Innholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2016 i Australian HiFi

Chartwell is back in business and once more producing the original fabled LS3/5 BBC monitor… but note that’s the original version, not the LS3/5a. The Chartwell LS 3/5 is being manufactured by English company Graham Audio, which now owns both Chartwell and Swisstone brands. It’s using bespoke drive units and crossover networks made by Derek Hughes, whose father Spencer Hughes founded Spendor and was on the team of BBC engineers that developed the LS3/5; only 20 pairs of which were ever made. Due to manufacturing issues, a second version, known as the LS3/5a, was developed, and it was this one that went into commercial production. However, according to Hughes, the BBC’s engineers always preferred the sound of the original LS3/5 over that of the LS 3/5a. For this new design,…

Krix’s new Symmetrix in-wall speakers will fit into a standard 70mm stud wall, can be retro-fitted as well as new-installed, and come with a back-box. It’s 211mm wide and 596mm high and houses two 100mm-diameter bass/midrange drivers and a 26mm ring radiator tweeter. Unlike most in-wall speakers that are open-backed and therefore rely on the wall cavity for their performance, the Symmetrix has a fully enclosed rear cabinet, which guarantees ideal bass performance. The grilles have a stylishly slim bezel design and are held in place by strong magnets. Made from stainless steel, the white grilles can easily be painted to match your desired wall colour. ‘Because these high-performance speakers will fit into a standard 70mm stud wall, you no longer have to rely on building out the wall to…

Perreaux of New Zealand has released the SR58, a three-way, five-driver floorstanding loudspeaker whose side panels are braced with stone. Martin van Rooyen, Perreaux’s managing director, said one of the reasons he decided to start building speakers as well as electronic products was his disappointment with the quality of many modern loudspeakers, even those badged with famous names. ‘Over the last ten years we’ve seen many manufacturers shift their complete production to Asia,’ he said, ‘and you would be amazed at the number of manufacturers who talk about “faultless workmanship”, “originality of thought and design” and “tradition”, whose only contact with the finished product is when it arrives inside a 40-foot container from their Asian supplier. We build the SR58 right here in New Zealand, using top-tier drivers manufactured entirely…

How USA-based company Jeff Rowland Design can fabricate such an extraordinarily beautiful chassis from a dull old slab of aluminium (even if it is of the highest grade) is, to me, one of the marvels of the high-end. Here is an undeniably exquisite machined-from-solid design, blanketed in lustrous black anodising across its integral milled heatsinks—no off-the-shelf run-of-the-mill shin-shredding stuff here—and fronted with a three-dimensional fascia sporting the most deeply radiant patina. Everything about a Jeff Rowland Design component—and this, the 625 S2, is the latest stereo amplifier in the company’s stable—reeks of ‘ne plus ultra’ quality. But the company is not only known for its exemplary fit and finish. Still headed by the towering Jeff Rowland himself, the Jeff Rowland Design Group (JRDG) has been producing highly acclaimed and desired…

One of the roles of any good consumer-based business is to seek out the best solutions for their client base. As audio retailers, our job is to seek out the best products in our specific market place, and then present them to our customers. This is the main thing that separates specialist audio retailers from the mass marketers – we take the time to listen and evaluate, and then promote accordingly. The alternative is to leave the buying to the deal makers where products are selected on profitability, exclusivity or marketability, usually generated by the brand itself. Performance is rarely a consideration. It was refreshing to see our choices validated at the recent Sound+Image Awards held in Sydney. A great number of the products that we carry were honoured on…

National Audio Group has announced that despite the tribulations of the Australian dollar, the prices of the entire range of Audiovector speakers will remain the same, including that of the Audiovector SR1 Signature. Audiovector’s SR1 Signature is a bookshelf/standmount two-way bass-reflex design that uses twin rear-firing ports. Unlike most of Audiovector’s speakers, which use the company’s Avantgarde dome tweeter. ‘The high-performance 3rd-generation Evotech tweeter is the fastest and most delicate soft dome tweeter in Evotech’s range, and is also found on the SR6 Signature’, said Con Dikeos, of National Audio Group. ‘The membrane—made from natural silk that’s been reinforced by carbon fibre—moves extremely freely, thanks to Audiovector’s low compression concept (LCC) technology and its soundstage enhancement concept (SEC) open-back system.’ The 152mm diameter bass/midrange driver has a cone that’s said…

Looking at the price, you’d think the gold finish of Final’s Sonorous X headphones was real gold, but it’s made of much harder materials: primarily aluminium, titanium and stainless steel. The Sonorous is the flagship of Final’s range, and retails here in Australia for $7,399. Its release in Japan was announced by Final’s consulting engineer Yoshihisa Mori and company president, Mitsuru Hosoo, who took over following the sad death of the company’s founder, Kanemori Takai. In the year since, the company has changed its name from Final Audio Design, whose initials had an unfortunate connotation in English, to simply ‘Final’, and released several new products including the Sonorous VIII. The Sonorous X has 50mm diameter titanium balanced armature diaphragms that are integrated with the front plate, which has been CNC-machined…

Acoustic Research has launched two high-resolution audio products, the ARM2 high-resolution music player with built-in headphone amplifier and the ARUA1 high-definition USB digital audio converter (DAC) with headphone amplifier. Both products use Burr-Brown PCM1794A DACs and high slew-rate headphone amplifiers and support a wide selection of high-resolution media files including WAV, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC, APE, DSD and DXD. The ARM2 has a 127mm touch-screen and built-in Wi-Fi. In addition to the 64GB of on-board storage, it also has a Micro SDXC slot and, according to Acoustic Research, its rechargeable battery is good for nine hours of continuous playback. ‘The Acoustic Research ARM2 is a genuine, audiophile-oriented music-only portable music player that incorporates lots of innovative audio technologies in a sleek, stylish design,’ said Scott McKenzie of Amber Technology, which distributes…

Noble, renowned for its IEMs, has released its first loudspeaker, the Noble One. It’s a very small (274×560×432mm) three-way bass reflex studio monitor that has a unique midrange/tweeter assembly that can be rotated so the speaker can be used in either vertical or horizontal orientation. The model demonstrated at release was finished in Noble’s signature deep metallic blue with the front baffle’s metallic rotatable section anodised gunmetal grey. ‘The fact users can rotate the baffle through 90 degrees either direction so that the speaker can be laid down on its side, allows the speaker to be more readily used in a tight working environment while keeping the tweeter and midrange drivers appropriately aligned,’ said Dr John Moulton, Noble’s president and, with Brannon Mason, co-owner. The Noble One’s bass reflex port…

It appears that Q Acoustics’ Concept 40 loudspeakers are the result of a speaker design project that ‘went off the rails’… so to speak. It all started when the Concept 2020i became so phenomenally successful for Q Acoustics that the company was inspired to build the Concept 20, which was equally successful. However, both were only small two-driver two-way bookshelf speakers with small cabinets and thus their deep bass response and maximum output levels were constrained by the immutable laws of physics. So when customers started asking for a model with more bass and more power-handling ability, Q Acoustics initially took the KISS (Keep It Simple & Straightforward) approach to design and simply added a second bass/midrange driver, while at the same time increasing the size of the cabinet to…

Jeff Lynne’s ELO Alone in the Universe He writes, he produces, he plays every instrument except a bit of percussion, and he still feels he has to exert further ownership by prefacing the band name with his own—as if this collection could possibly have come from any of the not-really-ELOs that have toured in the nearly 30 years since the true original called it a day. But of course the legendary Brummie has never lain idle, and this fine (if somewhat short, at 33 minutes) album is every bit a match for 2001’s ‘Zoom’ and hopefully gets a rather better reception too, given last year’s BBC concert in Hyde Park which spurred this second comeback. The songs are a delight, Lynne’s gift for effortless melody and harmony combining with plenty…

Magne Amdahl Astrognosia; Aesop | Dennis Storhøi/NROrch/Ingar Heine Bergby | 2L Pure Audio Amdahl was a pupil of Vladimir Ashkenazy and carved out a career in classical music and in jazz as a composer, conductor, pianist and trombonist. In 1994 he won the Orchestral Work of the Year in Norway for Astrognosia, presented here on this very fine new release from 2L. It’s a suite inspired by the twelve signs of the Zodiac that is an exceedingly well-crafted suite of light music, entertaining and diverting. The superb playing by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra under Ingar Heine Bergby brings out the humour of the work. Morten Lindberg and his team have come up with yet another gem of audio recording quality. This set comes on both SACD and BD-A but hi-res…

Bowers & Wilkins has added three new models to its range of custom installation speakers: the CCM Cinema 7 in-ceiling speaker, the CWM Cinema 7 in-wall speaker and the CCM632. The CCM Cinema 7 is designed for down-firing, in-ceiling left, centre and right speaker positions. It has a 180mm Kevlar-coned bass/midrange driver and a 25mm ‘Nautilus’ swirl-loaded aluminium dome tweeter. Both drivers are angled to the mounting surface and can be directed towards listeners so they hear the correct balance of sound. CWM Cinema 7 in-wall 2.5-way speaker does the job of three home cinema speakers—front-left, centre and front-right—and can be mounted beside, above or below the screen. Both Cinema 7 speakers feature ultra-narrow bezels and magnetically-attached metal grilles which can be customised to complement your décor, and are installed…

Bose has added a new, smaller, powered speaker to its SoundTouch range. The new SoundTouch 10 has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, plus a new unidome driver that Bose says has greater excursion than any same-sized driver in Bose’s 50-year history. The Bose SoundTouch 10 wireless speaker measures just 212×141× 85mm (HWD) and uses DSP in combination with a new Bose ‘Unidome’ 64mm transducer. ‘This new driver has the highest output and the greatest excursion of any transducer of its size in Bose’s 50-year history,’ said Sam Carter, of Bose. ‘The resulting performance is remarkable: the SoundTouch 10 plays cleaner, deeper, and louder than any single speaker of its stature. After all, what’s the point of streaming if it doesn’t sound any good?’ The SoundTouch 10 has six presets that allow easy,…

The Air Force III is the newest member of the Air Force family of turntables from Japanese manufacturer TechDAS and obviously draws heavily on the experience the company gained building its Air Force I and Airforce II models. All three turntables use air-bearings and vacuum hold-down technologies. ‘The use of air-bearings contributes in no small way to the super-silent background noise performance of the Air Force turntables, along with their legendary Japanese build quality,’ said Warwick Freemantle, of Pure Music Group, which distributes TechDAS in Australia, ‘though the reduction in noise is also achieved through isolation and damping of extraneous vibrations and termination of resonances in the vinyl itself, which is where the vacuum hold-down comes into play. The result is sonic performance that is second to none.’ The TechDAS…

German manufacturer Heco says the design of its new Direkt floor-standing loudspeakers was influenced by classic guitars from rock history—‘wide, loud and agile’ says Heco. The Direkt is a two-way floor-standing bass reflex system that pairs a 275mm-diameter paper-diaphragm bass/ midrange driver with a 28mm silk dome tweeter (nominal crossover at 2.35kHz) that’s loaded by a solid aluminium horn. ‘The use of lightweight Kraft paper, combined with the fact that the surround uses a low-loss rubber that displays particularly low-distortion characteristics thanks to Klippel optimisation, ensures high reproduction precision and excellent impulse response together with precise bass,’ said Isabel Halbauer of Heco. Dual bass-reflex ports exit through the base of the enclosure in order to increase efficiency due to the ground-loading effect. Halbauer says the tweeter’s efficiency is further enhanced…

B&W picked up five awards at the recent Sound + Image Awards night, including two winning awards plus a mention for being the second most popular download from the AVHUB website. That B&W’s DB1 Subwoofer won its category was not a huge surprise, following the rave review by Stephen Dawson in Sound + Image Magazine (Oct/Nov 2015), where he said: ‘B&W’s top-of-the-line subwoofer combines convenience and software control with spectacular performance—it had us walking down the street to hear the results… clearly one of the very best subwoofers on the market at the moment. For those who do want the best.’ Also winning its category were B&W’s new 802 D3 loudspeakers, only just released, and also the subject of a rave review in Audio Esoterica magazine (Issue No 2, 2015)…

Audio Features Air Studios Monitor Certification Dolby Atmos/Dolby TrueHD/Dolby Digital Plus/Dolby Surround DTS:X/DTS neural:X ready DTS-HD master Audio/DTS-ES/DTS Neo:X|11.1 USB-DAC 192kHz/32-bit with DSD native playback DSD Direct playback via network/USB (2.8MHz, 5.6MHz/2ch) DSD Disc (SACD) playback via HDMI (2.8MHz/5.1ch, 2ch) SABRE32 Ultra DAC (ES9016S) for 9.2ch Audio Scaler 192kHz/32-bit enhancer MCACC PRO Room Calibration with: • Full Band Phase Control • Auto Phase Control Plus/Phase Control Plus • Standing Wave Control • 3D time Axis Measurement • Precision Distance • Subwoofer Equalisation (4 Band) • Bass Management System for Dolby Atmos-enabled speakers Sound Enhancements: • PQLS Bitstream/Multi-Surround/2ch • Advanced Sound Retriever (Multi-ch) • Auto Sound Retriever/Auto Sound retriever for ARC • Auto Level Control (Multi-ch) • Virtual Speakers (Wide/Height/ Surround Back) • Rendering Mode Advanced Surround modes • Action, Drama,…

Bernie McGann 1966 | Sarang Bang SBR028 Few would dispute that Bernie McGann was the most distinctive jazz musician Australia has produced, and this provides a chance to hear how fully-formed that singularity was back in 1966. You can revel in McGann’s leaping lines and jolting phrasing; in the way his idiosyncrasies not only catapulted the groove rather than stalling it, but also compounded the emotional intensity. With him are trumpeter Kim Paterson, pianist Bobby Gebert, bassist Andy Brown and drummer George Neidorf, all playing with both gusto and adventurousness. McGann’s Lazy Days is here, as are Coleman’s When Will the Blues Leave? and Monk’s Rhythm-a-ning. These were essentially bootleg recordings, yet the sound, especially on Side One, is clear, consistent and energised. It is released by Sarang Bang as…

The Doors Feast of Friends 1970 Starring: Jim Morrison, John Densmore, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek and Fred L. Stegmeyer. The other day I heard someone discussing resources for gaining, in this centenary year, an understanding of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. A fine book for the purpose would be specific: a mid-70s text on gravity. Unfortunately, it was out of print, and second-hand copies available through the likes of Amazon were many hundreds of dollars, some over a thousand. No doubt it was a fine text, but not that fine. However it does illustrate how things can achieve disproportionate value through age and reputation. And so there seems to be a move to find and commit to consumer video every moving image ever captured of The Doors, at least in…