Naim Mu-so Utopia

The Mu-so Utopia is $5,500, or $6,000, or $5,600, depending on where Naim sells it to you. It is the first Naim product to carry the Utopia name, which until now belonged to the company's parent, Focal, and its reference loudspeakers. That name is now on a single table-top unit, which tells you what Naim thinks it has achieved.

The case is a brushed anodised aluminium rectangle, 1m long, 11.8cm high and 29.5cm deep, with a red trim marking it out as the flagship. Inside are 15 speaker drivers pushing a total of 720 watts: seven at the front including the bass woofers, two on each side, and four firing upward. That upward firing pair is what makes the Dolby Atmos claim real rather than decorative, since height channels need a physical speaker aimed at the ceiling, not a processing trick.

The engineering underneath is called the Naim Pulse Platform, built with Focal on the speaker side and tuned with an adaptive set-up process that reads the room and adjusts the output to it. Naim also built a set of Sphere audio modes that change how the system uses wall and ceiling reflections depending on whether you are playing a podcast, a film or a record. Streaming covers Tidal, Qobuz and Spotify, alongside AirPlay and Google Cast, with control through the Focal & Naim app.

The case for one box over a rack of separates is a real one: no matching amplifiers to components, no speaker wire across a floor, and a single system that can also sit behind a television on HDMI eARC. The trade-off is that you own one sealed unit instead of a set of upgradeable parts, which is the usual price of convenience at this level.