Hi-Fi Choice August 2011

PAUL MESSENGER EXPERTISE: SPEAKERS PAUL is the UK’s foremost expert on loudspeakers. Having worked as a speaker designer and reviewer for over 30 years Paul is internationally recognised for his ability to assess loudspeaker performance, and report on developments in the field. JIMMY HUGHES EXPERTISE: SYSTEM OPTIMISATION JIMMY has been involved in hi-fi for over 40 years. His knowledge of tweaking and optimising systems is unrivalled in the hi-fi industry and he brings enormous expertise to the pages of Hi-Fi Choice. If anyone can help you improve your set-up, it’s him. RICHARD BLACK EXPERTISE: TECHNOLOGY RICHARD writes exclusively for HFC and brings his experience as a successful musician and recording engineer to the title. As Technical Consultant, he’s our authority on tech testing, ensuring that our verdicts are beyond compare.…

www.hifichoice.co.uk Issue No. 348 August 2011 We’re just back from High End, Munich (the Munich show) and yet again our European cousins have put on a cracking event. Read Jason Kennedy’s full report on p16 in this issue. Despite the show’s moniker, there was plenty of affordable high-end product on display, something we’ve attempted to echo is this very edition. One of Britain’s best known high-end brands, Audio Note, is featured on our cover this month, as we reveal in a world exclusive review (p56) the Peter Qvortrup system you can afford! We’ve also got Pro-Ject’s second-from-top turntable, the RPM 10.1, which at just £2,000 truly represents affordable high end. Other noteworthy reviews this month include the stunning Pathos Ethos (p60) integrated and one of the world’s most talked-about DACs,…

PRICE: £20,000 AVAILABLE: AUGUST CONTACT: 01622 672 261 WEB: KEF.COM We were very taken with KEF’s ‘Concept Blade’ loudspeaker that did the rounds at the various hi-fi shows in 2010. KEF insisted that the Blade was a ‘technology demonstrator’, showing directions and design features that the company were considering, rather than an actual example of a future speaker. But, one year on, the Blade is going on sale with a price of £20,000 per pair. KEF says that the production version is a significant upgrade to the concept, but the key aspects of the original design have made it through intact. The thinking behind the Blade is the Single Apparent Source technology. This is the combination of two separate areas of development. The first is the latest generation Uni-Q MF/HF…

This year’s High End show in Munich was notably filled with top-notch kit from all around the world. While European brands are naturally well represented, there were as many from the far east and North America and we had to be highly selective in order to bring you the cream of a bumper crop. The theme this year was undoubtedly network streaming, and most of the mainstream brands and quite a few of the smaller ones had a streamer of sorts to show. It was encouraging to see temptingly low price points for this new technology, facilitating the purchase of a good-quality DAC. High End is very different to UK shows you may have visited: the show is divided between open, airy exhibition halls where no music is played, to…

There is a tendency in this industry (of which I am as guilty as anyone else) to divide products into ‘new’ and ‘mature’ categories. We watch streaming and network products develop rapidly and add new technologies and think nothing of it while subconsciously assuming that older categories are a static background. This is something that I believe blinds us to developments in the wider industry. Over the last decade, we have seen significant steps forward in areas that we often consider ‘mature’ or even ‘retro’. Turntables are an interesting case in point. The idea that technical development would still be demonstrating meaningful improvements after 63 years and its supposed ‘replacement’ by digital is a hard one to countenance, but it is the case. The Pro-Ject RPM 10.1 (reviewed on p66)…

As we all patiently await Apple to make its next major move in digital music with its new ‘iCloud’ service (or whatever it ends up being called when Steve Jobs lifts the lid later this year) Google has recently made its own move into the booming audio streaming business, going up against the likes of Spotify, we7 and Amazon. But what the hell is this rather unimaginatively titled new Google Music service? And, most importantly, is it something that might offer audiophiles better quality music streaming, both around the home and to mobile devices, than they might find elsewhere? Google unveiled its cloud-music plans at the I/O conference in San Francisco, the company’s annual shindig for web developers, with Music Beta by Google (music.google.com) currently only being tested out in…