Cabasse Pearl Akoya £1,600 per speaker
These 22cm diameter, 6kg Wi-fi connected orbs can be used as a single speaker, or paired for traditional stereo, or – for those with a big budget – invested in as a luxurious multi-room system. At £1,600 each, they’re not cheap, but they are beautifully made and feature technology borrowed from the brand’s £200,000 La Sphere speakers, and the STREAMCONTROL app (Android/ios) makes set-up intuitively simple. The coaxial speaker design, where the 13cm tweeter is held inside the 17cm woofer, helps reduce the size without impacting on sound.
Qobuz, Deezer, Spotify, Napster and Tidal are all catered for, you can plug-in multiple sources, and they play most music formats up to 32bit/768khz hi-res recordings. And with a total amplification of 1050W, they are astonishingly loud for the size. Listening to a MQA Master Tidal hi-res version of Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 (New York Philharmonic/kurt Masur), I’m bowled over by the sheer volume available, but thankfully the energy is controlled wonderfully. Vivid, detailed and emphatically live, it’s as close to the orchestra pit as I could hope for without leaving my office. cabasse.com