-plus, for regular reviews (not columns), a session in my test lab.

As Stereophile Editor Jim Austin wrote in the introduction to the 2022 awards: "The resulting review documents what's almost certainly the most thorough evaluation that product will receive outside the manufacturer's development lab.... That document, then - the review itself - is a product's best argument for winning an award or against it if the review lacks enthusiasm."

TWO ROUNDS OF VOTING