At Neat's workshop in Barnard Castle, in the north of England, the reference for a new speaker can be a real guitar. Founder Bob Surgeoner worked as a musician for 25 years, mainly in jazz, folk and blues, and Malcolm Steward of The Absolute Sound reports that Neat keeps instruments at the factory and compares its speakers with recordings made at gigs. The idea Neat returns to most is a clever way to get big bass from a small box. It hides a second bass driver inside the cabinet, directly behind the one you see, and the two work as a pair. Alan Sircom of Hi-Fi+ explains that the pair behaves like one driver in a cabinet nearly twice its real size. David Price of StereoNET heard the Ministra as tonally even and "seriously rhythmically snappy." Neat suits listeners in ordinary rooms who want big, lively sound from compact boxes.

The Iota family is the way in. The original Iota was a tiny speaker that could stand upright or lie on its side, and the Iota Alpha turned the idea into a small floorstander with its bass driver firing down at the floor. Sircom found the Alpha easy to place, a foot or so from the back wall with a slight toe-in, and best suited to small rooms and "smaller, agile amplifiers." The step up is the Majistra standmount, which brings the hidden twin bass drivers and a ribbon tweeter to a box designed to go near a wall. It does want an amplifier with current in reserve, and the Ditton Works reviewer used 200 watts a channel. Jason Kennedy of Hi-Fi+ notes that Neat speakers have always been popular with Naim owners. Carry a down-firing model by its sides, since fingers under the base can push in the bass driver, and give a new pair time, because Neat says some models need up to 200 hours to run in.

Surgeoner was a professional guitar player in the 1980s who sold hifi from his home to make ends meet, Kennedy writes, and then opened a shop in Darlington called North Eastern Audio Traders. There he designed the Petite, a small speaker with a big, lifelike sound, and in 1990 the trade liked it at the Penta show at Heathrow. Neat says the Petite went into full production in 1991 and that by 1993 it had become a full-time speaker maker. The MF9 of 2001, a tall tower that Sircom says spent six years on the drawing board, led to the Ultimatum models, which had a pair of small tweeters firing upward from the top panel. When Steward reviewed the Ultimatum XL10, Surgeoner pulled into his drive in an MPV and unpacked the crates himself. What Hi-Fi? called Neat unusual among hifi companies in being run by musicians, with its own recording studio on site. Every Neat is still built by hand in North East England, and the current range still includes the Petite Classic.