If you happen to live in Yorkshire, you'll know that Wharfedale is one of the incredibly beautiful Yorkshire Dales.

The rest of us will recognise 'Wharfedale' purely as the name of one of the first British specialist loudspeaker manufacturers. The famous proselytiser for great sound, instinctive engineer and professional Yorkshireman Gilbert Briggs founded the company way back in 1932. Wharfedale (along with the likes of Celestion and Tannoy) was there for the birth of high fidelity.

The firm was eventually acquired by a Far Eastern company, and moved lock, stock and barrel to Shenzhen in southern China. But although it has a fairly low profile in the UK right now, it's very much alive and kicking.

It manufactures 600 different drive units to support current and discontinued models. There's very little buying in of components or enclosures, which is how many supposedly all-British companies operate. Wood, steel and reels of wire go in at one end of the factory, and finished loudspeakers emerge from the other.

Now here's a trick question. What image do you have of Wharfedale (the company, not the landscape)? The sheer numbers of Diamonds, Lintons and Dentons it sold in the 1970s and 1980s mean that most people think of it as a producer of cheap and cheerful - if good-value - loudspeakers.

But that's only part of the story, and the manufacturer has a long tradition of building upmarket audiophile products - a tradition that continues today.

The Airedale Neo is the second-largest model in the Wharfedale range (after the Airedale Heritage). It's an ambitious design, in part an attempt to underline that Wharfedale is every bit the modern manufacturer, but also a celebration of Wharfedale's past, being named after one of its seminal early models. The biggest market for the Airedale range is Japan, and it was voiced in part for consumers there.

The design is retro down to the soles of its feet. There's something reassuringly artless about the way this speaker has been put together, apparently with few of the hi-tech accoutrements one might expect - the hi-tech diaphragms and enclosures of the latest diamond-tipped flagship B&Ws, for example.

It's a three-way bass-reflex design, housed in a huge box, like a gently sloping wardrobe. The flagship Airedale Heritage is bigger still.