EISA AWARDS

We join magazines around the world in choosing audio & AV champions...

As the combined judgement of magazine editors around the world, the EISA awards now deliver a global perspective on the best-value and highest-performing consumer electronics you can buy. And with Sound+Image a proud EISA member, we get to reveal the winners...

The announcement last year that EISA, the European Imaging and Sound Association, was going global felt like an inevitability. While audio markets and sometimes models do vary around the world, consumer electronics has never been so globalised as it is today, and spreading the EISA footprint allows the organisation to deal directly with global head offices, as well as bringing in opinions from outside its European headquarters. Ours, for instance! We were invited to consider joining EISA in 2016, and agreed, knowing both the organisation and many of those already involved, so both Sound+Image and our sister publication Australian Hi-Fi were officially enrolled as members in 2017.

EISA’s Awards go back to 1982/3, when they began in the photographic categories, joined by Hi-Fi and Home Theatre categories precisely 10 years later, and since then joined also by Incar Electronics and Mobile Devices. You might imagine that getting editors from 55 special interest magazines across 27 countries to agree on a final list of winners might be quite the process. We were pleased to find it a highly organised one. Initial voting revealed a remarkable near-unanimity for many of the categories, followed by vigorous debate on others. Note that while most winners have identical or near-identical Australian counterparts, sometimes our outlying region gets a significantly different model, so that the EISA winner is less relevant here (the TCL winner is one example). The rest, however, represents the world’s best...