High End 2019 • Hot Product

Avid, longtime manufacturer of compact but heavily engineered record players, has quietly but confidently been expanding its range over the last few years, adding amplifiers and speakers to the line, all of which feature massive, machined aluminum cabinets -- and fairly massive price tags to match. In Munich, the company showed its new Evo loudspeakers. Based on the same drivers, networks and tuned-mass damping technology used in the pricey Reference models, these new speakers employ birch-ply cabinets with front and rear baffles reinforced with machined aluminum plates.

The largest three-way, the Evo Two floorstander (€15,000 per pair, including sales tax), combines a 28mm/1" soft-dome tweeter with a pair of 152mm/6" titanium midrange units and a 254mm/10", sideways-firing bass unit to deliver a claimed bandwidth of 26Hz to 20kHz (±3dB) and a sensitivity of 90dB.

The price puts the new Evo models around a quarter of the cost of their related Reference brethren. With their compact dimensions and choice of veneer or paint finishes, they look pretty too.