Wharfedale Evo 4.4

Wharfedale shows it can mix with the best premium speakers

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₹1,89,999

Think of Wharfedale and we can pretty much guarantee the next word to enter your mind is Diamond. So successful have the various budget Diamond ranges been over the decades that it's easy to forget that the company also makes premium products, such as these new Evo 4.4 floorstanders.

As the biggest and priciest offerings in the company's new Evo range, they are packed full of so much technology that we had to double-check the speaker's recently reduced price tag to make sure it was for a pair of speakers, rather than just one.

What kind of technology? Well, there's the Air Motion Transformer tweeter for starters. While there are a few similarly priced speakers that use such a unit, it's a type of design more usually seen at far higher prices.

Fast, accurate sound

An AMT works by having a light, pleated diaphragm driven across its surface by a row of carefully placed magnets. The pleats contract or expand according to the music signal, squeezing the air between them in the process to create the sound wave. The sound from this kind of unit is claimed to be fast because of the light diaphragm, and accurate due to the complete surface area being driven.

The 55 x 80mm AMT hands over to another unusual drive unit, a dome midrange, at a relatively high 4.7kHz. Few speakers use a dome midrange because of the cost and difficulty of development, but the one used in the 4.4 has a 50mm soft dome coated with a damping compound to control resonances. There's also a specially shaped chamber behind the dome that scatters and absorbs the diaphragm's rearward sound, so reducing distortion and improving detail.