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For over 40 years this family-run speaker specialist has epitomised the best of Danish design. This newbie continues the tradition

This month’s Exotica is the very definition of luxury and the sort of dreamland purchase that is beyond the reach of most mere mortals. Unless you have the expendable income of a Premiership footballer or Russian oligarch, you’ll need to start getting lucky with those lottery numbers. Very lucky... Everything about the Audiovector R 8 Arreté is impressive, from the size and scale of the cabinet to the seemingly fiendish complexity of the design, which appears to have drivers firing and venting in all directions. The piano-lacquered Italian Burl Walnut veneer, seen here, is gorgeous too, and offered alongside Italian Grey, black and white finish options.

But although this floorstander looks and feels like a flagship model from the Danish company, its wallet-straining price tag is still a world away from its big brother, the £190,250 R 11 Arreté. If all that’s too rich for you, the entry-point for the Arreté range is the R 1 standmount, at just under £5,000, although this and the R 3 and R 6 floorstanders forego the luscious gloss of the R 8 we have before us here.

Take a walk around the R 8 Arreté, and what initially looks like a relatively conventional, if heroically built, speaker soon reveals itself to be something massively more complex. Yes, the aluminium baffle may appear to house all the drivers – the AMT ribbon tweeter and what are surely a mid/bass driver and a pair of bass drivers – but that’s just the tip of the technology iceberg. As the venting on the rear panel, also made from aluminium, and the eye-catching finned plinth suggest, there literally is more to this than meets the eye.