Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2022 i Hi-Fi Choice

PRICE: £60-£700 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: ASTELLKERN.CO.UK BUSY TIMES AT Astell&Kern with two new products just released to tempt your wallet. First up is the second-generation version of its entry-level digital audio player, the A&norma SR25 MKII, which the company says improves on the audio performance, adds new features, such as a balanced 4.4mm headphone jack, tweaks to its ultra-compact design, a replay gain function to uniformly adjust volume playback from sound sources up to 24-bit/192 kHz, an AK File Drop for easier wireless file transfers, a BT Sink function for simpler connection to an external Bluetooth device, extra internal silver-plated shielding to protect from electromagnetic interference, a more defined volume wheel design and a new Mercury Dark Silver finish. As with the first-generation A&norma SR25 (HFC 465), the MKII handles…

PRICE: £6,200 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: PRIMALUNA.NL ABSOLUTESOUNDS.COM DUTCH MANUFACTURER PRIMALUNA, famous for its valve amplifiers, is expanding its range with the new EVO 300 Hybrid Integrated Amplifier. The result of a collaboration between the company and Floyd Design – the solid-state design arm of Durob Audio, PrimaLuna’s parent company – PrimaLuna has designed the amp’s valve-based preamp stage while Floyd Design has created the solid-state power stage – and the two have worked together to mould the hybrid PrimaLuna explains: “Combining valve and solid-state amplification in a single chassis to capture the respective qualities of both – the warmth and fluidity of valves, the power and grip of solid-state circuitry – is something audio designers have attempted for decades, to varying degrees of success. The difficulty is in engineering these…

PRICE: £165,000 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: DANDAGOSTINO.COM ABSOLUTESOUNDS.COM CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE WON the lottery. And now you’ve distributed the odd million here and there throughout the family – even to the inlaws – it’s time for a proper premium hi-fi upgrade in the shape of Arizona, USA’s Dan D’Agostino Master Audio Systems’ new Relentless Preamplifier. The companion model to the Relentless Mono Amp, the Relentless Preamplifier makes use of three separate chassis – a dedicated audio chassis for each channel and a separate power supply centred between the two to keep the power supply feeds as short as possible. The three chassis interlock through special mechanisms in the mounting feet of each one and 30-pin interlocking 20-amp, gold-plated connectors eliminate wiring normally used for these applications. Dan D’Agostino explains: “This distinctive construction…

WHEN THE VINYL LP hit its sales peak in the UK back in 1975, virtually every pick-up cartridge on sale was a moving-magnet design – even right up at the high end. The almost complete ubiquity of this type of cartridge was down to a combination of factors. Moving coils were in their relative infancy, and also there was a lack of good, high-effective mass tonearms to play them with. They also tended to have vanishingly low outputs – roughly a half of today’s designs – and moving-coil head amps were pretty noisy back then, too. Yet just five years later, things had changed dramatically. We’d seen the introduction of a new generation of ‘super arms’ like Linn’s Ittok and Syrinx’s PU2, which were of highish effective mass and low…

Six years ago, Masao Okada took the decision to add a high-end moving-coil cartridge brand to his company, the Excel Sound Corporation. It had originally been a trusted OEM cartridge maker back in vinyl’s heyday, but later diversified into audio and video accessories. Finally, when it was clear that black plastic was undergoing something of a renaissance, he launched Hana in 2015. The Umami Red is the company’s flagship product, and follows the usual Japanese best-practice of being built by specially trained artisans. Okada-san says two of his craftsmen have worked for Excel Sound for up to 40 years, no less. A low-volume production line is now setup, with eight cartridges made every day. Interestingly, this is a half-covered cartridge; a sort of Lyra with a loose fit coat on.…

Some years ago, Peter Ledermann began remaking Bang & Olufsen’s range of classic phono cartridges for enthusiasts. Demand took off and soon he had a licence to manufacture them and a new company called Soundsmith. He soon started to design his own designs too, and this is one of his latest mid-priced models. Uniquely in this group, it uses an ultra-low mass moving-iron stylus and cantilever assembly. Peter calls this ‘fixed magnet’ and claims it offers the best of both MM and MC designs. It’s included in this group because its close rivals are moving coils and it puts out 0.4mV output – comparable with every other cartridge here. It has an irregular body design – supposedly to reduce resonance – that makes it tricky to correctly align in a…

It would be easy to get the wrong idea about the Melody Action Ultra integrated tube amplifier. First, Melody. Who? If I tell you the company was founded in 1999 in Australia by Allen Wang to build nothing but valve amplification, my guess is if you live in the UK you’re none the wiser. Then there’s the Action Ultra itself. It’s almost ridiculously stylish for an entry-level valve amp and beautifully made. Yet printed on top of the black metal transformer cover is a very strange graphic depicting smoking tyre rubber and a chequered flag. Wasn’t expecting that. And it doesn’t take long to twig that on the front of the volume knob located in the middle of the facia, the ‘+’ and ‘–’ markings and the thin, curved line…

Desktop hi-fi? Can’t say I’ve dabbled. But, of course, ‘desktop’ is just another marketing category and not a stipulation. Basically, it means small, which is a much more liberating concept and a description that aptly fits Chord Electronics’ new integrated amplifier, Anni. With the same dinky form factor and CNC-machined aluminium build as its Qutest DAC (HFC 436) and Huei phono stage (HFC 459), Anni completes a tiny trilogy that, with the addition of Chord’s dedicated QSS (Qutest System Stand), can be stacked for an even more Lilliputian footprint. The star innovation of the company’s large, insanely powerful and very expensive flagship Ultima amplifiers is also at Anni’s heart. Chord calls it dual-feed-forward error-correction circuit topology. It’s clearly scalable and gifts Anni the kind of point of difference its maker…

Just like before, it’s yesterday once more. The wisdom of The Carpenters. Except, of course, little is quite as it seems. True survivors from the past like the LS3/5a standmount speaker – still being made to the original Seventies BBC recipe – are rare. New designs that evoke the spirit of old ones are increasingly not. Whether it’s turntables, amplifiers or loudspeakers, the yestergear wannabees may successfully conjure a vintage vibe, they might even attempt to avoid sounding modern but, more often than not, up-to-date components and engineering are used to create a kind of chronological hybrid: tasty old-school theme meets daisy-fresh tech in a glorious mash-up intended to add a psychological dimension to the business of nourishing the soul with super sound tied to a ‘safe’, broadly acceptable aesthetic.…

Where to begin with the furore that’s evolving over the proposed Beatles “attraction” to be built on Liverpool’s Waterside? It was announced, as a surprise to just about everyone, by Chancellor Rishi Sunak who pulled it like a rabbit from a hat in the midst of his budget announcement back in October. Immediate, of course, was the online ballyhoo which claimed Sunak had lobbed out the news in a clumsy attempt to distract from what many considered to be a devastatingly draconian budget. Then there was the unseemly squabble that followed over whose idea it actually was and which of the dismayingly many council departments should really be given the credit. Next came the backlash from folks who wrote to the local press pointing out that Liverpool already has at…

ALBUM OF THE MONTH Elbow Flying Dream 1 CD Polydor WHEN ELBOW RELEASED their debut album Asleep In The Back 20 years ago, the British musical landscape looked a very different place. Ocean Colour Scene, Stereophonics, Travis, Starsailor and Embrace all scored top-ten albums in the course of 2001, but have long since faded. The joint behemoths of Radiohead and Coldplay remain enduring landmarks, but amid the insipid post-Britpop banality of the chasing pack Elbow stand out as the one act whose creative growth has remained undiminished. Their debut earned Mercury prize and Brit award nominations. With their fourth album, 2007’s Seldom Seen Kid, they finally won the Mercury and the following year were voted best British group at the Brits. Melvyn Bragg made an hour-long documentary about them for The…

CHORD COMPANY HAS expanded its cost-effective C-series to include devices that have a 3.5mm mini jack output. The C-jack connects devices such as phones, tablets, laptops and digital audio players to home audio systems. Although an entry-level cable, the C-jack employs many of Chord’s proprietary technologies, such as the ARAY conductor usually found on the company’s flagship products. The cable is shielded to reduce RFI and available in three lengths and terminated in 3.5mm-to-3.5mm jack plugs or 3.5mm jack plug-to-twin RCA configurations – as reviewed here. The connectors have gold-plated contacts with over-moulded bodies and a narrow profile so it is more easily able to fit into difficult-to-access 3.5mm sockets. I use the C-jack to connect my mobile phone to my valve preamp and commence listening with Nicola Benedetti playing…

PRICE: £700 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: BOWERSWILKINS.COM BOWERS & WILKINS has updated and relaunched its classic 2007 iPod dock, the Zeppelin. “Better-sounding, better-looking and smarter than ever,” according to the blurb. The company says the new Zeppelin has been re-imagined for the streaming age: “now both smarter and more flexible, while its high-resolution sound is more detailed and dynamic than ever”. Available in two finishes – one dark (midnight grey) and one light (pearl grey) – the Zeppelin now includes switchable, dimmable ambient lighting to create a ‘halo’ lighting effect onto its metal pedestal stand. A complete stereo system in one component, featuring dedicated left and right speaker assemblies around a central, large subwoofer, all powered by 240W of amplification, the Zeppelin’s premium components are mounted in an ultra-rigid, FEA-optimised enclosure…

AT needs little introduction to any analogue addict. It’s had massive success over the years with its AT95E (HFC 387) budget moving-magnet offering, and also the more expensive AT-OC9 moving coil and its derivatives. Yet the AT33 has kept soldiering on in relative obscurity since the early Eighties, and actually predates the more fashionable AT-OC9. The AT33Sa is the latest version of this venerable model, and also the first Audio-Technica MC to feature a shibata stylus – which is effectively an enhanced-line contact type. Impressively at the price, it’s mounted on a tapered boron cantilever, which is exotic stuff considering most of its price rivals use heavier, more resonant and cheaper aluminium. A dual moving-coil design with PC-OCC wiring, the number of coil rotations has been reduced over previous models…

This illustrious Danish brand has no shortage of experience in phono cartridge design and is an early pioneer of moving coils. Ortofon’s very first SPU-GT appeared in 1958 and blazed a trail for the technology. Because of its very low output, it came with a small transformer integrated with the cartridge and sold with a headshell affixed as standard. While distantly related to this, the Cadenza Black is far more advanced and is the flagship model in Ortofon’s middle-ranking Cadenza range. It sets out to give a taste of the company’s latest high-end models without the expense. It’s a conventional design with a painted aluminium and stainless steel body, and uses a boron cantilever – de rigeur for a serious phono cartridge – tipped by a nude Shibata stylus. This…

AUDIO-TECHNICA’S AT33SA RANKS sixth. That’s to be expected, considering its lowly price, and yet it’s way better than any sub-£1,000 moving magnet, and surpasses many moving coils that are a fair bit more expensive too. You get a delicate, nuanced, detailed sound that unlocks vinyl in a most enjoyable way. Soundsmith’s Zephyr MIMC Star is next. I love its brio, energy and musical demeanour, but it’s not as refined or detailed as some here. Ortofon’s Cadenza Black is fourth. Given its excellent all-round ability, and super-neutral, delicate and finessed sound, it is a great performer. It doesn’t quite have the visceral power that some here display. Think of it as a half-way house between the super sophisticated Lyra Delos and the muscular Soundsmith. In third place is Shelter’s 901 III.…

A new arrival to B&W’s famed 800 Series is always an occasion of significance. Not only does it introduce technology that will eventually filter its way down to more terrestrial members of the range, but some of the ideas tend to find their way into wider speaker design too. This latest range comprises the same choice of five stereo models and two centre speakers as before and the 805 D4 is the smallest and most affordable option as well as being the only standmount. The major refinement for this latest version of 805 (and the floorstanding 804) is that they are constructed in the same way as the larger members of the range. The process, which Bowers & Wilkins calls ‘reverse wrap’, takes alternating layers of birch ply and adhesive…

This is Vertere’s third cartridge, following the Mystic MC design that was launched last year. Designed with a view to being something that DG-1 Turntable (HFC 463) owners might consider as an update for the supplied Magneto cartridge as well as being an option for non Vertere users, the most unusual aspect of the Sabre is that it is a moving-magnet model, which at the £845 asking price is fairly rare. Vertere argues that having a cartridge that doesn’t require your phono stage to be changed makes the proportional upgrade cost lower. The stylus is a micro elliptical profile, bonded to an aluminium cantilever. Output is given as 4.0mV with frequency response quoted at an impressive 15Hz-25kHz. Vertere states that the Sabre is established engineering rather than a radical clean…

Research published in the journal Frontiers In Psychology has revealed that the mockingbird, which is known for the complexity of its song, is up there with the greats of classical and popular music composers. Male budgerigars, alongside the grey parrot, amazon parrot, eclectus parrot and ring-necked parakeet may be considered the best mimics and can boast a huge vocabulary of hundreds of sound phrases. Over half the mockingbirds’ songs are also mimicry, but they also have the ability to assemble their collections of sounds into their own unique compositions. When we listen to mockingbird song, it’s quite easy to notice that successive song phrases are acoustically related. This is what musicians call variations on a theme. To put it another way, the transition from one mockingbird song phrase to the…

On February 2021, Daft Punk announced that the group which changed the face of 21st-century dance music was no more. The duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo did so in typically enigmatic style via a video, titled Epilogue, in which, dressed in their trademark robot costumes, they said farewell to each other in the desert, before one of the robots self-destructed. Some 22 years earlier they had transformed into their robot alter egos, never again to show their faces in public. “We did not choose to become robots. There was an accident in our studio. We were working on our sampler, and at exactly 9:09 am on 9 September, 1999, it exploded. When we regained consciousness, we discovered that we had become robots,” they said in a classic…

WITH OVER 40 years of experience producing amplifiers and digital source components for the audio industry, Audiolab has struck out in a new direction and recently released its first mains conditioning unit – the dual-action DC Block. As well as removing any DC present on the mains, it also blocks out mains-borne RFI and EMI using its internal high-performance audio class filter. The filter addresses both common-mode noise (such as from airborne interference like mobile phones, Bluetooth and wi-fi) and differential-mode noise (generated by low-cost switched-mode power supplies). Especially with toroidal transformers, such as found in high-quality audio source equipment, a DC offset of as little as 500mV on the mains supply can result in the core of a mains transformer becoming permanently magnetised in one direction. This can cause…

1 INTO THE BLUE A PMC Dolby Atmos Music mix of Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue has just been released by Apple Music – the first time it’s been made available in an immersive format. Working with the Miles Davis estate, Maurice Patist (left in the picture opposite), president of PMC USA and Grammy winning engineer David Rideau (front) worked at Los Angeles’ Capitol Studios with Senior Engineer Steve Genewick (centre) on the Atmos mix and a binaural Spatial Audio mix for use with headphones. Kind Of Blue is available now to stream via Apple Music on compatible devices with a Dolby Atmos mix of Davis’ Sketches Of Spain to follow shortly. 2 RADIO ON Legendary BBC radio DJ Annie Nightingale has launched a scholarship to support the next generation…

PRICE: £1,500 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB:MOFI.COM KARMA-AV.CO.UK KARMA-AV IS INTRODUCING Mobile Fidelity’s UltraGold moving-coil phono cartridge to the UK. The cartridge unites the UltraGold MC’s nude shibata diamond profile stylus and boron cantilever with a neodymium magnet and permendur yoke, housed within an ultra-low resonance aluminium/brass extrusion with the intention of delivering: “palpable low-end energy, high transient responsiveness and compelling openness and transparency from vinyl”. In essence, the UltraGold MC exists to liberate the astonishing musical glory of Mobile Fidelity Original Master Recordings and other reference pressings. It’s precision crafted in Japan and the company explains that the UltraGold MC offers an: “exceptionally wide frequency response, tonal richness, lifelike separation and true-to-the-source faithfulness of a class-leading audiophile moving-coil design”. Claiming ease of installation in virtually any setup, the threaded cartridge body…

PRICE: £1,750-£21,800 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: LINN.CO.UK LINN IS LAUNCHING a new iteration of its flagship Sondek LP12 turntable, the Klimax LP12 featuring Radikal, comprising hyper-accurate speed management technology, “whisper-quiet” power supply, state-of-the-art motor design and the Ekstatik flagship cartridge. The company claims that the Klimax LP12 sustains rotation closer to 33rpm than any other turntable; and thus: “produces the most musical, pitch-perfect performance from a Sondek LP12 ever”. Linn explains that: “Customers will experience even more of their music, in perfect pitch, thanks to a digitally (FPGA) managed motor control and the latest, precision-engineered motor technology. Accurate to five times tighter tolerance than its predecessor, new Radikal’s persistent autocalibration makes for more consistent and accurate speed management than ever before – rendering its performance hyper-accurate and faithful to the recording.”…

MOVING-COIL CARTRIDGES GROUP TEST EVERY ONE OF the cartridges is installed and played for roughly one day each to compensate for any difference in the number of hours each had when supplied. After a few days of casual listening, the first stage of critical listening takes place, with extensive notes made from the test music selection. Further small adjustments are made to optimise tracking force, tonearm VTA settings and electrical loading via the Trichord Diablo/NC phono stage. After this, each cartridge is fitted into a standard Technics headshell. It is correctly aligned in a Technics SL-1200G turntable using a Mobile Fidelity Geodisc protractor. Then the comparative stage begins in earnest, swapping out the cartridges quickly via the different headshells with only the tonearm balance and height needing to be adjusted.…

Named after one of Greece’s best-known mythological sites, there’s a degree of intrigue surrounding the Lyra brand. The designer, Tokyo-based Jonathan Carr, has built a fine reputation for moving-coil carts over the past 30 or so years and subcontracts the hand-building of them to artisans Yoshinori Mishima and Akiko Ishiyama. Lyra pioneered this distinctive skeletal style of moving-coil design, which nullifies the effect of body resonance. The downside is it makes the cartridge even more vulnerable when handling. The chassis is hewn from a solid 6063 aluminium billet, deliberately non-parallel in its shape to minimise sensitivity to external vibrations. 6N purity copper signal coils are affixed to the body, with square-shaped high-purity iron formers and a solid boron cantilever is attached to these using a asymmetric single-point suspension system. This…

Yasuo Ozawa joined Fidelity Research in 1982, where he worked on its MCX-3 and MCX-5 cart, among other things. He left in 1986 to form Shelter, which has since become a renowned vinyl specialist. This is yet another small Japanese company that hand builds cartridges, which are inspected and approved by Ozawa. The 901 III tops off the company’s Legendary Line and is based on the original 1986 Model 701, albeit highly refined since then. It has an old fashioned-looking but beautifully finished anodised aluminium body housing, a hard aluminium-clad boron cantilever and an elliptical diamond stylus. Shelter says it has been deliberately voiced to: “provide the comfort of analogue playback sound”, as opposed to: “pursue more information” like its flagship carbon-fibre bodied Harmony MC. That neat-looking, tall, narrow, oblong…

It’s the style of the Boulder 1100 series that grabs you first – very different from the common image of US-made high-end hi-fi, even if the £30,000 1160 stereo power amp lives up to at least some of the stereotype with its 61.2kg mass. Instead of the usual scattergun buttons, grab-handles and menacing, finger-slicing heatsinks that are all too common in products of this type, the Boulder power amplifier and its matching £22,500 1110 line-only preamp have a much softer look. In fact, the company’s industrial designers have – dare we say it – got a bit playful, with geographic contour lines machined into the front panels mimicking the topography of the 2,000m+-tall Flagstaff Mountain, around a 30-minute drive from the company’s manufacturing centre. Simple and solid Weight aside, these…

There’s no doubt that the best way to connect your streamer, digital music player and music server to your computer network is via Ethernet cable rather than wi-fi network. Only a cable offers the higher speeds that are required to transmit hi-res audio over a modern gigabit (1000Base-T) network. Connecting all of this together requires the use of a network switch, but the problem with the standard computer grade switches built into routers is they’re designed to allow a reliable flow of information without concerning themselves with the effect that they may have on the timing of the data and the shape of the digital waveforms. For audio applications, these factors have a significant influence on the jitter of the digital audio signal, which the DAC would have to correct.…

Sometimes, a logical area of development in one product category is slightly undermined by other areas not necessarily producing the kit to make use of them. The recent DAC Group Test (HFC 482) is a case in point. Five of the six models can be used as preamps to streamline your system if you have no need for analogue inputs. The catch is that affordable power amplifiers remain a fairly rare beast. Into this gap steps XTZ. The Swedish company is best known for its speakers, but also produces a small selection of standalone amps. One of these is designed to power a subwoofer, but the other two are stereo power amplifiers ideal for the task of being run with a DAC preamp to form a compact but very capable…

First it was queues at petrol pumps, then empty supermarket shelves. The government has even appointed a minister ‘for saving Christmas’ to ensure turkeys and mince pies aren’t rationed due to glitches in the supply chain. What we have heard less about is the vinyl shortage, which means you might not find that LP you were hoping for in your stocking. The vinyl crisis has hit small independent labels the hardest. “We’re facing six-to-eight month lead times after paying large sums up-front,” Dominic Williams, label manager at Acid Jazz, told Investment Monitor. “Small labels don’t have the cash flow to wait that long”. But even the majors have been affected. Some months ago, Universal Music announced a 30th anniversary edition of Nirvana’s Nevermind as an eight-LP set – but it…

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. Métronome Technologie Le Player 2S PRICE: £5,100 REVIEWED: HFC 449 As good as the sweet treble and rich bass are, what really impresses here is how when fed weaker CDs and impoverished MP3s the delivery remains unflappable and composed as layers of detail are locked into sharp focus. Cambridge Audio AXC35 PRICE: £300 REVIEWED: HFC 454 Something of a budget marvel, you’ll have to…

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