It's a couple of years since Derek Gilligan broke out on his own and turned stand manufacturer Kudos into a speaker company. We've been keen advocates of his products from day one and particular favourites have been the stand-mounted C1 and C10 speakers.

Over time, there have been some subtle changes. The grilles have become a little more 'normal' - although I'd still leave them in the box - and the binding posts are now made by Michell Engineering. Neither of these changes have been considered dramatic, but something else has clearly been going on in the background.

We had a call the other day from Chris Fayers, who now does the on-the-road stuff for Kudos to make arrangements for him to come and play us a single-wired version of the C10. "I think you'll be impressed".

Now, we already know that, to our ears and with Naim electronics, the C10's sound best with the speaker feed to the top (treble) terminals and that the best sounding link wire is Chord Rumour whereas the best sounding speaker cable is NAC-A5, so we are willing to accept that some reductionism might impact on the sound. Nevertheless, we were surprised at how straightforward the judgement was.

So now we have a new pair of C10s running in. A pair with two terminals rather than the previous four. As far as we can glean, the official line is that this perceived improvement "is really a Naim thing", and that other brands may prefer retaining the option to bi-wire.

Figuring that we mainly partner them with Naim, we have elected to have our new C2 floor-standers also with reduced connectivity. We have also opted for an extreme veneer choice for the C10s. The ebony pictured right will not be to everyone's taste but it certainly is dramatic, even if it does add 20% to the cost.

The new C2s are in natural oak and now sport a re-styled plinth too. They seem heavier than C2 / C20s felt before and also sound rather more organised than we remember. Some serious auditioning is still to be done. Our bias towards the stand-mounts was fairly strong, so it will be interesting to see if these changes will pull the new C2s back into the running. As matters stand, they sound like a very competitive sub-£2k speaker.

Arcam, ATC, Audio Technica, Creek, Chord Company, Eichmann, Dynavector, Epos, Focal / JM Labs, Grado headphones, Harbeth, Hutter

Isoblue (and special branch), Kudos Audio, Lyngdorf, Lyra, Michell Engineering, Naim Audio, Neat Acoustics, Nordost, Origin Live, Ortofon, Nottingham Analogue, Partington, Primare, Rega, Roksan, Rountree Acoustics, Sim2, Graham Slee, Shahinian, Something Solid,

Stands Unique, Stax Earspeakers, Sumiko, Trichord, Wireworld, Wyrewizard

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