It’s a public vote held each year at the Australian Hi-Fi Show, to answer the question: “Which room, for you, had the best sound, and why?”
To encourage responses, we include this question as the ‘prize question’ on the Competition Cards that are distributed to all visitors in their Show Bags, offering a collection of wonderful hi-fi and AV prizes to be won by collecting ‘stamps’ in various rooms of the Show.
Collect the stamps, choose your favourite room, enter the competition.
If you were a visitor who entered the competition and you haven’t heard from us by now, then we’re afraid you didn’t win. :( But your Room Votes have still been counted!
Four rooms pushed ahead of the others as we counted the votes – though there are also good few honourable mentions for rooms with significant votes, which we’ll mention at the end.
One interesting trend was that three of the four top rooms were running active speakers, where the amplifiers are inside the speakers, and sometimes streaming as well, making for extremely simple systems, and to judge from the votes, also an advantage in creating beautiful sounds too.
Let’s get into it and meet those top-voted rooms for Best Sound...
Best Sound of Show: WINNER
Westan Australia’s Focal room
Westan Australia brought the remarkable Focal Diva Utopia speakers to their big room on the Ground Floor, with Melbourne’s Premium Sound store working the room, and clearly living up to their name, given the votes that stacked up for this room to give it the win.
Yet this was an unusual system – no supporting stack of electronics required for these streaming active Focal Diva Utopia speakers, though they were given the slight sprucing of Atlas power cables. Otherwise the Divas worked entirely alone, the ultimate modern high-end system, using their streaming smarts, built-in amps and impressive driver arrays to impress visitors with their solo performances.
This room came absolutely top of the votes, so we congratulate Focal, Westan and Premium Sound, winners of Best Sound of the Show at the Australian Hi-Fi Show 2025.
Best Sound of Show: SECOND PLACE
Audio Marketing & Len Wallis’s Triangle demonstration
Up in the Corridor of Sound, in room 902, distributor Audio Marketing and the staff from Sydney’s Len Wallis Audio brought together a stack of Musical Fidelity electronics, including the acrylic wonders of the M8xTT turntable with the new M8x Vinyl phono stage.
But there was no doubt about what most impressed visitors to the room: all the votes for this room mentioned Triangle’s active streaming Capella speakers, and the extraordinary dynamics and impressive bass pounding from these lusciously-finished standmount speakers.
As with the Focals, the Capellas can be a system in themselves, streaming from AirPlay 2, Chromecast, Bluetooth or Roon, though their included ‘hub’ also adds USB-B, three opticals, an HDMI, a coaxial input and analogue inputs.
Full marks for performance, power and impressing the visitors here!
Best Sound of Show: THIRD PLACE
Magenta Audio with Dutch & Dutch
Magenta Audio brought the award-winning Dutch & Dutch 8c speakers to the Corridor of Sound, making this the third room to be recognised for active speakers with their own internal power, their own streaming – and in the case of Dutch & Dutch, plenty of other hidden wonders as well. While they present as an apparent two-way, with magnesium-alloy dome tweeter and eight-inch midrange, there are two more 8-inch high-excursion bass drivers to the rear, while the 49cm-high oak cabinets contain three amplifiers providing a total of 1000W of power.
“Bad Room? Great Sound” promised Magenta’s pull-up sign – and while we hope the Show hotel's rooms aren’t too bad at all, Magenta certainly proved the point and pulled the praise from the punters, scoring third spot in the public poll for Best Sound of the Show.
Best Sound of Show: FOURTH PLACE
Bowers & Wilkins by Masimo Consumer
The sweet sounds from a pair of lusciously-finished Bowers & Wilkins 805 D4 Signature loudspeakers climbed to fourth place in the public Best Sound vote; their performance was supported by twin Bowers & Wilkins DB3D subwoofers and Marantz 10 Series electronics, with the Link 10N network audio player, SACD 10 reference CD player, and 2 x 250W of Purifi amplification within the Model 10 integrated amplifier. The stack was topped by Denon’s flagship DP-3000 direct drive turntable with DL 103R cartridge.
Wth votes also received for the high-value performance in the adjacent room from a system of Denon electronics and Polk speakers, Masimo would jump up at least one place in the rankings if we added the results of their three rooms together – but we don’t do that. Our congratulations nevertheless to Masimo on several rooms of superb sounds at the Show.
Honourable mentions
There was barely a room which didn’t garner at least one vote from impressed Showgoers, but the following rooms were knocking on the doors of our top 4, so congratulations to:
- Yamaha: both its main room and its headphone demonstration
- Serhan Swift
- Elementi/Wavetrain
- HeyNow Hi-Fi
And also rising above to pack with a strong vote count were:
- Richter
- MaxMedia
- Vivid Audio /Avation
- DanA
- Synergy.
We thank everyone who exhibited at the Show, all the visitors, and especially those who voted to decide our Best Sound of the Show!
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