TrustedReviews Awards 2007 Review

It's a universal constant like the speed of light, and the England football team being rubbish that the headphones bundled with all audio players are useless. The Shure SE210s will be a major step up from anything you'll get for free, but more surprising is that you can pick a pair up for under £70 on the street. The SE210s use a single driver to deliver the full frequency range, unlike some super high-end offerings, saving on the cost of the extra driver and a crossover, but they still excel in the sound quality department. Nevertheless bass response is excellent as is the rest of the wall of sound. As these are in-ear and encased in new foam sleeves you can be sure of a tight fitting noise isolating experience. Build quality is also top notch, with heavy duty, gold plated cabling and a neat carrying case. If you want a quality earphone upgrade without paying the earth, these are the ones to go for.

Like the headphones that come with MP3 players, the speakers that come bundled with most PCs are a complete waste of time. If you don't have room for, or don't want, a full 5.1-channel set then you'll need a good stereo pair, such as the Creative Gigaworks T20s. They are rather tall and wide for a desktop set, but are solidly built and look great, especially with the covers off. On the front are well hewn knobs for Bass, Treble and Volume as well as a headphone socket and a front mounted Aux input. We tested them with a wide range of musical styles and the T20s never failed to impress producing a wonderful sound, with full rounded bass along with balanced and clear mid range and upper frequencies. The T20s even have sufficient bass for you not to miss a separate sub woofer. For the money, these are one of the finest sets of PC speakers you can buy.

Nobody has been doing video enabled MP3 players as long as Archos. Compared to Archos, Apple is the flashy kid that gate crashes parties. The 605 won't win any catwalk shows, but it's not hideous and in the feature department it has got it where it counts. The screen starts things off by delivering 800 x 480 of your finest pixels in a 4.3in widescreen display. It also contains a 30GB hard disk on which to store your content and it's got built in Wi-Fi and the excellent Opera browser to view web pages. It will keep going for over 5.5 hours with video and 17 hours if you stick to audio. And all for around £170. It's all enough to make 8GB iPod touch owners start to shift uncomfortably in their seats and look down shiftily at their shoes. Which is great, obviously.

When we've waxed lyrical over a pair of £70 Creative desktop speakers it seems rather a leap to suggest that £750 for a four speaker set-up could get 9 out of 10 for value. Don't worry though, they have now come down to a mere £500! Trust us then, when we say that the Ferguson Hill FH007 and FH008 sub have to be seen, and heard, to be believed. The two acrylic horns and two fish bowl speakers are completely transparent, while the sub has an iPod white finish. Meanwhile the amp has two inputs - one for an iPod and one for a hi-fi component. They must be run in for a while to get the best of them, but after a couple of weeks our erstwhile audiophile Jon was using words such as "revolutionary", "transparent" and "emotional". Certainly the speakers are sensitive to the types of music you play on them and are quite directional, but if you hook these up to your PC, sit yourself in the sweet spot and feed them the right material, you'll be privy to something very special indeed.