Over the past week we have been putting the new Spendor A7 speakers through their paces, and we are impressed.

Visually they are still in keeping with the traditional design Spendor are known for and come in a range of pleasing finishes such as Black Ash, Dark Walnut, Natural Oak and now for a little extra Satin white.

The new A7 is a major revision for the award winning A6R, a tough act to follow. With more dynamic range and resolution with elements of D7 technology and changes to the cross over making the A7s a real step up. For full specifications click here

The A2 looking up to its big brother the A7

One element of the new A range that is worth mentioning, is that none of the speakers come with grilles. They are now an optional extra at differing prices depending on the model. The A7 is the biggest in the A-line range but is by no means a particularly big speaker. There are two other floorstanders in the range, in decreasing order of size they are the A4 and A2, which is a very compact and competent floor stander indeed. Last but not least is the A1 stand mounted speaker (A-line range).

After 5 days of playing the A7s day and night we sat down for good listen. We paired them with a very popular Naim combination, The NAC-N272 streaming pre-amplifier and the NAP 250 DR power amplifier.

We started of with Nils Lofgren ''Keith Don't Go'' from the brilliant Acoustic Live album. The A7s really brought the performance to life. We were all tapping out feet and would have been singing along but we didn't want to ruin the experience. The bottom end was big, warm and controlled allowing the vocals to soar creating loads of space around Lofgren which brought all of the emotion out of the track. After a few more tracks we changed to ''The Sound of Silence'' by Disturbed from the Immortalised album. An amazing version of the well known Simon and Garfunkel song. The powerful, rich vocals were clean and well nuanced and again with beautifully controlled bass. After a few more snippets of various tracks we were all in agreement that these are a serious competitor at the price and are very much in our top selection of favourite speakers. In short, the A7s like the rest of the A-line range have managed to retain the familiar sound of Spendor, but added so much more giving them greater dynamics and intricacies, a much more spacious and involving performance able to to cope with all kinds of music comfortably.

We love them and we think you will too. Call Nick Joe and James at Audio T Portsmouth to arrange a demonstration or home loan

We look forward to seeing you soon,

Spendor Loudspeakers are available from the following branches of Audio T:
Cardiff, Cheltenham, Portsmouth, Swindon