WINNERS REVEALED! Meet the winners of the Sound+Image Awards 2025

Welcome to our 2025 Sound+Image Awards announcement! Up here on the web, it's a click-around affair – each of the Category images below links through to a set of winners, listed along with their Judges' Citations.

But get hold of our Special Awards Issue as a magazine (in either its print or digital form) and you'll get a full article on every winner, explaining the merits and possible distractions of each winner, and all the reasons we regard each as the best or best-value hi-fi and AV equipment on the market today.

So I won’t bang on about it too much here, except perhaps to note that I was pleased to find so many Australian products this year making it through the strongest competition of international manufacturers new and established, with all their various possible advantages of market conditions and global mass production and possible local support, and well, I won’t mention tariffs...

But despite that, or perhaps taking advantage of that to offer value locally, we have nine Australian winners, and several others which might fairly boast some useful Aussie content. Don’t it make you proud!

I suppose it is almost inevitable that our two Cinema Design ‘Gold’ winners are Australian, because our custom installation articles cover almost exclusively Australian home cinemas and smart homes – though we’ve had a few from New Zealand, and we feature all CEDIA’s regional finalists each year, which often include some astoundingly bonkers cinema rooms from China. Our Gold winners are to be found among our Audiovisual winners – click below to see them all.

Likewise and almost by definition for our Lifetime Achievement Winner, since all such winners have been at least residentially Australian; we made only one exception, back in 2012, when Ken Ishiwata was over for the Sydney hi-fi show; I had known Ken since my very earliest days in hi-fi writing around 1990… there’s a hazy memory of going to deepest Ireland with Marantz on some fairly flimsy excuse for a trip (it was still like the 1980s back in the early 1990s, and I must have had a good time because I can’t remember much about it). But it was a great pleasure to give him an award all those years later, when he had grown old and famous, and I had become Australian.

(At this point someone is probably shouting ‘Oi, aren’t you a Brit?’ Which was and is true, but I have had my Australian passport for 20 years, did the pledge, got a free Lamington and a native plant that I confess didn’t make it to maturity, so I can certainly be proud of Australian stuff.)

Back to the Australians. Look at Halcro among our Amplifier winners: not content with making the world’s best mono and stereo power amps, now the South Australian company has delivered what
is probably the world’s best preamplifier in a spectacular flurry of innovation.

Talking of innovation, Western Australia’s March Audio’s products are loaded with the stuff, both native innovation and imported, since they leverage the developments at Denmark's Purifi. This year sees us recognising both March power amps and the company’s floorstanding speakers.

And look at our Australian speaker companies.

There’s Richter, which consistently releases beautifully-engineered speakers with ridiculous levels of sound-per-pound, as we used to say in the UK (and here, I suppose, before dollarisation).

Or look at Krix, using its global expertise from building real cinemas to design now a clever and very different soundbar solution for delivering huge cinematic sound under today’s giant TVs.

And VAF! — I was delighted to see VAF back in our Awards, hitting the heights with its A$22k Signature i93 MKV floorstanders. When I returned to hi-fi journalism here in Australia around 2006, VAF was doing some amazing and wildly innovative stuff with very early dock-based speakers, and Sound Walls, and all sorts. Decades later VAF is still making fine music, and still innovating.

There may be bits of Australian-ness in other of our awards of which I am unaware, but I do know that Zildjian’s headphones use Australian hearing correction technology, and that the HEOS streaming technology in Denon’s amplifier and in Marantz's various winners here was developed and is still maintained in Sydney. It was many months before release that we sneaked a look at a prototype of a Horizon speaker hidden in the back rooms of Masimo's Sydney HQ: the coding behind this most luxurious of one-box hi-fi systems is pleasingly Australian.

And those are just this year’s Aussie winners: last year there was Dellichord, Serhan Swift, Kiat Low from Duntech… while Mark DÖhmann’s turntables, Kyron’s systems and others are equally unmissable proof of Aussie hi-fi prowess.

Not that I’m going all ‘Make Australia Great Again’ – I say congratulations also to all our winners from overseas, of course! In a way it’s amazing they can make it elsewhere and still get it all the way over here competitively-priced enough to still win an award.

So well done everyone! But of course we don’t make the magazine for the manufacturers. We make it for you, the reader, to bring you all this amazing hi-fi and AV gear all in one special collectable Awards issue.

So well done you, too, for being here to read about it. Now get clicking on those Category images above (or the quick links below) to meet all the winners in this year's Sound+Image Awards. And if your expectations are whetted for more detail, get hold of our Special Awards Issue, in newsagents, as a digital issue online, and now available for direct home delivery (click here).

Enjoy the music! (And the movies.)
Cheers!
Jez Ford, Editor

Vinyl winners CLICK HERE

Hi-Fi System winners CLICK HERE

Amplifier winners CLICK HERE

Loudspeaker winners CLICK HERE

Audiovisual winners CLICK HERE

Headphone winners CLICK HERE

DAC winners CLICK HERE

• Showcase! - world-class Australian home theatres & smart homes

• See all our Australian reviews from Sound+Image and Australian Hi-Fi magazines