Audica's CX Series loudspeakers are gorgeous. So gorgeous, in fact, that I've been suffering palpitations. Why? I'll explain...

A while back I reviewed another set of speakers that lived in skinny, naked, aluminium enclosures.

They used only a few tiny drivers and looked fabulous - trouble was, they were completely pants, and I said so. I think I even compared them to Objets d'Art from the Dadaist movement, which is about as insulting as you can get.

Stunningly gorgeous

Thankfully, the brand in question has since produced some truly brilliant loudspeakers. They're with a different distributor now as well, so the contract on my life has probably expired.

The experience has scarred me a little, though. Every time I come face to face with another set of designer-skinnies my heart doesn't exactly sink, but certainly suffers a little wobble.

Will these slinky Audica CX speakers also fail to live up to their looks? Not a chance!

Improved design

It transpires that these Audicas are not just a set of drivers screwed onto the face of a pipe-cooling extrusion chosen out of an industrial catalogue. Rather, they are the result of some genuinely inventive R&D.

There's a whole function-breeding-form thing going on here; the aerofoil shape - also sometimes seen as a more teardrop-shaped cross section in other brands - is proven to help with reduction of distorting standing waves inside cabinets, and so helps create better sound.

All of the CX satellites are based on a tiny 50mm 'bass' driver and a 20mm soft dome tweeter - both able to be so small by dint of use of rare-earth Neodymium magnets.

Matching accessories

There are two 50mm drivers and a tweeter in the CX-S satellite, and four drivers and a tweeter in a line array in the CX-T towers and C-suffixed centre alike.

They all have front ports under their cloth grilles and use small screw-down connectors in their bases - note that these won't take a banana plug, nor a fat wire. Dinky feet hold the base of the speaker just high enough for a wire to be able to run out beneath the speaker without making it wobble.

The Audica people are kind of unique in the AV industry in that as well as their electronics too, they are also makers of truly attractive furniture and bracketry to go with their kit, so it can all look like it matches.

For instance, the CX-T towers have lovely thick plate-glass plinths and you can fix them with rubber nuggets or spikes underneath.

Idiot-proof subwoofer

The eye-catching subwoofer is a downward-firing unit with an 8in driver and two ports that all fire onto a fixed-position plinth underneath.

This means that the acoustic loading (a bit like compression of gunpowder for a bigger bang) is a known quantity. Other makers just use the floor - but that means you can end up having some energy soaked up by carpeting...

The woofer is simple to operate. Controls compromise a phase flip switch, crossover knob and gain dial. Thoughtfully, it is idiot-proofed. The place the crossover knob needs to be set to when used with the CX series speakers is clearly labelled.

Potential buyers should be aware that this £1,500 set is called System 3.

System 2 (£1,100), comprises the same centre and four of the satellites to go with the subwoofer (no floorstanders for you, then); System 1 (£1,000) is made up of two of the sats, the sub and the CX-LCR sling-it-along-the-bottom-of-your-plasma enclosure.