Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i Hi-Fi Choice

PRICE: £300-£850 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: TECHNICS.COM TECHNICS HAS LAUNCHED its new SA-C600 Compact Network CD Receiver as part of its Premium C600 Series, joining the SB-C600 Compact Speaker System launched back in September. “The SA-C600 is a significant add-on to the Technics portfolio, filling the gap between all-in-one compact speaker systems such as the C70MK2 and true separate component systems such as the C700 and G700 systems,” according to the company. “This enables a performance level not possible with all-in-one solutions, yet without the need to find space for lots of components within the home”. The new SA-C600 makes use of full-digital amplification technology based on the company’s JENO Engine and boasts a top-loading CD design, quoted power output of 2x 60W into 4ohm and low noise power supply left and…

PRICE: TBC AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: MARKLEVINSON.COM US COMPANY MARK Levinson has unveiled its new No 5909 headphone, a high-resolution wireless adaptive active noise-cancellation model – the first portable offering from the brand more usually associated with its home hi-fi systems. Boasting up to 34 hours of playback time and 30 hours with adaptive active noise cancellation turned on, this design was crafted with luxury comfort in mind. The No 5909 is constructed with core aluminium components, a leather headband and replaceable leather ear cushions. It comes with an accompanying hard-shell carrying case that also stores bundled cables and an airplane adapter. The No 5909 delivers what the company calls: “reference-quality sound” via 40mm Beryllium-coated drivers and features Bluetooth 5.1 with LDAC, AAC and aptX. The Adaptive Active Noise Cancellation boasts…

FOUR OF THE six contenders in this roundup of wireless, noise-cancelling, over-ear headphones cost £350, and that says something. In matters of headline tech, standout performance and ear-pampering practicalities offered at a comfortably affordable price, this is where the fiercest competition lives – always good news as it drives innovation and value for money. And, make no mistake, what’s on offer here is remarkable. There are ‘cans for courses’: IEMs for music on the move or in the gym, high-end wired designs for the ultimate ‘head-fi’ experience at home. But the premium, noise-cancelling, wireless over-ear variety is truly the any place, any time, all-seasons specialist of the species tasked with delivering sweet sonics, significant attenuation of ambient noise, long-term wearability and a high standard of user convenience – perhaps most…

The demarcation between ‘separate’ and ‘system’ was never a terribly distinct one, but in recent years it has become increasingly blurred. What you see here is a relative of the Mission LX-2 MkII standmount speaker, but where that is a conventional, passive two-way design, the LX Connect is a self-contained system with some fairly radical variations in how it functions. The critical difference is what happens behind the drivers in the speakers. These are unchanged from the LX-2 MkII and comprise a 130mm composite fibre cone, with complete secondary cone behind it that the coil and motor assembly acts upon, crossing over to a 25mm microfibre dome tweeter. In time-honoured fashion, this is placed below the mid/bass driver to help with time alignment. The crossover is also fundamentally unchanged too.…

Neat Acoustics’ Majistra will set you back a lot for a compact standmount – but there’s much inside that’s interesting. For starters, it’s one of very few isobaric speakers you can buy – using a novel approach to getting more bass out of a cabinet than its internal volume would suggest. Then there’s the true ribbon tweeter, which is still largely the preserve of the high end, and virtually unique when used together with the isobaric driver complement. The Majistra is basically a Ministra (HFC 465) on steroids. It is perfectly sized for most UK listening rooms, whereas the more compact Ministra might be too small. Bob Surgeoner – the company’s designer and managing director – says there’s been an 80 percent increase in internal volume, which is a big…

Sometimes, the ‘obvious’ product that a company should make can be a long time coming. The circa-£1,000 speaker market is booming and you might have thought it a natural hunting ground for Q Acoustics. Some 15 years since the introduction of its original Concept range, the company is a recognised force both at entry-level price points and – thanks to the Concept 300 (HFC 448) and 500 (HFC 426) – at more premium ones too. Until recently, the space between these two points was less well covered, but the Concept 30 is the smaller of two speakers intended to bridge this gap. As you’d no doubt expect, the engineering that the Concept 30 employs can be seen as a gently simplified version of the more expensive 300, but that does…

I’ve mentioned before on these pages (HFC 459) that I was invited to give a talk on tape recording at The UK Hi-Fi Show Live at Ascot Racecourse in 2019. Also presenting was Ken Kessler from our sister publication Hi-Fi News, and during his talk he played a commercial tape from 1958 that sounded amazing. Chatting with Ken afterwards, he mentioned he’d come across this and several other tapes for sale on an online auction website. I was so impressed, I decided to track down a copy for myself. The tape in question was a Capitol recording tape ZD-19 from 1958 entitled Velvet Brass Presented By Jackie Gleason. This was a stereo 7.5IPS two-track reel-to-reel tape for in-line heads, which pre-dates the commercial standard of four-track for domestic stereo pre-recorded…

To be honest, if it wasn’t for the pandemic, the shop might never have happened at all,” explains Kier Wiater Carnihan, the friendly face of Margate’s Ghost Papa. It’s one of two coastal haunts for book lovers and music fiends – along with Ramsgate’s June Bug – to have sprung up in recent months. “The fact our lives had already been turned completely upside down made the prospect of a massive move (from London) less intimidating,” he adds. “In normal times, we might not have had the guts to take such a risk.” Open Wednesday to Sunday, Ghost Papa draws on Keir’s 15 years’ of experience buying and selling records and books in the capital. It’s a spacious treasure trove of pre-loved vinyl, new releases from local heroes, cult literature,…

HAILING FROM NORDOST’S entry-level Leif family of cables, the Blue Heaven range includes everything from RCAs, to tonearm, Ethernet and USBs. All the Leif cables are constructed using silver-plated, OFC solid core conductors that have undergone the company’s proprietary FEP extrusion process. This individually encloses each conductor in FEP insulation to reduce the dielectric properties by increasing the signal speeds to improve accuracy of the signal transfer. This is further improved by mechanically tuning the conductors through the adjustment of their dimensions and spacing. The cable has a translucent blue sheath and is terminated at each end with gold-plated RCA connectors. It is directional and this is indicated by arrows printed on the heatshrink at one end. The cable is quite flexible and I have no difficulty fitting it to…

PRICE: £230-£600 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: ACOUSTIC-ENERGY.CO.UK ACOUSTIC ENERGY HAS redesigned, upgraded and relaunched its entry-level 100 Series loudspeakers in the shape of the AE1002 bookshelf, AE1092 floorstander, AE1082 active subwoofer and AE1072 centre (for home cinema setups). Meanwhile, a new AE1202 flagship floorstander is due to follow in the future. The company says the design brief was to: “try and maintain the compact dimensions and sleek appearance of the previous 100 Series, but offer a more mature, refined and bigger sound with greater bandwidth and power”. What this means is that the 100mm paper cone has been increased in size to a 127mm driver utilising a four-layer voice coil with flux rings, while high-density fibreboard (HDF) is now being used – which AE claims is: “unheard of at this price-point and…

PRICE: £2,000 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: ASTELLKERN.CO.UK ASTELL&KERN HAS INTRODUCED its new desktop headphone amp with digital audio player (DAP) capabilities – the ACRO CA1000, which features a four-step gain level that drives high-impedance headphones with a 15Vrms output or below. It boasts 3.5mm and 6.35mm unbalanced, and 2.5mm and 4.4mm balanced headphone outputs, plus an array of digital/analogue inputs, while the onboard ESS ES9068AS Quad-DAC supports high-resolution audio playback up to 32-bit/384kHz and native DSD512. Using Astell&Kern’s patented TERATON ALPHA Sound Solution technology, it has Bluetooth 5.0 with aptX HD and LDAC codecs supported. Its 8,400mAh built-in battery provides up to 10.5 hours playback, while USB-PD fast charging means that anyone with a charger that supports USB Power Delivery (USB-PD) can experience improved charging times – a one hour blast provides…

PRICE: £450 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: CHORDELECTRONICS.CO.UK CHORD ELECTRONICS HAS launched Mojo 2, the replacement for its original Mojo portable DAC/headphone amplifier (HFC 423), which features the first lossless DSP in the world. This UHD DSP, Chord claims: “is fully transparent, enabling comprehensive tone adjustments across the frequency range, without any degradation in sound quality. The new technology gives Mojo 2 compatibility with today’s wide-ranging choice of headphones, regardless of type and sonic signature, plus flexibility with different source components and digital file types. “The UHD DSP enables fine-tuning across the full frequency range with 18 steps of adjustment per frequency banding: lower bass, mid-bass, lower treble and high treble. The volume control range has also been improved from +18dB to -108dB, and now benefits from two distinct operational ranges: low…

Audio terminology is a curious business. The ‘just add speakers’ style of all-in-one systems has become a dominant part of the market, but determining quite how dominant is made more complex by how manufacturers refer to their creations. The NAD C 700 is a perfect case in point. It could be a standard all-in-one, but as far NAD is concerned, it’s a ‘streaming amplifier’. Indeed it’s the most affordable of the Canadian company’s streaming amp family. At its core, the C 700 is a combination of NAD’s UcD Class D amplifier technology – which creates a switching amplifier from discrete analogue sections rather than a single chip amp – and the BluOS streaming front end that underpins many NAD and Bluesound components (as well as some of the C 700’s…

In a commendably short space of time, Fyne Audio has gone from plucky newcomer to an established contender in the speaker sector. More recently, it has focussed on increasing the number of its models built in the UK. These units – denoted by their ‘SP’ Special Production badging – are not simply repatriated versions of existing models. This means that the F500SP is a relative of the standard F500 (HFC 457), but is not the same speaker made in a different place. The characteristics are the same, though. The F500SP is a two-way standmount that uses Fyne’s preferred driver configuration. This is a coaxially mounted tweeter placed in the throat of a mid/bass driver. The tweeter is a 25mm magnesium compression type. It operates best inside a flare, so is…

I’m not really a decluttering sort of guy. In fact, let’s be honest, I’ve always been a hoarder – although I prefer the classier term ‘collector’. As a 10-year-old, my suburban bedroom housed vast collections of stamps, coins, match box labels and albums full of cards depicting animals of Africa or flags of the world, given away with packets of tea. Then I discovered collecting records, starting with 45s but soon graduating to LPs (A Hard Day’s Night in 1964 was the first). Once I decided I liked an artist, I had to own everything they’d ever recorded. If Bob Dylan played uncredited harmonica on three tracks on a 1962 album by obscure folk-singer Carolyn Hester, I had to have it. Later there were collections of Wisden Cricketers Almanacs and…

HI-FIChoice Recommends ESSENTIAL HI-FI YOU’LL WANT TO OWN CD players p112 Amplifiers p113 Pre/power amps p113 Cables p114-115 Network audio players p116 Music servers p116 DACs p117 Loudspeakers p118-120 One-box systems p120 Turntables p121 Cartridges p121 Phono stages p122 Headphones p122-123 Portable DACs p123 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…

1 BARN TO BE WILD If you fancy watching a gang of gnarly old geezers bash out an album, then you could do yourself a favour by looking up Barn on Youtube. The new documentary, directed by Daryl Hannah, shows her beau Neil Young and Crazy Horse working on their latest album, called Barn, in – you guessed it – a log barn. A press release states: “It captures Neil and the Horse in an organic way, their easy irreverent humour, their brotherhood and their music, as it was created”. Barn intentionally lingers on single shots for entire songs, showing there are no tricks, revealing the raw, organic and spontaneous process of the music bursting to life from unexpected moments. “Exquisite changes of light and weather dance in the remote meadow…

PRICE: £650-£1,000 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: ROTEL.COM JAPANESE SPECIALIST ROTEL is upping its output to celebrate its 60th anniversary with the arrival of the A12MKII (bottom) integrated and CD14MKII (middle) and RCD-1572MKII (top) CD players, following the recent launch of the A14MKII (HFC 480), RA-1572MKII and RA-1592MKII amps and RC-1572MKII and RC-1590MKII preamps. The company explains that: “the new models benefit from innovations and improvements to the circuit designs and enhancement to critical audio components, resulting in exceptional performance, improved accuracy and greater acoustic detail. The soundstage of the new models delivers wider and more genuine presentation of the music with increased depth and natural expression.” All models feature a new Texas Instruments 32-bit DAC, power supply refinements, precision acoustic coupling capacitors and circuit board layout isolation intended to lower the noise…

PRICE: £239-£370 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: RUSSANDREWS.COM Russ Andrews has unveiled the TT-2 phono interconnect cable for turntables equipped with phono socket outputs, combining the benefits of the Kimber braided cable design with those of an outer screen, to minimise hum pick up. “The turntable cable is the one cable in a hi-fi system that must be screened to prevent pick up of hum, which is a potential problem with all cartridges, but more common with the moving-magnet designs often fitted to lower and mid-priced turntables,” the company reveals. The TT-2 follows Russ Andrews’ TT-1 cable, which is a coax design and in part based around the wire used in the Kimber Select range. TT-2 is a more traditional braided Kimber design, made using three woven Teflon-insulated pure copper conductors per…

PRICE: £200 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: APPLE.COM BEATS HAS LAUNCHED what it’s calling its most advanced earphones to date, the Beats Fit Pro. Featuring a custom-developed acoustic platform, 27-hour battery life with charging case, Active Noise Cancellation, Transparency, Adaptive EQ, spatial audio with dynamic head tracking and the Apple H1 chip, Beats says the Fit Pro: “represents a breakthrough in all-day fitness earphones,” delivering three listening modes, auto play/pause, sweat-and water-resistant earbuds (IPX4)1 and coming in four colours: Black, White, Sage Gray and Stone Purple. The company says Fit Pro’s flexible wingtip design was digitally modelled: “using measurements from thousands of ears to achieve the perfect combination of soft, pliable material around a rigid core for a comfortable and stable fit on any ear shape or size.” The Beats also deploys an…

Hi-Fi Choice employs the most methodical test and measurement regime in the business. Here’s how we do it… NOISE-CANCELLING HEADPHONES GROUP TEST ALL OF THE noise-cancelling headphones in this group can be used as conventional passive models along with the provided cables. This generally offers superior sound quality – as well as preserving battery – so we begin by testing each with any noise-cancellation modes deactivated. The source used throughout is an Astell&Kern A&norma SR25 (HFC 465), which supports both aptX and aptX HD Bluetooth and allows us to test any wireless capabilities. The next step is to activate noise-cancelling modes on each headphone and compare performance under controlled conditions. Several models have adjustable levels of cancellation that allow a certain amount of background noise to be heard. However, our…

Unloading the three AVID HiFi boxes that these standmounts arrive in – one for each Reference Four speaker, at £20,000 a pair, plus one for the included (and very hefty) stands – you’d be forgiven for jumping to the obvious conclusion that what you’re dealing with here is intended for playing heavy metal. And as fate would have it, you wouldn’t be that far off the truth for, while most speakers do very nicely enough thank you very much with variations on the wooden box theme, the Reference Fours opt for all-alloy cabinets, with panels up to 15mm-thick, sitting on six ‘risers’ attached to a thick alloy baseplate. Hence why each of these relatively compact speakers, at just under 370mm tall, weighs a decidedly hefty 25kg. Furthermore, the cabinets may…

B&W’s Zeppelin has been part of the company’s range in some form or another for the last 15 years. What began as a speaker with an iPod dock (which seems rather quaint now, but was pretty radical at the time) evolved into a wireless speaker that removed the physical connections but kept the iconic shape. The latest version continues the trend, offering wireless connectivity with some new twists – support for Qobuz and Tidal (with native MQA handling in the works) alongside Deezer and Spotify Connect. This is the first Zeppelin to be compatible with hi-res alongside AirPlay and Bluetooth and it has native Alexa support too. Some of the omissions are more mystifying. The Zeppelin can’t access a UPnP library on a local network, there’s Chromecast support but no…

Atime of great social change, the Seventies saw the UK finally begin to face the brave new world of global competition in industry and consumer goods. As the rapid decline of both UK car and motorcycle manufacturing at that time showed, we simply weren’t ready… The onslaught from Japanese companies was too strong for many British brands, aided and abetted by a Yen that was – until around 1980 – dramatically undervalued. One of the major casualties in the hi-fi world was Garrard – which had been a seemingly unassailable turntable manufacturer in the early Seventies, but by the end of that decade was in terminal decline. The 125SB was its attempt to stave off the flood of affordable belt-drives from Japan, from around 1975. It was the ailing Swindon…

Apparently, a typical night at Bongo’s Bingo consists of: “several rounds of bingo interspersed with rave intervals, dance-offs and catwalks down tables. It’s essentially bingo played over pitchers of cocktails and beer, with frantic dancing to Nineties pop music and celebrity entertainment.” Sounds utterly brill, right? Sadly, our Scottish pals couldn’t partake as planned over the new year because all Hogmanay celebrations were banned North of the border due to COVID. What makes this cancellation doubly tragic is that the venue hosting the double B bash was Glasgow’s SWG3, an ecologically minded arts space that is working hard to put in place a radical new plan to heat and cool the building using its audience’s body heat. The first of its kind to be installed in Scotland, BODYHEAT does exactly…

ALBUM OF THE MONTH 94 Scenes From The Kalevala Lahti Symphony Orchestra 96 Kendra Morris Nine Lives 99 Action & Tension & Space Tellus Nilufer Yanya Painless CD ATO BORN IN LONDON 26 years ago to an Irish-Barbadian mother and a Turkish father, Nilufer Yanya may be the embodiment of modern multi-cultural Britain but she’s built her career in the old-fashioned way. Her debut album, 2019’s Miss Universe, arrived not on the back of internet-fuelled hype and a social media campaign, but was the culmination of years of gigging in small clubs, acoustic demos on Soundcloud, self-released EPs, support slots for like-minded artists such as The xx, and Sharon Van Etten, and finally signing to an independent label which allowed her the space to hone and develop her songcraft. “I certainly…

APART FROM ALLOWING connection of up to six pieces of equipment, TCI’s powerblock includes the company’s Emerald Constrictor RFI filtering mains cable, which features eight cores of silver-plated copper conductors insulated in PTFE and is designed to act as a filter to eliminate unwanted mains-borne interference. The wires are braided in a non-inductive and self-screening construction and finished in a polyolefin braid to provide abrasion resistance. The distribution block itself has a master on/off switch and is fitted with six UK mains sockets. The other end features a 13A UK True-Plug. A version of the powerblock with Schuko connectors is also available. Connecting my audio equipment to the Emerald Constrictor, I am able to compare it with a standard six-way mains distribution block. The sockets are moulded from a single…

REGA SYSTEM ONE “If you’re looking for one of the purest distillations of the hi-fi experience on the market today, you’ve just found it.” The all-in-one analogue audio system consists of a Planar 1 turntable, io amplifier, Kyte loudspeakers and tons of cables, and you can get the in-depth lowdown only in the April issue. ALSO: REVIEWS Roksan Attessa streaming amp, B&W P15 true wireless in-ears, Dethonray Prelude DTR1+ DAP, Bricasti M21 DAC, Astell&Kern A&K Zero 1 earbuds, Sonos Beam Gen 2 soundbar, Beats Fit Pro earpods and a Group Test on the best hi-res streaming services FEATURES Music Legends, Music Reviews, Reasons To Be Cheerful, our comprehensive Buyer’s Guide and sharp-as-nails Opinions pieces, and all your hi-fi questions answered by our experts, plus Audiofile News on all the latest product…