No matter how those performance attributes were achieved, they combine to create a speaker I could happily live with for a very long time. And the fact that the 770 looks cool and is made in England adds icing to the cake. If you’re going to recreate a classic, it makes sense to make it in the same place as the original. So kudos to Peter Comeau and team—in every respect, their new Mission 770 really is a job well done.

Although the new Mission 770 is technically superior to the original, it retains its predecessor's charm. It makes pretty much any type of music you play a real occasion. It doesn't do this by adding pleasant-sounding artefacts, though. Instead, it's clean enough to take you directly to the recording itself, at which point it steps aside as much as possible. I liked this new, retro-styled loudspeaker a hell of a lot – and the way it sounds suggests to me that designer Peter Comeau had plenty of fun voicing it, too. Nice work, if you can get it!

As I type this up, the Missions are playing a vinyl copy of Underworld’s (they of Born Slippy) Change the Weather; one of their early albums from the eighties (yes, they’ve been around for a while). Objectively it’s not a good album and it’s not a piece of mastering for the ages either. With the 770 doing the legwork though, I don’t care. It’s huge, unapologetic good fun. Sometimes it is necessary to accept that Hi-Fi; like any luxury goods, is as much about how it makes you feel as anything else. What Mission has built is something that - for some of us anyway - nails this so perfectly that the only logical conclusion is to award it a Best Buy.

Mission's reborn 770 presents an almost floorstander-style listening experience from a more 'compact' cabinet that, thanks to adhering to the aesthetics of the 1978 original, will likely find plenty of admirers. So, too, should this loudspeaker's sonic signature, which seems tailor-made for those who crave rich, warm bass and mids, while its easy-to-drive nature is another feather in its very polished 'classic' cap.

Traditionally, a reviewer lists a loudspeaker's performance in specific regions: "The bass was ..., the midrange was ..., the high frequencies were ..., the stereo imaging was ..., etc." This proved more difficult to do with the Mission 770 than I had anticipated, because the loudspeaker's sonic character was in some ways more than the sum of its parts. The highs didn't call attention to themselves, the bass was well-extended and articulate, the stereo imaging was sufficiently well-defined. But all through my time with the Missions, I kept returning to that warm, detailed, and musically involving midrange. That's where the 770 excels, and that's why I recommend it.

No need for rose-tinted glasses here. Mission’s resurrected 770 offer an excellent alternative to the established class leaders