The last year may have been tough on the wallet, but 2023 was remarkably decent for cheap, cheerful and often small-form audio products that offer plenty of performance without the mega outlay. And much of this has happened in areas you would associate with already more affordable, small-form audio.
Sony’s range of headphones, premium or bargain, has offered supreme value for money across the board. The WH-CH520 over-ears were tested at just £35, but we can’t think of a pair of cans twice their price that outperform them. It’s a similar story with the noise-cancelling WH-CH720N, not to mention the Award-winning, and oft-discounted, WF-C700N wireless earbuds.
In the world of wired cans, meanwhile, the Røde NTH-100 (one of our Products of the Year) are eloquent, revealing and stunningly affordable at around £150. And that’s before discounts…
Other brands have followed this example in other fields. You might not expect much from iFi’s rather dinky Go Link DAC considering it is the size of a pencil sharpener and probably weighs even less. Yet the Go Link is a remarkable pocket-sized performer, boosting your music on the go with a “surprisingly open, spacious sound” across a range of file formats. All of these great bits of kit are offering more performance than we have previously got, or hitherto been able to expect, from products at their respective price points.
RECESSION-BUSTING DEALS
If wearable audio was an area where we had at least hoped, if not fully expected, to find some recession-busting steals, domestic hi-fi perhaps wasn’t. Despite this, we have witnessed some frankly wondrous attempts to boost the home set-up with more affordable performers recently, with some units frankly blowing us away with their unprecedented sound-per-pound credentials at their modest end of the market, especially in the field of network streamers.
The WiiM Pro Plus came from nowhere to nab a 2023 What Hi-Fi?Award for its expressive sound for a frankly tiny fee, while the (also) Award-winning Cambridge Audio MXN10 outperformed its closest rivals – the Audiolab 6000N Play and Bluesound Node – all while undercutting the latter by roughly £100. What we hope now is that products such as turntables, amplifiers and preamplifiers follow suit, as these are categories in which fewer truly affordable products seem to have been released this year.
Speakers haven’t been immune, though. We fell in love with the PMC Prodigy 5 floorstanders and Prodig
