Deciding the Product of the Year Award for 2021 Last year was the first year we awarded a PTA Product of the Year. Last year’s winner–the Vimberg Amea loudspeakers from Germany—was chosen by me, Marc […]
Tag Archives: product of the year
Deciding the Best Value of the Year Award for 2021 As we finish out our year-end award season, I noticed that many of the same products that were considered for Product of the Year for […]
Reviewers Choice Award Winners for 2021 Before we hand out our Editors Choice, Best Value and Product of the Year Awards for 2021, here’s a summary of the winners of our Reviewers Choice Award for […]
Yamaha NS-5000
$15,000
An effort of 19 engineers and 8 years in development, the full 5000 Series sees Yamaha return to the audio deep end, making waves with a cannonball dive off the high platform. The NS-5000 loudspeaker will be viewed as the Series’ star component, and it rightly takes a place as an underpriced overachiever in the high-performance loudspeaker marketplace. The NS-5000 uses just one material for every vibrating surface—Zylon—one of the strongest fibers in existence, which offers a nearly ideal combination of stiffness and damping. The innovation continues on this large “bookshelf’s” insides, with tuned chambers replacing broadband stuffing to attack resonances more efficiently across the audible frequency band. Though Yamaha first used the term “hi-fi” way back in 1954, the NS-5000 is decidedly not (in my use of the term) hi-fi. It’s the kind of product that invites you to just settle into a very unfiltered, unforced experience. Refined, carefully judged by people who obviously care. Whether it will become the classic that its NS-1000 ancestral variants were is for the market and time to determine. But from our tiny little hidden world of the high end, we should all celebrate when companies from the bigger world of industry and commerce, like Yamaha, passionately contribute to a better audio future.
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Product of The Year 2020 Publisher’s Note: Someone told me that hanging a Product of the Year 2020 ribbon would be odd. Maybe this year was not the year to do “congratulations”, and any award, other than “Congrats, we made it” (to those of us that actually did make it), would be out of place. I hear that. To a very large extent, I completely agree–to say that “this year was not a typical year” will probably end up in some dictionary under the heading “blithe understatement”. This was a year that started with a bang followed by a long whimper. We lost so much, and the hits just kept coming. And yet. And yet, with that said, some remarkable things still happened. Like these products, collected here. Acknowledging them seems like the least we could do. It also feels a bit weird to say that 2020 was, in spite of it all, a banner year at Part-Time Audiophile. We have new writers, a new editorial structure, and perhaps surprising given that for most of the year the world was on fire during a time of plague–and that was just the election season–we saw our readership and reach expand explosively. To all of […]