Wharfedale Aura 3

Well-made towers with an easy-going nature

Floorstanding speakers £2999 whf.cm/Aura_3

Has Wharfedale made some sort of mistake with the Aura 3’s price? That’s our first thought as we unpack these elegant floorstanders. Few rivals at this level look as luxurious or as comprehensively engineered. This is a great start given that the Aura range is designed to distil the character and quality of the high-end Elysian series into a more affordable and easier-to-accommodate form.

The Aura range currently consists of four models of stereo speakers (split evenly between standmounters and towers) and a pair of dedicated centre speakers. The Wharfedale Aura 3 on test here is the smaller of the two floorstanders and the one more likely to be used in modestly sized UK homes.

Elegantly curved

These speakers are beautifully made and finished. Their enclosures feature elegantly curved sides and neatly rounded corners to minimise the sonically harmful effects of sharp corners. The enclosure’s panels are made of multiple layers of different woods to create a more inert and less resonant structure, and internally the rearward sound from the drivers is damped by multiple layers of by multiple layers of matted long hair fibre. There are three finish options for the cabinet – white, gloss black or walnut – and they all look smart to our eyes.

These Wharfedales have a formidable-looking drive unit array with two 13cm bass drivers, a 10cm midrange unit and a 27 x 90mm AMT (Air Motion Transformer) tweeter. Wharfedale claims that this tweeter, which uses a folding diaphragm that moves in a concertina fashion to produce sound, excels at reproducing the music’s transients with low overall distortion. Its use certainly helps to differentiate these speakers from their more conventional rivals.