Awards season has What Hi-Fi?’s listening rooms working overtime, and the magazine’s September 2026 intake reads like a shopping list for three different kinds of enthusiast at once. There is a turntable, an integrated amplifier, a CD player, a pair of floorstanders, a compact Dolby Atmos soundbar and a very large television.
The headline act is the Rega Planar 6 RS Edition. RS stands for Rega Special, and the £2000 package borrows engineering from the pricier Planar 8 while keeping the familiar Planar silhouette and dustcover. The plinth is a Tancast 8 foam core wrapped in a high-pressure laminate skin with brushed aluminium edging, a combination chosen to be rigid and light at the same time. On top sits the RB880 tonearm, factory-fitted and aligned with Rega’s flagship Nd9 moving magnet cartridge. A custom-matched Neo MK2 power supply drives a hand-tuned 24 V motor through a CNC twin drive pulley and two Rega Reference EBLT belts. Bought separately, the RB880 alone is £765 and the Nd9 £695.
The Sonos Beam Ultra is the soundbar in question, and it is a bigger jump than the name suggests. Nine drivers, five tweeters and four low-profile woofers, replace the five of the Beam (Gen 2). Two of those tweeters fire upward for height effects, two fire sideways for stereo width and one faces forward for centre imaging. Sonos claims a true 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos presentation from a cabinet measuring 29.53 x 2.48 x 4.13 inches. Preorders opened on September 1, 2026 at US$699, with shipping from September 29, 2026.
Arcam is marking 50 years with the A50 Signature, the new flagship of its Radia range at £2499 / US$3000. It is the brand’s first fully dual-mono Class G integrated amplifier, each channel built as a discrete section, rated at up to 150W per channel. Analogue inputs run to three RCA pairs, a balanced XLR pair and a Class A MM/MC phono stage, while the digital side covers HDMI eARC, USB-C audio, optical and coaxial. The amplifier made its global debut at High End Vienna 2026 and reaches dealers from Q3 2026. The matching CD25 disc player, which slots in above the CD5, is in for testing alongside it.
The Ruark Talisman-R revives a name from 1990 at £1499 per pair. The two-way bass reflex design pairs a 27mm silk dome tweeter with a 16.5cm NS+ long-throw fibre woofer behind Ruark’s trademark sloped baffle, decoupled on elastomer bushes to keep vibration out of the drivers. Quoted frequency response is 35Hz to 22kHz, sensitivity 87dB and nominal impedance 6 ohms, with a choice of Fused Walnut veneer or Satin Charcoal lacquer.
Rounding things out is the TCL X11L, the company’s flagship Super QLED. It costs £3999 in the 75-inch size, with an 85-inch version also offered. The panel combines quantum dot technology with an UltraColor filter and a higher local dimming zone count than before, and the set carries an integrated Bang & Olufsen sound system rather than the usual afterthought speakers.
Between them, these six cover almost every corner of a modern hi-fi and home cinema rack, from a belt-driven record player to a television that wants to be its own surround system.
