At the end of each year, the SoundStage! editors pick the best products based on the reviews that have appeared across our network of sites during the previous 12 months. This year, we created an award for Outstanding Achievement in the industry—and there were three people in 2022 who won.
Until ten years ago, we’d present honorees with their awards during the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which is held in January. But as almost everyone in the hi-fi industry knows, CES has become a dead issue for hi-fi, leaving us no place to present our awards to the winners in person.
As a result, I began traveling to companies so I could present these awards personally. But starting last year, we brought a batch of awards to High End, because many of the award-winning brands exhibit here. So below are the pictures of award winners for 2022—and in one instance, for 2020, because we couldn’t present the award in person during the pandemic. These aren’t all the 2022 winners, because some of them weren’t present at High End 2023. For a complete list, check out “The 2022 SoundStage! Network Awards for Outstanding Achievement and Products of the Year,” which was published on SoundStage! Hi-Fi on December 15, 2022.
Siegfried Amft of T+A (Outstanding Achievement, 2022)
Ben Lilly of ATC for the SCM50 loudspeaker (Outstanding Performance, 2022)
Tetsuaki Aoyagi and Kazuo Hamaguchi of DS Audio for the DS 003 cartridge and optical phono preamplifier (Outstanding Performance, 2022)
Stuart McNeilis of SME for the Model 60 turntable and Series VA tonearm (Outstanding Performance, 2022)
Antonio Meze of Meze Audio for the 109 Pro headphones (Outstanding Performance, 2022)
Calvin Lee of KEF for the LS50 Meta (Hall of Fame, 2020) and the LS60 Wireless (Innovation in Design, 2022)
Nick Brown and Gary Yacoubian of SVS for the Prime Wireless Pro active speaker system (Exceptional Value, 2022)
The iFi Audio team for the Zen DAC Signature digital-to-analog converter (Exceptional Value, 2022)
