In the UK for many decades we were told that the source is the most important component. Well that particular maxim did hold some weight all those years ago simply because a typical CD player or mid level specification Linn Sondek or Pink Triangle was fairly atrocious by today’s standards. You needed to spend a good chunk on the source to acquire anything even remotely resolving and transparent. Nowadays though, you can buy a DAC for just a few thousand pounds or less that will utterly obliterate all those fancy turntables and CD players of yesteryear.  A case in point would be the basic bundled DACs with the entry Thrax and Vitus integrateds we sell. These will outperform market leading DAC’s you can buy today for over twice the price, let alone yesterday’s five figure relics such as the Naim CD555, Puccini, Sondek CD12 etc.

A new system or indeed any system should ultimately be designed around a set of speakers. They are without doubt the most important part of the system and the most pertinent selection you will make. This is because they have the greatest influence on what the final sound is like and also because there are very few truly great loudspeakers in existence. Now that you can get a great sounding DAC or Amplifier for a fairly modest outlay, speakers should receive the largest share of the budget. It doesnt really help that unlike electronics they haven’t gotten any cheaper over the years or easier to manufacture. In fact the opposite is true; they are more expensive to build than they used to be and you probably get less for your money as well. There are no shortcuts with speakers.

Loudspeakers are very difficult to design and create. Most of them make glaring mistakes. These range from the very sloppy amateur kind, like you can hear the tweeter sticking out, bass that is ‘subwoofer like’ with no detail or transparency, or even a cabinet boxiness God forbid, to the subtler type like they are not phase correct, not truly linear in response or they are too forward, too sterile or clinical sounding. Most loudspeakers ultimately still have residual noise in them – it takes nothing short of an engineering miracle to iron it all out – and to the human ear this just makes them sound wrong, unnatural or hugely coloured. That is to say that they contribute a very large amount of their own intrinsic ‘sound’ into the final result. It’s this high degree of colouration that traditionally has made choosing and buying them such a vexatious and personal choice.

I am very fussy when it comes to speakers. None of the models I sell will contribute their own ‘sound’ or colouration into the final result. They are all a pure open window back onto the signal they are being fed. They all disappear as objects in the room and the music will not seem to emanate from them but will exist as a 3d soundscape in front of you with prodigious depth and width. It has taken me over 10 years to assemble the brands I have. Really good loudspeakers like these are extremely difficult to design and manufacture and so they are unavoidably very expensive. Even amongst many popular high end brands you will find deal breaking mistakes, a biting sharp treble, an added boost in the bass or a nagging sterility across the midrange. Let’s go through my portfolio and explain how they relate to one another.

Thrax Audio make two compact aluminium standmounts, the little bookshelf Sirens and more established Lyra SE, now in MK2 guise. The Lyra SE can be purchased with their own stands or with the Hades low frequency extension module which acts as a stand but also very convincingly upgrades the speakers time coherency and microdynamic denisty. Extreme transparency and super neutral, they deliver music in an organic and very open, holographic manner but also with much precision and image stability. They are particularly suited to UK rooms and the Hades upgrade path is extremely useful as well.

Sirens are very compact but should be seen as a fully fledged speaker solution rather than a bookshelf with scale and bass limitations. They have performance to sit inside a very lofty system indeed. The Lyra SE are some of the most transparent to source transducers we sell. Their neutrality and resolving power is true reference level ability. Fitted with the low frequency Hades subwoofer stands, they mature into one of the very beast speakers we have at any price. Their imaging, and ability to disappear is amongst the best we have ever experienced in the entire world of loudspeakers.

Joseph’s are one of the industry’s true hiddent gifts, a lovable gem of the kind that comes along only a few times a decade. It is near impossible to find more affordable speakers which have the same philosophy and equivalent performance of our flagship speakers from Rockport and Tidal but in Joseph that is exactly what you will find.

Jeff Joseph’s small quiet company, formed in 1992, is well established and very highly respected in the USA, but unavailable in much of Europe. Supremely open, liquid and emotionally expressive, Josephs are a seductive loudspeaker that are highly approachable and so very easy to fall in love with. They represent a welcome antidote to the current fashion of forensically detailed and precise sounding speakers, yet at the same time possessing equivalent performance statistics; you will hear absolutely everything and will miss nothing, but in a fashion that speaks more to the mythical subconscious than to the analytical brain.

Josephs totally disappear from the room, not a single trace of cabinet, emanating out an incredibly wide and deep holographic panorama of sound which tingles with realism and presence. A touch sweet, a touch warm, with a comforting sense of ease, their sonic fingerprint is subtle and expertly judged. They will delight and charm you from the first few tracks, and that will be on all genres of music, with the good recordings and the bad ones too. A loudspeaker that will enthuse you and reinvigorate the hobby, with the elite level of ability to do full justice to our electronics from Thrax, Vitus, Soulnote and JMF, but in addition, possessing the kind of ‘everyman’ visual and sonic appeal to fit into almost any mainstream system, from the likes of Linn and Naim up through to hybrid systems transitioning into High End.

Rockport Technologies are the newest loudspeaker manufacturer to join the Lotus fold. This alluring boutique outfit from Maine USA is a brand who have been on my wishlist for many years now though so it’s only really by accident that that are a tad late to the party. As a result of me approaching them in early 2020 they are now committed to a new and strong presence here in the UK and are available for the first time where they belong here at Lotus Hifi.

A Rockport is an end product that is the result of so much passion, hard work and ingenuity, the produce of a group of master craftsmen and engineers, a beautifully bespoke loudspeaker that has been quality controlled to the nth degree and realised using some exceptional machining resources and ingenious construction techniques. Moulded monocoque enclosures, aluminium sub baffles, epoxy core material to bond successive cabinet shells, carbon fibre driver skins, drivers designed from the ground up, epoxy encapsulated crossovers featuring custom designed capacitors and inductors – this is a company who clearly care very deeply about what they are doing and are only really interested in being the very best.

They have a neat five model lineup starting with the compact Atria II and ending with their flagship Lyra. All models are highly coherent with the same family presentation and strengths. Out and out quality starts very high in the Atria II model and as you go up the range you essentially pay for a bigger and better cabinet. All models are characterised by exceptional neutrality, superb imaging and soundstaging and a refined and rich treble. The Rockport standout hallmarks have to be their famed sense of naturalness  and amazing bass performance with an exemplary degree of transparency and articulation in the lower octaves. The stability and localisation of the music is also breathtakingly surefooted and affixed in space. The clue is in the name !

Weighty, rich, deep propulsive bass and a simply gorgeous tonality, Rockports are an utterly addictive experience and designed and finished in the way they are, are always a very special purchase indeed.

Tidal loudspeakers are truly the stuff of legend. The most incredible deeply lacquered finish, the sumptuous woods, the very best driver technology, the most advanced crossover electronics, they are really something special to behold in the flesh. They will accomodate the highest resolving and most natural hifi sounding systems in the world without breaking too much of a sweat.

The starting model is the 2023 Piano G3 Diacera and then there are 3 more current passive models, Contriva G3, Agoria 2, Akira, until you get the flagship one of a kind, 7.5 foot tall La Assoluta, a true state of the art half a million pound product which is unsurpassed as far as loudspeaker design goes.

In January 2025 we also took delivery of AP1, essentially a Tidal version of the flagship Bugatti Royale speakers. This is an amplified design, with inbuilt multi channel, semi-active amplification derived from the Tidal for Bugatti project. AP1 pave the way for a new style of single box systems. The racecar of high end audio. They are set to shake up the price/performance expectations of state of the art systems. Priced at under £200,000, just add one Contros Dac/Preamp and one set of XLR.

We have many customers mixing Tidals in all sorts of systems but they do prefer to be in a very good setup, neutral with high transparency and noise reduced in all nooks and crannies. In an all Tidal system they can the fully exercise all their purity and resolve and a remarkable thing it is too. There isn’t anywhere to go after a Tidal. Even the Piano posseses a degree of upper end purity and clarity which is unique and unmatched and something we simply do not find in other speaker brands, anywhere in their entire range.

Pride of ownership with a Tidal loudspeaker is something very special. Like buying a Rolls Royce or a Saville Row tailored suit, it is a purchase that brings immense joy, not just when it is a delivering beautiful music, but also purely by the act of it just being in your possession. For many, it is a purchase of a lifetime, something unique and treasured that will endure forever.