Naim Muso Utopia
In the world of high-end audio, there has always been a fairly clear division of labor. If you want to listen to music seriously, you buy an amplifier, a network player, and a decent pair of speakers. If movie sound is the priority, you put together a home theater system with an AV receiver, a subwoofer, and speakers dotted around the couch. And if convenience, good looks, and a minimum of boxes matter more than anything else, you buy a soundbar or a wireless speaker and accept that you're making a compromise on sound quality. Or at least that's how the thinking went for years. The trouble is, audio manufacturers seem to have stopped playing by those rules. Increasingly, they're offering products that refuse to stay in their designated categories, promising to take the place of several components in a home entertainment system. Most of the time, the promise is more impressive than the result. It's easy enough to give a soundbar streaming capabilities or add an HDMI socket to a Bluetooth speaker. Getting that same box to sound like a proper stereo system is another matter entirely. Occasionally, though, engineers approach the challenge with rather more ambition. They're not content to assume that powerful bass, clear dialogue, and the ability to stream a playlist from a phone are all anyone could possibly want. That's when things get interesting, and even die-hard audiophiles may find themselves questioning a few long-held beliefs. Suddenly, we have compact wireless speakers that can hold their own against imposing floorstanders, or a beautiful amplifier slim enough to hang on a wall that can embarrass high-end integrated amps and 100-pound power amplifiers. Could the new Naim Muso Utopia be another of these rule-breakers?
