Kudos Audio are based in Willington, County Durham. The man behid them is Derek Gilligan and we have known him for over ten years.

The Kudos 'recipe' is simple: Uncomplicated design with high quality ingredients. Works for restaurants. Anyone who has seen either Derek or me will realise that we understand about decent food!

And the recipe certainly works here. The range kicks of with the compact X2 loudspeaker but starts to really find its groove (in our humble opinion) with the Cardea series.

The C1 stand-mount and C2 floor-stander are ported two-way designs and they give exceptional results. They are particularly well suited to Naim electronics. Lively, open and engaging. Fun to listen to. If using with Naim, the NAC-A5 cable generally wins hands-down against alternatives.

In the last couple of years, cabinets have become denser and the crossovers have been given the option of single instead of bi-wire. The improvements brought by the single wire alone was substantial, all the more remarkable when you consider that they did not use the usual hideous sounding metal bars to link the terminal posts.

Bass porting on the stand-mounts is rearward and, on the floor-standers, downward, with a vent gap between the speaker and the heavy base plate.

Next up the ladder comes the C10 stand-mount and C20 floor-stander. They use similar cabinetry, so look almost identical, but the cross-over is made with higher quality components and the tweeter is the high end SEAS Crescendo unit.

The improvements from these two factors are deep and meaningful. Put simply, considerably more music reaches your lug-holes! They time better, resolve more and could be all the speaker you will ever need.

The C10, in particular, is one of our absolute favourite loudspeakers. The 20 has a little more bass weight but just a shade less precision too and the '10 has had our vote for the past few years.

To add fuel fuel to its impending superiority complex, we are expecting a 'super' version of the 10 to arrive in 2012. We heard pre-production examples back in 2009, so Derek has been taking his time on these. The Super Ten takes the bass mid-range driver from the larger C30 model and uses an (even) more sophisticated Crescendo tweeter and further improved crossover.

Looking forward to seeing then, Derek!

Did I mention a C30?

The C30 (right) is a chunky columnar design with a footprint hardly any larger the the smaller models. As with the C2 and C20, the bass is ported downwards. In addition, though, the upper midrange driver, which has its own cabinet, is ported to the rear. Essentially a stand-mount with a sub attached.

And they are good too, winning loudspeaker of the year from HiFi Choice. But. . . Spotting a little half-heartedness creeping in?

In our larger room they can be a little bass heavy and just a tad boom prone. You can tune the lower port by changing the height of the stand-off from the bass (this can be done with the smaller offerings too, but it has never completely cleaned things up.

The result, in our hands, has been a speaker that seems to have two characters: Brilliantly clean mid and top. Slightly heavy bottom. By normal standards it's a cracker. Compared to the Super Ten, or maybe even the normal C10, it's flawed.

I am aware that 30s have worked in other spaces rather better than they do here and that they generally need powerful 'grippy' electronics to tame the bass, so my negative comments need to be put in context.

But Derek can do better. . .

Witness the new T88 Titan. These are the best passive speakers that we have ever heard. Fast, clean, refined, honest and engaging. Expensive too, but not a looney as some.

The T88 is a two box design with the lower, smaller, cabinet containing two bass drivers in an isobaric arrangement. I.E. you see only one of them. The upper cabinet contains an 8" bass / mid driver and the latest, greatest version of the Crescendo tweeter. All drivers are by Seas but they are specific versions for Kudos.

There is a cable linking the binding posts for upper and lower cabinets and Chord Signature links are supplied as standard. If you are using these on the end of, say, Naim NAC-A cable then earn yourself a few bob and stick them on eBay. NAC-A 5 sounds way better. This judgement could well be different if other cables and electronics are in use.

The Titans are not overly demanding on the amplification but then you are hardly going to stick a pair of 13 grand speakers on the end of an Amstrad either. They need a small amount of room to breath - as little as 20 cm has been fine - and quite a few hours of playing to get properly run in. So far, so normal.

The seamlessness of these is deeply impressive. Indeed, their lack sonic signature, the effortless dynamics, bass extension, the speed of stop / start, ability to resolve textures yet be benign enough to accept the odd off-colour recordings. These are fast, snappy speakers that don't sound remotely how fast, snappy speakers normally do. The treble quality is several steps ahead of any other current Kudos speaker.

One of our customers had them on home trial for a week or so, overlapping with some rather more expensive alternatives. There was a 'niceness' to the more expensive offerings but, over time, the honesty of the Titans won out. Listing to live concerts at Snape one day and to the Radio 3 broadcast the following one showed, we gather, how natural the Titans really are. All tribute too to the BBC engineers who can record a concert so effectively.

And yes, he did buy them.

These are 'long haul' speakers well worth serious contemplation. We have then on permanent demonstration.