After playing around, we end up with the speakers around 40cm from the rear wall, well away from the sides and slightly angled in towards the listening position. We’ve mentioned the stands, but room positioning plays a large part too. It takes a bit of work to get the best from these boxes. The best 30 hi-fi speakers of What Hi-Fi?'s lifetime.We found that the L82s speakers sound considerably cleaner and punchier in the bass when sat on the similarly priced Custom Designs FS104 Signatures. While they may be the obvious choice, we’re not convinced they’re the best one sonically. The £175 ($250) JS-80 are neatly welded supports that lift and angle the speakers appropriately for most listening situations. The company makes dedicated stands to suit the L82’s distinctive appearance. There’s a choice of three colours – black, dark blue and the iconic orange. While we rarely write much about speaker grilles, they’re a bigger deal here because their geometric design is a clear link back to the original L100s from the 1970s. There isn’t the slickness of finish that we’re used to seeing from the likes of KEF, Dynaudio or Bowers & Wilkins, but the walnut veneer option looks nice enough. The enclosure feels suitably solid and the cabinet edges are nice and crisp. We don’t have any real grumbles when it comes to build. As before, there’s a dished waveguide around the dome to help with dispersion. This tweeter is the same as used on the L100s, but in that application the crossover point is set far higher at 3.5kHz. It’s tuned with a front-firing reflex port and crosses over to the 25mm titanium tweeter at 1.7kHz. The mid/bass driver is a bang-up-to-date unit with carefully optimised chassis and motor system designed with some of the most sophisticated facilities around. Their appearance may hark back to simpler times but the engineering certainly doesn’t. It would be easy to dismiss the L82 Classics as a mere marketing exercise aimed at those who yearn to live in the past, but that would be a mistake.
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