The Clarity Alliance Awards

For the last five years, the Bristol Sound & Vision Show has also been home to the Clarity Alliance awards. The Clarity Alliance is a trade association within the UK for promoting the benefits of quality hi-fi and home cinema, and allowing the manufacturers, distributors, dealers, and press to work together to inform and educate. Although the position was a purely voluntary one, as the first Chair of Clarity, and then sitting as an ex-officio board member until the beginning of 2017, I felt unable to discuss the Clarity Alliance publically as it was a potential conflict of interests.

This year’s awards are the first in which I had no formal involvement, and were given over to ‘best in show’ exhibitions at the show, and the new Chair of the Clarity Alliance, Tom Barron of PMC, presented the awards. While Clarity has moved away from developing a public presence at this time, the judging process – performed by unnamed ‘secret shopper’ judges roaming the rooms in several key categories – the awards are prized as they are considered professional confirmation of the work done to bring a good exhibition to the public, and the winning certificates are frequently displayed in the winning rooms after being judged on the first day.

This year’s winners were as follows:

Best hi-fi demonstration: KEF Audio

Best home cinema room: Arcam

Best display: Dynaudio

Best Innovation: Devialet

Overall Best of Show: Naim Audio

Additionally, every year, Clarity presents a Lifetime Achievement Award to a member of the industry who has given decades of service to the advancement of high performance audio or audio/video. Past recipients include the well-known reviewer Paul Messenger, and Eric Kingdon of Sony. This year, the award was presented to Paul Stevenson, who spent 35 years working for Naim Audio, joining the company in 1981. Paul became Naim’s Managing Director in 2000 and Chairman of the company from July 2015 until the end of last year.