US audio magazine The Absolute Sound’s annual Golden Ear Awards single out a small selection of hi-fi components that are individually elected by each of the magazine’s reviewers. Some are longstanding references that continue to stand the test of time, while others are more recent revelations that are doubtless destined to become classics. “In either case, the products selected for a Golden Ear Award are special,” writes editor Robert Harley. 

In 2023, German brand MBL’s flagship 101 X-Treme MkII Radialstrahler loudspeaker was chosen for the Award by reviewer Jonathan Valin, and in 2024 Valin sticks with that same choice, while also adding the brand’s new C41 network player to his Award selection.

Valin’s colleague Neil Gader, meanwhile, also singles out MBL’s unique Radialstrahlers, this time in the form of the more compact 126 standmount, giving MBL an impressive – and rather rare – trio of Golden Ear Awards overall.

With the 101 X-Treme MkII, Valin experiences, “far and away the most lifelike (and enjoyable) tone color, dynamics, soundstaging, imaging, and three-dimensionality I’ve heard from a loudspeaker of any kind…. This is something different and better, friends – something you haven’t gotten before from a stereo system” and which is sure to “raise goosebumps on just about every well-recorded track.”

MBL’s C41 network player, newly launched a few months ago, also gets Valin’s 2024 vote. It’s a streamer / DAC / digital preamplifier which, when demonstrated as the sole source component at the Munich High End Show in May (driving MBL’s world-class 9011 amplifiers and the aforementioned 101 X-Treme MkII loudspeakers), the system was named ‘Best of Show’ by The Absolute Sound editor Robert Harley. Valin also plans to nominate the C41 for this year’s Digital Product of the Year Awards: “It’s that good”.

If your budget is short of the upper echelons of the 101 X-Treme, don’t despair. MBL’s “littlest” Radialstrahler loudspeaker, the MBL 126 standmount, remains “year after year” on Neil Gader’s shortlist of “exhilarating compact loudspeakers.” It still “drops jaws and perks up ears”, writes Gader, “lighting up a listening room with its sheer musicality and provoking more questions from disbelieving and delighted listeners than any speaker… even now I continue to pinch myself that I’m listening to a ‘mere’ standmount” as it ‘draws listeners into its orbit like few other speakers in or out of this world.”

Find out more about MBL’s multi award-winning Radialstrahler loudspeakers and electronics, and locate your nearest specialist retailer, at www.mbl.de/en

Discover the complete list of Golden Ear Award winners in the September 2024 issue of The Absolute Sound.