Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2020 i Hi-Fi Choice

PRICE: £1,200 AVAILABLE: NOW CONTACT: 01268 740580 WEB: MONITORAUDIO.COM Monitor Audio has launched its new IMS-4 Music Streamer featuring BluOS and Apple AirPlay 2. The former allows the IMS-4 to stream to four separate zones and its BluOS Controller app offers playback from music services and libraries with voice control through a suitable smart device. Accessed through the app or one of the integrated control systems, multiple IMS-4 Music Streamers can be integrated with other BluOS devices to provide up to 64 different music zones. MA claims that lossless music can be played with resolutions up to 24-bit/192kHz to every room in a home network while AirPlay 2 provides the IMS-4 Music Streamer with flexibility as Siri allows users to request the track they would like to hear and then…

There are many things happening now that I never imagined 25 years ago – not least the vinyl revival and the fact that DAC separates are now so central to hi-fi systems. Another thing that I truly didn’t envisage was the return of the Japanese consumer electronics giants to the two-channel stereo market. There was a period around the turn of the millennium when it looked like big companies from Japan were getting out of hi-fi, leaving the market to smaller specialists. Now though, they’re seriously back in business – as Yamaha proves here. A few years ago, the company made a major push into the market, offering precisely the same blend of quality and value that it did way back in the seventies when the hi-fi market was at…

WHEN PHILLIPPE PETIT walked between the rooftops of New York’s World Trade Center in 1974, he didn’t just lash up any old wire between the Twin Towers. Not a bad lesson for anyone putting together a separates system: cable spec matters. I’m not talking about a motley gang of leads from a rag bag of makers any one of us might have acquired over months or years, but interconnects and speaker cables with a common design philosophy and material content in the guise of a single origin loom. If you’re on board with the idea that cables can make a positive difference to the sound of a system (and you really should be), every cable manufacturer out there will tell you this is the way to go. In high-end circles,…

For Black Rhodium (what respected cable guru Graham Nalty did next after DNM) this loom is about as basic as it gets. By the standards of the group, it seems almost impossibly small and light. But then ease of handling is a definite advantage, not least because the Opus interconnect – one up from the company’s entry-level Twist – is as floppy as a piece of string and terminated with gold-plated, hourglass-shaped RCA plugs that are easier to grip between finger and thumb, especially in a tight space. An unscreened cable with highpurity, tinned-copper conductors wrapped in and damped by silicone rubber insulation and outer jacket, the internal wires are twisted together to improve noise rejection. Another unusual touch, the positive and negative leads run in an opposite direction from…

Like Kimber, QED started making waves over here in 1979, but with its second – not its first – speaker cable. QED 79 Strand became just as legendary as the 4PR and is still in production, along with QED 45 Strand which appeared in 1975 and still remains the company’s most affordable cable. For this loom, we’re rolling with XT40i – which replaces the XT40 and is claimed to offer a step up in sound quality. It’s a pure oxygen-free copper design that boasts very low DC resistance, employs QED’s X-Tube technology to counter skin effect and also has the company’s innovative Air Gap dielectric. With a matching silver-grey outer jacket, the Performance Audio 40i’s Solid Complementary Conductor tech claims to reduce capacitance by a quarter compared with its predecessor.…

How we listen to music is becoming more and more diverse, and there are some who question the point of entry-level, affordable hi-fi separates. After all, with the sheer selection of smart speakers, portable music players, soundbars and other innumerable ways to stream anything from anywhere, the humble twochannel amplifier would seem to be something of an anachronism. Rega doesn’t see it this way. In fact, reports from its distributors and dealers would suggest an everincreasing demand for simple but effective two-channel equipment. The sort of thing that doesn’t need a decent wi-fisignal, regular software updates and a degree in electronics to successfully navigate. At the Bristol Hi-Fi Show back in February, the company released its £1,000 System One comprising turntable, amplifier and loudspeakers to great acclaim, proving that the…

Cabasse has a long history in both home and professional audio, producing an impressive range of wireless speakers, such as its flagship, The Pearl, which costs more than £2,500. If that’s a little out of your reach, then the latest addition to the French company’s range is the more affordable The Pearl Akoya. Affordable, however, is something of a relative term here as the Akoya still weighs in at a fairly hefty £1,500 for a single speaker. The design oozes quality, though, with a simple sphere available in glossy black or white and finished with a gleaming metallic trim. The sturdily built cabinet employs ‘tri-axial’ technology to house three drivers – bass, midband and tweeter. That heavyweight design is matched by heavyweight performance too, with Cabasse boasting that the 1,050W…

Perhaps best known for its range of compact DACs and supporting accessories, iFiAudio’s product lineup also includes a range of power management and treatment options, and the company has now added a full-size mains extension block. The basic design is a six-way block (eight in Japan and the USA) that has a single IEC mains input on the end with a power switch. Each output is placed in its own isolated chamber to avoid cross contamination and the wiring uses PurCopper – an extremely pure continuous cast copper, intended to maximise performance. Surge protection is quoted at 30,000 amps which should be sufficient to keep your equipment safe in all but the most catastrophic situations. Where the PowerStation is different from most rivals is the ground arrangements. It has inbuilt…

Quiz time! What do Billie Eilish, Snoop Dogg, Faith No More, Darwin Deez, The Subways, Hinds and Rupaul’s Drag Race all have in common? They’re gigs that members of my family would have attended over the past few weeks had the Coronavirus not closed down all live concerts. Obviously we’re all disappointed that the shows didn’t happen but, during these toughest and most worrying of times, with jobs at risk and finances uncertain, getting the ticket money back would be a welcome upside. Except, of course, there is no money forthcoming. Much has been made about the precarious state of the UK’s gig circuit. Small venues – the lifeblood of new talent – were under threat from cash-hungry landlords and keen developers long before the virus shut them down. And…

THE PROVISION OF XLR balanced audio connections on domestic audio equipment is on the rise and there is growing interest for those that utilise professional open-reel tape. Such equipment often has XLR connections, and to meet this demand Atlas Cables has introduced its Element Mezzo XLR. Screen test It uses balanced core technology and oxygen-free copper conductors insulated with a gas-loaded, high density foamed polyethylene dielectric. These are screened with a high efficiency braid and the cable is terminated with new copper alloy XLR male and female plugs. I connect the Element Mezzo between my Studer A810 pro tape machine and my unity-gain balanced-to-unbalanced preamp and play a 15IPS tape of The Quentin Collins Jazz Quintet’s A Day In The Life. The opening percussion of Angola is crystal-clear with the…

PRICE: £4,000 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: TECHNICS.COM/UK CAST YOUR MIND back to the summer of 2016 and you’ll no doubt remember that Technics released its Grand Class SL-1200GAE limited edition turntable to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the company forming. Now, five years later, it’s releasing the SL-1210GAE Limited Edition to honour its 55th year. Based upon the SL-1200G that received an Editor’s Choice recommendation back in HFC 418, the updated deck marks Technics first collaboration with highly respected pick-up producer Nagaoka – which in turn celebrates its 80th anniversary this year. Specially tuned by a joint team of experts from both companies, a moving-magnet JT-120 cartridge comes bundled with the turntable (and won’t be available anywhere else). Employing a boron cantilever, it’s claimed to be designed for superior focus and…

With a reputation for no-nonsense engineering and bullish about its clean sheet, from-the-ground-up approach to designing and producing cables, Scotland’s Atlas rates its build consistency and quality control highly enough to offer a five-year guarantee as well as a bespoke build service for customers who want something a little out of the ordinary Element is its entry-level tier, but incorporates much of Atlas’ core thinking. As such, the Element Integra interconnect features a high-quality OCC copper conductor, is shielded against RFIand fitted with solderfree, cold-welded, non-magnetic Integra RCA plugs. The central conductor is insulated with a low-loss porous polyethylene dielectric (PEF), while the outer conductor employs a braided copper and aluminium foil screen. The plug’s cover is made from a non-magnetic polycarbonate sleeve. The Element Integra S/PDIF is identical in…

A long-standing mainstay of the Russ Andrews family in the UK, Kimber Kable is pretty close to cable royalty in its native USA with all bases covered and a broad swathe of realistically priced high-end exotica for the well-heeled to chew on. It all started back in 1979 with the speaker cable in this loom. Running a business that needed to find a way to eliminate the noise generated by bundled cables serving light and sound requirements in nightclubs, Ray Kimber hit on the revelation that twisting conductors together rejected noise radiated by nearby sources. Soon after, 4PR was born and the rest is history. The first and most famous Kimber cable of all has hardly changed in the 41 years that have followed. 4PR continues to have eight conductors,…

Any attempt to commit the Pro-Ject turntable range to memory would be a passable Mastermind subject. The number of models that the company builds is vast and, at times, there seems to be an inexplicable level of overlap to them. At first glance, the T1 Phono SB looks like it sits in the latter category with barely any breathing room between it and the more affordable Primary series below it and Essential above. In reality, it is the first rung on the ladder for specialist dealers, with the Primary aimed more at the mass market. The basic ingredients of the T1 Phono SB appear conventional enough. It’s an unsuspended, belt-driven turntable that follows an underlying design pattern dating all the way back to the original Debut. Look a little closer,…

Chinese company Topping Audio designs and manufactures USB DACs and Class D amplifiers. The DX7 Pro is a combined USB balanced DAC and headphone amp in a single smart case that incorporates the power supply. At the heart of the unit is the ESS Technology flagship ES9038Pro Sabre DAC chip. This has a high dynamic range of up to 140dB from the 32-bit, 8-channel DAC. The ES9038Pro also features ESS’ patented 32-bit HyperStreamDAC technology with -122dB total harmonic distortion plus noise (THD+N) and support for a wide range of sampling rates. The USB uses the second-generation XMOS XU208 chip that is part of the xCORE-200 Series and is a 32-bit, low-latency multicore microcontroller. It’s capable of executing multiple real-time tasks simultaneously and communicating via a high-speed network. Bluetooth 5.0 support…

Though dramatically different to its traditional area of expertise, The Chord Company felt the opportunity to snap up the English Electric brand and make it a subsidiary was just too good to resist. Considering the company is more synonymous with jet fighters, it was initially difficult to understand the attraction. The 8Switch is one of the first results and, as the name suggests, provides eight 100/1000 Base-T gigabit-capable Ethernet connections. In layman’s terms, this means it should be capable of handling any demands that network audio is likely to make of it. The basic underpinnings are taken from existing equipment but are beefed up for more effective performance in an audio context. It is controlled by a customised TCXO (Temperature Compensation Crystal Oscillator) offering a superior performance than the oscillators…

Sometimes the hi-fi world suffers from a lack of joined-up thinking. Many of us strive hard for perfection in our purchasing of hardware, when so much of the end result remains out of our control. A number of factors determine the sound of a system, and the choice of kit is just one of them. Even those with the best systems money can buy may still be a long way from getting great sound. This is for two reasons – first, the interaction between your speakers and your room acoustics plays a massive part in the end result. Indeed, the difference in sound between a good and a bad room can be greater than that between a good and bad hi-fi. And then we have the oft-overlooked question of the…

Let’s hear it for Spotify! When the current epidemic was doing its very best to decimate the worldwide gig circuit, the streaming service made a bit of a noise about helping struggling musicians whose income had been curtailed by lockdown. What it did was introduce a system whereby you could ‘tip’ your favourite artist directly – in addition, of course, to paying your usual tenner a month subscription. Now considering a recent survey by the Musicians’ Union revealed that 19 percent of British musicians are considering abandoning their careers because of a lack of support from the Government, Spotify’s gesture looked just the job. But look again, and what it actually did was cannily reposition the musicians featured on its service as buskers, not clients, their songs reduced to charitable…

Order the music you love today”. Sounds like a no-brainer to us. Behold the mission statement of long-standing Leeds-based online store Norman Records, a one-stop-shop for specialist and hard-to-find indie, alternative, experimental, electronica and much more… Its website is friendly, simple to navigate and effervesces with irreverence: major boxes ticked. There are handy sections for bestsellers, staff recommendations (see boxout) and – bargain hunters, take note – cheap vinyl too. From shipping to packaging and even environmental impact, every conceivable question is anticipated. The Norman Records story starts with record-obsessed owner Phil Leigh (above) way back in 1996 in his bedroom in Leeds. It was a proudly DIY affair, with photocopied lists of records sent by post to a small number of contacts. Shrewdly, the business embraced the internet’s potential…

MAKING GOOD USE of its current stocks, Black Rhodium has designed a new interconnect from high-quality parts that’s simply constructed in an effort to keep the cost down. The resulting ‘99 Series’ Black and White RCA interconnect is offered at £99 for a 1m stereo pair and is also available in a 1.5m length for an additional £10. Each cable utilises silver-plated copper wires insulated in a silicone rubber dielectric. These are then terminated with Graham Nalty GN-3 gold-plated RCA plugs. Express yourself To see how it fares, I connect the interconnect between my preamp and monoblocks. After a good period of running in for several hours using a cable burn-in CD on repeat, I switch to a CD of Eva Cassidy singing Ain’t No Sunshine. All the emotional qualities of…

PRICE: £1,000 AVAILABLE: NOW CONTACT: 01279 501111 WEB: IFI-AUDIO.COM INCORPORATING TECHNOLOGY DERIVED from the £12,000 PH-77 phono preamp from sister-company AMR, iFiAudio’s iPhono3 Black Label MM/MCcompatible phono stage is driven by the company’s Class A TubeState engine – solidstate circuitry claimed to capture the key attributes of valves while maintaining ultra-low distortion. Its circuit is directcoupled, meaning there’s no coupling capacitor from cartridge to output, and this is achieved without a conventional DC servo. iFicalls the design Direct Drive Servoless, incorporating a proprietary DC Infinity circuit to boost DC gain to a level approaching infinity. The Black Label also boasts a series of DIP switches on its underside for setting gain and load. The former can be adjusted between 36dB and 72dB, while there is a wide variety of values…

PRICE: £350-£600 AVAILABLE: NOW CONTACT: 01344 844204 WEB: TALKELECTRONICS.COM UK-based Talk Electronics has launched two new tonearms – the A500 and A600. Both are advanced captive uni-pivot designs with acrylic headshells and hardened stainless steel pivot joins with outputs via a five-pin 270° connector, which provides for the user’s choice of cable. The A500 boasts a 12mm aluminium slightly tapered arm tube, is internally wired with jointless 0.15mm copper single-core, varnished copper wire and offers the option of straight or right-angle sockets. The A600 meanwhile features lightweight, rigid 12mm pultruded carbon fibre, and is wired internally with jointless copper litz wiring. Both tonearms have a standard Rega compatible mounting, and are available in 9in, 10in and 12in versions with SME Audio or Jelco compatible mounts by special order. The A500…

Hi-Fi Choice employs the most methodical test and measurement regime in the business. Here’s how we do it… CABLE LOOM GROUP TEST ALTHOUGH STANDALONE REVIEWS of interconnects or speaker cables can be instructive, manufacturers always tell us that to really understand what they’re doing we need to try the whole ‘loom’ – by which they mean every cable in the system should be their own brand, even those that supply the electricity from the wall. For this reason, we periodically conduct Group Tests of cable looms, confining our focus to interconnects and speaker cables, to make comparisons between one-make packages. The parameters are set early for consistent test purposes – we want to keep everything simple and straightforward. Six companies submit 1m analogue and a 1m coaxial digital interconnects with…

Even including the £35 AudioQuest charge for terminating the speaker cables with crimp BFA plugs, this is, by a few pounds from the QED package, the lowest cost loom on test. Price unseen, there are few clues. True, the interconnects’ RCA plugs have shiny plastic shells and are quite small while the speaker cable, although well made and expertly terminated, was originally designed to be hidden in walls and looks somewhat ‘white goods’. That said, the dark green hue of the interconnects is attractive and, with its woven fabric outer jacket, the Chicago has a pleasingly up-market appearance and tactile feel. Using long-grain copper, it is a solid core rather than multi-stranded cable, AudioQuest asserting that the electrical and magnetic interaction between strands can cause distortion, giving an unnatural edge…

More specialist outlier than household name in this group, Merlin Cables has actually been in business since 2002 and on a mission to recalibrate hi-fi cable performance-per-pound value at all price points. Well, all price points above the £370 you’ll pay for this loom, which represents the company’s best opening gambit. The loom does, however, contain items so new they don’t yet feature on the website. But this is the way MC likes it – fast-rolling development with the emphasis on getting product connected with customers’ systems. Like most cable makers, Merlin has a whole host of TLAs (three-letter abbreviations) to illuminate its tech. For instance, its new Mozart analogue interconnect is constructed with six HCT (Hybrid Core Technology) IRC (Inert Resin Coated) cores. This is a type of Litz…

Okay, before we go any further let’s deal with the rather sizable elephant jumping up and down vying for our attention in the room. In the highly unlikely event that you’re ever going to come into a serious amount of money – say £65,000 – chances are treating yourself to a new stereo power amplifier most probably won’t be the first thing you’d consider spending it all on. But let’s put mundane responsibilities like mortgages, that horrific credit card balance, the kids’ financial future and replacing the family jalopy to one side for a moment and pretend that just for once you can put yourself first. After all, this is what our Exotica tests are all about – putting yourself into the shoes of a Russian oligarch, Premiership football player…

Norma Audio hails from Cremona in Northern Italy, a city famed as the home of the world’s greatest stringed instrument makers – Stradivari, Ruggieri and Amati – so maybe sweet music making comes from something in the water? Or, more probably, the wine. Whatever, the name may not be as familiar as other audio brands, but it’s certainly no newcomer. Founded in 1987, it is part of Opal Electronics which builds advanced electronics measuring equipment – so it will have few excuses for poor measurements. The Revo IPA-140 is the bigger brother of the Revo IPA-70B that we reviewed back in HFC 455. Claiming 140W into 8ohm from six MOSFETs per channel, this integrated amplifier is effectively a fully dual mono configuration of its smaller sibling. Alongside extra power the…

You didn’t have to be a fully paid-up member of the Cyrus fan club to notice the ONE when it landed in 2016. The architect of half-width hi-fi hadn’t included a temptingly inexpensive integrated amplifier in its lineup since its very first offering under the Mission Electronics banner back in the mid-eighties, the unfeasibly talented original Cyrus One. Mission went its own way in 1993 and the trajectory and ambition of a streamlined Cyrus operation’s output thereafter pointed singularly skywards, leaving interest in the high-performance, low-cost sector it helped define as a legacy discussion. It’s a strategy that has worked well for the Cambridge-based company which, these days, likes to stalk the lower slopes of high-end with a similarly sharp value proposition. Nor has time dimmed our affection for the…

Dirac has built its reputation by offering audio enhancement technologies found in the automotive, home cinema, hi-fi, portables and headphone markets. The Dirac Live platform in particular has grown a following as part of room correction and bass enhancement approaches carried within products by companies such as AudioControl, Lexicon, miniDSP, NAD, Arcam, StormAudio, Datasat, Bryston, Emotiva, Focal, Quadral, Monoprice, Digital and Wisdom Dirac has also companies outside audio world improve performance in such as Rolls Royce Volvo, Xiaomi BMW. Doctor Johansson company’s origins: that went on to all did their masters digital techniques improve sound Signals and Systems Group at Uppsala University in Sweden. The idea was to use digital technology to improve the sound of speakers without having to alter them physically. Our first experiments were with quite low-quality…

Readers of a certain age will surely remember the three-day week when a combination of the global oil crisis and industrial action by the miners’ union meant commercial users of electricity were limited to three days use and forced to close on the others during the early months of 1974. I was 20 years old at the time and was in the hedonistic habit of spending every night out on the town, drinking, seeing bands and picking up girls. I recall the partial lockdown as a crippling pain in the backside. As for staying in, forget it. The Government ordered the TV channels to shut down at 10.30 every night, leaving us with only test card tedium. Looking back, this wasn’t anything like as restrictive as the lockdown and people…

CD PLAYERS Audiolab 6000CDT PRICE: £380 REVIEWED: HFC 447 The 6000CDT is exceptional at revealing what’s on your discs to deliver a great big soundstage with plenty of detail inside. It can dig down deep into the mix to eke out the different musical strands while dynamically and rhythmically it’s hard to beat at the price. In short, it’s a super, highly affordable audiophile CD transport. Cambridge Audio AXC35 PRICE: £300 REVIEWED: HFC 454 Something of a budget marvel, you’ll have to work extra hard to get the AXC35 to put a foot wrong. Bass is firm, detailed and blessed with excellent timing; the tonal palette is pleasingly broad and clean; and though the soundstage doesn’t extend much beyond the speakers, there’s great depth perspective. Exposure XM CD PRICE: £1,200 REVIEWED: HFC 455 A highly likeable…