Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2026 i Hi-Fi Choice

PRICE: £1,300 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: LUMINMUSIC.COM SOUNDDESIGNDISTRIBUTION.CO.UK UK DISTRIBUTOR SOUND Design Distribution has introduced Hong Kong-based company Lumin’s new flagship X2 Network Player – which incorporates key technologies from Lumin’s already available X1 network player. Featuring the company’s latest System-on-Chip (SoC) processor, Lumin claims that the X2 delivers a significant boost in processing power, enabling enhanced upsampling and sophisticated signal handling for comprehensive file format support up to 32-bit/768kHz and DSD512 from a wide range of digital streaming sources, including Spotify Connect, Tidal, Tidal Connect, Qobuz, Qobuz Connect, KKBOX, TuneIn, Amazon Music and AirPlay. For the first time, Lumin’s X2 incorporates a fully custom discreet DAC circuit. The design includes an external dual-toroidal linear power supply (also utilised by the X1), a fully balanced analogue output module incorporating a dual…

PRICE: £900 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: FYNEAUDIO.COM SCOTTISH SPEAKER SPECIALIST Fyne Audio has added a new model to its F500E range with the launch of the F55E – a compact floorstander featuring the brand’s IsoFlare point-source technology and BassTrax diffuser system. The entry-level F500E Series saw the company transition to become an all-IsoFlare brand. Across seven ranges and over 60 models, every loudspeaker in the Fyne portfolio is now built around the brand’s patented point-source driver tech. The F55E completes the lineup. Designed for use in smaller and medium-sized rooms where space is at a premium, the new model features a 127mm IsoFlare driver and downward-firing port system with BassTrax Tractrix diffuser. Fyne claims: “this delivers enviable low-end authority at this price point and the system’s 360° low-frequency output ensures the…

Most companies update one or two products at a time, allowing each new release to enjoy its own moment in the spotlight. However, Audio Pro recently refreshed its entire range of speakers all at once, with the launch of its new ‘W Generation’. The outward design of the speaker hasn’t changed much, with a compact cabinet available in a variety of colours that’s small enough to fit onto a bookshelf. There’s a smart fabric grille on the front, which can be removed to reveal a pair of 19mm tweeters and a single 133mm bass driver. That’s similar to the previous model, but Audio Pro states it has adjusted the speaker’s sound profile to provide greater clarity and volume. The ‘W’ stands for ‘wireless’, reflecting the fact that the C10 MkII…

French brand Devialet first entered the active speaker market back in 2015 with its original Phantom, an oh-so-stylish wireless model incorporating bespoke drivers and electronics. There have been a few upgrades over the years, but it’s now overhauled the concept sufficiently to launch a new ‘Ultimate’ edition. Carried over from previous Phantoms is the near-spherical cabinet shape, use of side-firing bass drivers and Devialet’s Speaker Active Matching (SAM) DSP and Analog Digital Hybrid (ADH) amplification technologies. The latter combines Class A preamp circuitry with digital Class D power rated at 400W, while the former provides real-time matching of the amp output to the behaviour of the bass drivers. More DSP tools are user selectable in Devialet’s partnering smartphone app, including Movie, Music and Podcast listening presets, six-band EQ and Night…

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Live God CD Bad Seed MAINLY DUE TO so many audience members filming gigs on their mobile phones and then posting the footage on YouTube, plus the business opportunity exploited by the likes of Taylor Swift, Depeche Mode and The Cure who have taken to making movies of their tours so that they can extract extra moolah from the fans who couldn’t afford tickets to attend the actual shows in the first place, nobody in their right mind releases live albums anymore. Nobody, that is, except Nick Cave who, by common consensus, is more right-minded than he’s ever been. Cave, of course, can do no wrong presently, his resilience in the face of tragedy – the loss of two sons – deservedly lauded as inspiration…

1 GOT LIVE IF YOU 1 WANT IT Music Venue Properties (MVP), Charitable Community Benefit Society, has announced the purchase of The Joiners in Southampton and The Croft in Bristol under its Own Our Venues initiative with support from Arts Council England. The two grassroots venues, where artists including Arctic Monkeys, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay, PJ Harvey, Oasis, IDLES and Wet Leg played early in their careers, will now have permanent protected status and so will benefit from long-term security. Music Venue Properties focuses on removing the venues from vulnerable leases by purchasing the freehold of the buildings and placing them into community ownership. Since launching in 2022, the Own Our Venues campaign has raised almost £4-million through a combination of community investment – with music fans buying shares from as…

PRICE: €2,500 AVAILABLE: SOON WEB: TRIANGLEHIFI.COM FRENCH COMPANY TRIANGLE is about to launch an updated successor to its CAPELLA system. The new CAPELLA 2 is an all-in-one system featuring its Stereo Hub 2 network player and transmitter, powered by WISA technology – which provides a wireless connection between the speakers – allowing the user to position them wherever they choose without involving any cables. The Stereo Hub 2 introduces several new features including a dedicated subwoofer output (fully adjustable via the CAPELLA app), RJ45 Ethernet port for network connection, rechargeable remote control and a Cortex A53 Quad-Core processor clocked at 1.5GHz. It also offers native support for Spotify Lossless, Tidal Connect and is Roon Ready. The CAPELLA 2 features wireless Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi for high-resolution streaming up to 24-bit/192kHz…

PRICE: £9,200-£9,700 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: PIEGA.CH/DE HENLEYAUDIO.CO.UK SWISS COMPANY PIEGA has expanded its Premium speaker range with the introduction of a new flagship model, the Premium 801 floorstander. Features include a new ribbon horn design, a midrange/low-end driver assembly and improved base stand for optimised stability. The Premium 801 is built on the highly rigid extruded aluminium profile of the company’s Coax 611 loudspeaker. The cabinet is shaped under more than 5,000 tons of pressure, which Piega says results in an exceptionally stiff, resonance-free enclosure with a sleek, elegant silhouette. Inside there’s longitudinal bracing, a damping layer and a newly developed wooden reinforcement matrix, while the midrange driver operates in its own sealed chamber with four drivers in a bass reflex system. At the heart of the Premium 801 lies…

PRICE: £3,990 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: ULTRAFIDEAUDIO.CO.UK ULTRAFIDE AUDIO HAS introduced its SP500 stereo power amplifier. The company explains that SP stands for ‘squaredPOWER’ and the amp features a more minimal, straight-edged casework design than previous Ultrafide models while: “offering the same output power, sonic purity and music-first ‘power with emotion’ as its brother the U500DC”. The SP500 features Ultrafide’s Ultra Sigma output topology and DC coupling input to output, to ensure: “clean and accurate signal transmission, a pure timbre sonic signature: providing an incredibly transparent, but musically engaging experience”. It also offers flexible configuration with RCA and XLR inputs, XLR passive link outputs and both binding post and speakON outputs.…

PRICE: £700-£6,950 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: REGA.CO.UK REGA HAS ANNOUNCED a raft of new releases: its Mercury preamp, Solis power amp and a new addition to its Nd moving-magnet range: the reference Nd9, which uses the company’s Neodymium magnet technology combined with a Boron cantilever and fine-line profile, which it claims is an assembly usually reserved for high-end moving coils. Explaining how the design works, Rega reveals: “The main challenge we faced creating Nd9 was connecting the Nd magnet to a Boron rod. This was achieved by working with a highly skilled watchmaker to manufacture an ultra-fine connecting tube with different diameters at each end. The Nd9 boron cantilever is fitted with a precision perfect fine line nude diamond stylus. This assembly provides the optimum tracking accuracy and extracts maximum levels…

PRICE: £5,500 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: MUSICALFIDELITY.COM HENLEYAUDIO.CO.UK MUSICAL FIDELITY HAS launched its Nu-Vista Vinyl S integrated amplifier, boasting many of the same features and technologies as those deployed in the flagship Nu-Vista Vinyl 2, re-designed into a smaller chassis. Features include audio circuitry inspired by the flagship Nu-Vista Vinyl 2, fully balanced and discrete electrical design including eight 7586 nuvistor tubes, a redesigned front panel, split-passive RIAA, DECCA and COLOMBIA EQ curves, setting options to suit different cartridges, separate output and input stages to allow for multiple devices to be connected at the same time and a new slim remote control. In more detail, Musical Fidelity explains that the Nu-Vista Vinyl S is a: “highly accurate phono stage for both MM and MC cartridge systems featuring two balanced XLR and…

PRICE: £450 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: DECOAUDIO.COM DECO AUDIO HAS released its new Governor Standard entry-level turntable power supply, a stripped-down model of the company’s Evolution with a lower power output and less facilities – reducing its cost. Inside the half-width aluminium enclosure with its Gloss Black acrylic fascia is a linear power supply, analogue waveform generator and transformer-coupled analogue output stage. With a claimed output of 3W it is capable of driving the majority of turntables. An electronic power supply allows speed switching along with adjustment and Deco says it also produces a completely new and stable waveform. “This naturally reduces speed variation and most importantly vibration as the motor no longer sees the noise inherent in the normal mains supply”. The mains man The new Governor offers 33 and…

Last year the line where an ‘amplifier’ ended and an ‘all-in-one system’ began was pretty hazy, and Arcam was one of the companies responsible for this. In its five-strong Radia ‘amplifier’ lineup, the lower three models – all recently updated to ‘+’ status – are integrated amplifiers with a combination of analogue and digital inputs. The upper two are rather closer in spec to all-in-ones. The reason for this is that the SA35 has no requirement for any source to be connected to function. As well as the expected collection of analogue and digital inputs, it’s fitted with a UPnP streaming module capable of handling PCM to 384kHz and DSD256; supported by the usual suspect streaming services with Connect function. The front end of the streaming platform is now a…

LA’s Highland Park is home to artists and producers who make music in small spaces with neighbours they don’t want to disturb close by. The HP-1 has been designed with this in mind and offers a unique range of facilities for personal listening A closed-back, over-ear design, it offers both Bluetooth and wired connection, and is supplied with a cable terminated with a 3.5mm jack and 6.3mm adapter. One of the two buttons on the right earcup is used to select the various DSP voicings – the default setting being Studio mode, which Kali says offers a transparent and accurate sound for mixing and studio use. Bass-Heavy mode adds a low-frequency boost of around 10dB between 60Hz and 600Hz, a 3dB boost centred around 1,100Hz, and a slight dip in…

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Music has been shown to affect some of the broadest and most diverse networks of the brain. It activates the auditory cortex in the temporal lobes close to your ears, but that’s just the beginning. It also stimulates a variety of memory regions and the parts of the brain involved in emotion are not only affected by emotional music, they are also synchronised to other parts of the brain. A new study from Aarhus University in Denmark explores how the brains of younger (18–25) and older adults (60+) respond as they listen to familiar Johann Sebastian Bach’s piano compositions. These 300-year-old masterpieces are also helping scientists to understand how ageing brains adapt in order to remember things. Music therapy is already used to stimulate the brains of those with dementia…

PRICE: £400 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: CHORDELECTRONICS.CO.UK CHORD ELECTRONICS HAS upgraded its Mojo 2 (HFC 488) DAC/headphone amplifier with the inclusion of a new 4.4mm headphone output and USB-C charging. The Mojo 2 is engineered around a custom-coded FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) processor, uses the company’s proprietary digital audio code and features what CC says is the world’s first lossless Digital Signal Processor (DSP), explaining that: “The innovative ‘UHD DSP’ is fully transparent, enabling comprehensive tone adjustments across the frequency range without any degradation in sound quality. This unique technology gives Mojo 2 unrivalled adaptability when connected to other hardware, plus exceptional control over digital music regardless of age, recording quality or genre.” A further key feature is a button-operated menu system, which offers a mute function, four-setting crossfeed adjustment,…

PRICE: $1,345 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: KRIX.COM AUSTRALIAN HI-FI COMPANY Krix has updated its Evara range of loudspeakers with the release of the Equinox Evara two-way bookshelf speaker and the Seismix 1 Evara subwoofer. The Equinox claims an in-room frequency response of 45Hz-40kHz, 20-120W recommended amplifier power and sensitivity of 88dB (6ohm). It has a bass reflex enclosure that’s rear vented with internal bracing. The low-frequency driver has a cast aluminium basket with a nominal 130mm doped curvilinear paper cone with a 30mm vented magnet voice coil wound on high temperature kapton former, with copper shorting ring. The 26mm tweeter boasts a dual concentric diaphragm with wave-guide centre plug for controlled directivity with a non-reflective dual chambered magnet structure with copper shorting ring to lower distortion. The input terminals feature gold-plated…

PRICE: £28,000 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: GRYPHON-AUDIO.DK Scandinavian company Gryphon Audio Designs is celebrating 40 years in the business with the launch of the limited-edition Gryphon 40 integrated amplifier. The celebration amp is built upon the foundation of the Diablo 333, while introducing exclusive mechanical and visual elements. Each unit ships with an exclusive anniversary presentation package, including: a luxury leather-bound owner’s manual, a personal 40th Anniversary letter from designer Mr. Flemming E. Rasmussen alongside a hand-signed sketch of an original design concept.…

PRICE: £350-£3,000 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: AUDIO-TECHNICA.COM AUDIO-TECHNICA HAS INTRODUCED its AT33x Series, an update to its phono cartridge line. The new moving-coil series includes five models: the AT33xMLB, AT33xMLD and AT33xEN stereo cartridges, plus AT33xMONO/I and AT33xMONO/II mono options. The launch sees the brand’s first use of die-cast zinc, which A-T explains: “helps minimise unwanted vibrations and delivers a richer, more articulate performance, particularly across the mid and low-frequency ranges”. Another debut within the AT33x Series is a newly developed suspension mechanism, designed with slightly lower dynamic compliance than conventional cartridges. A-T claims this innovation expands setup flexibility and tonearm compatibility. Each AT33x Series cartridge is crafted and hand finished in Japan. The AT33xEN is a solid elliptical nude stylus model that the company claims combines a rich soundfield with…

PRICE: £150-£380 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: WEAREREWIND.COM FRENCH COMPANY WE Are Rewind has announced the arrival of a couple of new products. First up is a follow-up to the launch of its WE-001 portable cassette player in the shape of the GB-001 boombox. The company claims that the new box rivals home speaker systems, delivering exceptional stereo sound with a full-spectrum stereo image, thanks to its combination of separate left and right mid/bass drivers and tweeters. “Whether you’re listening to cassettes, using a wired connection, or streaming via Bluetooth, its four hi-fi-class loudspeakers (two powerful drivers for extended bass response and two soft dome tweeters for refined voices and treble) provide a huge 104W of total power output.” The GB-001 also features dynamic power control to reduce distortion, refined equalisation in a…

Michell has an illustrious history of manufacturing phono stages stretching all the way back to the ISO of the late Eighties. Inside the Apollo are gain stages employing THAT1512 instrumentation-amp chips running in full Class A. These low-noise microphone preamp devices are designed to work with just a few millivolts on the input. Michell says they give a lower noise floor and better consistency than discrete transistors. The Muse power supply has a low-noise toroidal transformer with voltage regulators to reduce ripple and noise. Build quality is excellent. Hand-selected components are specified throughout and the cases are superbly finished aluminium affairs, machined from solid billets. Michell says they form effective Faraday cages against radio frequency interference. Underneath the Apollo is a small removable aluminium panel, behind which are DIP switches…

Slotting in above the quite excellent XtraX (HFC 512), Vertere’s Ruby One now sits on the throne at the top of its cartridge range. One of the main improvements is the use of a custom-designed low-mass moving-coil generator paired with an advanced telescopic ruby, aluminium alloy cantilever and micro-ridge nude diamond stylus. Ruby is considerably stiffer than aluminium or boron, so less sound information is lost as the cantilever flexes during playing. The low-mass generator utilises a Samarium-Cobalt magnet and is fixed in the body with a quad-point contact mounting secured with four stainless spike screws. This design is intended to deliver an extended dynamic control, excellent tracking ability and a wide frequency response. The cartridge is supplied with a variety of fixing screws, a Vertere Balance-1V mechanical stylus balance,…

Topping has carved out a reputation for high performing digital front ends at a very reasonable outlay. Even judged by its past offerings, the DX5 II feels like a lot of digital for £300. It is built as a DAC, preamp and headphone amp, and uses the ESS 9039Q2M for decoding. Where it differs from most rivals is that it uses a pair of them for one per channel. It’s possible to create a true balanced circuit from a single 9039, but this implementation allows for a positive and negative balanced signal to be summed for a further reduction in noise and error. These dual chips handle sample rates up 768kHz PCM and DSD512. Bluetooth supports LDAC, aptX Adaptive, aptX HD, aptX, AAC and SBC. The in and outputs on…

DRY CLEANING A record with a brush or cloth before every play is easy, but will never release all the debris (including the mould-release agent present on new discs) from within the grooves. This can only be done carrying out a wet clean. The VC range of wet record cleaning machines from Pro-Ject started with the VC-S (HFC 410), which was introduced in 2016. Since then, the range has earned a great reputation and undergone a number of changes, moving from the wooden case of the original to an aluminium one for the VC-S3. This compact cleaner is described by the company as perfect for smaller rooms or those with fewer records in their collection. The VC-E2 is only 310 x 266 x 210mm (WxHxD) and has a durable aluminium…

Hi-fi Choice Recommends ESSENTIAL HI-FI YOU’LL WANT TO OWN CD PLAYERS 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. Cyrus CDi-XR Phantom Black PRICE: £2,200 REVIEWED: HFC 499 Familiar Cyrus traits such as clean speed, punctuality and strong sense of transparency are present and correct, but previous signature leanness has been bolstered by a weightier, warmer balance that sounds more natural. Fell Audio Fell Disc PRICE: £500 REVIEWED: HFC 524 New hi-fi brands don’t come along very often, but…