Hi-Fi Citations

Every year, the Expert Imaging and Sound Association (EISA) hands out awards for the best products in each of 19 hi-fi categories, as determined by a panel of judges from the world’s leading hi-fi magazines. (EISA, once a European organization, has gone global, with members from Japan, Hong Kong, Australia—and the United States, where Stereophile is the only member of the Hi-Fi Expert group. Stereophile’s partner publications, Shutterbug and Sound & Vision, are also EISA members, in the Photography and A/V categories, respectively.)

This year’s awardees survived a regimen of presentations and reviewer auditions over a long weekend in Antwerp, Belgium, last May; EISA hi-fi members—editors of high-end audio magazines from around the world—voted at another meeting in Slovenia in June. The winners, listed below, received their awards at the EISA Awards Gala at the Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA)—Europe’s equivalent, roughly, of the Consumer Electronics Show in the United States—in Berlin, on September 6. To find out more about EISA, visit www.eisa.eu.

The following award citations represent the collective opinion of the members of EISA’s Hi-Fi Expert Group, of which Stereophile is a voting member. They are presented here exactly as drafted by the committee, right down to the funny British spelling.—Jim Austin

ELAC Navis ARB-51

Part of a new, two-strong active speaker range from ELAC – there’s also the larger floorstanding ARF-51 – this bookshelf design combines custom drivers and