Because of this, and the fact that the Audiolab 6000 series has some of my favorite affordable integrated amps, I paired the EVO4.2 speakers with an Audiolab 6000A Play/6000CDT Streaming Amp/CD Transport combo ( read our review here), and I was not disappointed with the result. Hence, the bass and the treble provided true sonic bookends for a host of midband detail that entertained and delighted while the bass itself acted like a football coach, encouraging and influencing the rest of the music to greater heights. However, whilst treble balance is mild to self-effacing there were occasions the Evos still jumped at me, notably with Willy DeVille’s Spanish Harlem where “It…s” had force in “it starts a fire there”. The dome pulls out upper mid diction but you don’t get high-end spit from the AMT tweeter. Here I understood why domes are used in studio monitors. Drum and bass, no speaker is going to reproduce that shy of a very large floor stander. Listen to DJ shadow three ralphs and tell me where the 10hz tone is through a pair of bookshelves.

Tying everything together is a fine sense of timing that results in surefooted rhythms and the ability to present a mass of instrumentation as a cohesive and musical whole. The longer we listen, the less we find ourselves analysing the sound, and the more we simply enjoy the results. You really have to talk bass from the off, with the speakers. There’s just no getting away from that frequency here. Methinks that here Wharfedale have come to terms with the fact that their potential audience prefer ‘the BBC sound’ to anything associated with Red Bull and Vodka shots. Additionally, the smooth high end doesn’t draw attention to distortion from CD, making silver disc an easier listen.In the box, besides the speakers and the grilles, you get some rubber feet to isolate the speakers from surfaces, as well as a pair of white cloth gloves to let you put them in place without leaving fingerprints. Listening to the Wharfedale EVO4.2

This dome midrange unit has a wide frequency response ranging from 800Hz to 5kHz. This response along with the powerful motor system helps it integrate with the AMT tweeter as well as the twin woven Kevlar bass drivers that sit below it on the front panel. The crossover point between the midrange and bass drivers is 1.2 kHz. If you’re thinking that any speaker that stands 106cm tall and has twin 15cm bass drivers should deliver plenty in the way of bass, you’d be right.The Evo 4.2’s bass/ midrange unit must reach up to 1.4kHz to meet the dome and it has a central parasitic dome – the chrome plated item at centre of bass unit cone– to help do this.

This works up to point, although the Evo4.2 sports a set of dimensions that are a long way outside the norm considering the price. Standing at 450mm tall, it is significantly larger than any rival I can think of and this has some implications on how it is best positioned. I initially try it on a 60cm high stand, but this places the AMT tweeter above the height of my ear when sat in the usual listening position so I switch to Atacama’s shorter SE24 stand. You will need to budget for new stands if you’ve previously had a more traditionally proportioned standmount in place. This provides clearance for a down-firing port, the narrow gap providing a measure of acoustic damping. However, the large format of the EVO4.2 gives it a little more oomph on the bottom end than a mini-monitor, which I like. It also plays with a larger scale. To me, it’s the best of both worlds. The other thing to think about with this speaker is the soundstage. It’s not super wide. I found the presentation mostly between the speakers, which to me was not an issue since the imaging and depth had such good separation. Well, the 4.2s had that too and bass was that underlying feeling. Bass wasn’t dominant here. With the EVO 4.2s, it’s not like you’re listening to a pair of subwoofers. These speakers didn’t swamp the upper frequencies.From my perception, that smooth-sounding speaker is partially based on an earlier Wharfedale Evolution model, so it looks like we’ve come full circle in a sense. There is also impressively little sense of constraint or colouration from the cabinets. Provided that a modicum of care has been taken when it comes to placing and positioning in the listening room, it manages to disappear from my perception and is impressively difficult to pinpoint inside a big and very consistent soundstage. It benefits from being used with decent partnering equipment, but this is more a reflection of its ability to show the benefits of whatever its attached to is capable of – thanks to its admirable transparency – rather than being a difficult design to drive.