Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2020 i What Hi-Fi?

What Hi-Fi?|October 2020

New-season TVs are right on time

It always takes quite some time each year for the new season’s televisions – always so heavily promoted at CES, the massive annual industry exhibition/shindig right at the beginning of January – actually to arrive in our testing rooms. Of course, this year, the manufacturers have had far greater issues to worry about than simply the usual production gremlins. It is to all their credit, then, that the major brands have barely missed the normal dates for their sets to come on the market. We are now well underway in our testing for our annual Awards (Best Buys announced online at the beginning of October), so now is a good time to start whittling down some contenders. To that end, we’ve got a test of 55in TVs (p26) from all…

1 min

What Hi-Fi?|October 2020

JBL Bar 9.1

Imagine a sliding bar between quality and convenience, with a soundbar at one end and a full home cinema speaker package and amplifier at the other. Somewhere in the middle is a space that the JBL Bar 9.1 is aiming to occupy. It looks like a single soundbar and sub, but this is more akin to a Transformer toy. Remove the two ends of the bar and place them behind and to the side of your seating position and they become the dedicated, true wireless, battery-powered rear speakers in a surround-sound set-up. It’s the sort of thing Optimus Prime might have at home. Complete with upward-firing speakers on both the main bar and the satellites, it represents a real effort to fill your room with AV audio. So are we…

7 min

What Hi-Fi?|October 2020

Neat Ministra

While there’s no shortage of great speakers at the two-grand mark, if you need something that sounds best close to a wall, you’ll struggle. That’s where Neat’s Ministras come in. They’re specifically designed to do that job, with a suggested initial placement of just 20cm into the room. Out of the ordinary But there’s more to these standmounters than just convenient positioning – there’s some unusual engineering too. Neat has long used ribbon tweeters, so it’s not a surprise to find one here. This one is a 50mm unit that’s claimed to offer excellent dynamics over dome alternatives. In this installation, it’s mated to a pair of 13cm treated-paper mid/bass drivers arranged in an isobaric configuration, one behind the other. The idea is to keep the air pressure behind the…

Your record player really should be the star of your system. The beating heart of your set up might be the amplifier, and the speakers are its face, but your source is why you built the system in the first place. It is dictated by how you want to consume music, and you’ll interact with no other component as much as you do a turntable. That puts quite a bit of pressure on choosing the right one, however, and with so many variables and so much choice, it can help to have a hand to hold through the process. That’s what we’ll try to provide here. We’ll talk you through how to budget and all the items you’ll need to consider, what your options are in terms of features, and…

12 min

What Hi-Fi?|October 2020

HOW WE TEST

EXPERIENCE. HERITAGE. We’ve been helping the world discover the best in hi-fi and home entertainment for more than 40 years, and have more than 100 years of reviewing experience under our collective belts – so you can count on our expert opinion. DEDICATED TEST FACILITIES We test every product against its peers in our brand-new, bespoke reviewing facilities in London and Bath. We conduct all our tests as a team – our opinions and conclusions are always the result of collaboration. HOW WE SCORE All review verdicts are agreed upon by the team as a whole – not an individual reviewer. Each product will be listened to and/or viewed by several members of the test team, who will then discuss the final verdict before it appears in the magazine or…

1 min

What Hi-Fi?|October 2020

Dynaudio Contour 20i

We’ve long been fans of Dynaudio’s Contour 20 standmounters. Their combination of a muscular and expressive sound coupled with fine build made them a firm recommendation at the price. This latest Contour 20i version aims to build on those solid foundations without altering the fundamentals of a great product. On the surface, little seems to have changed between the two generations of Contour 20s. Indeed, compare the headline specifications and they’re pretty much identical. Start to look closer, though, and the differences between the two emerge. One of the highlights is the revised Esotar tweeter. This new 20i version still uses the company’s usual 28mm fabric dome, but much has changed behind it. Now there’s a larger chamber for the dome’s rear-firing sound to get absorbed in, and at its…

6 min

9 min

What Hi-Fi?|October 2020

10 OF THE BEST SONGS TO TEST YOUR SPEAKERS

Every reviewer at What Hi-Fi? has their own carefully curated list of songs they use to test speakers, spanning all genres and musical tastes. This is crucial for testing speakers, especially if they’re new: it’s best to use songs that you know really well to hear what speakers can do. By that token, you’ll probably also have your own playlists for testing the various facets of audio performance; but what’s the harm in adding a few more tracks? We’ve put together a list of ten songs (with some extra suggestions) that we use to test every aspect of a pair of speakers’ performance, from treble and bass quality to the way they handle rhythm and dynamics. This is by no means a complete list – we’d be here for days…

7 min

What Hi-Fi?|October 2020

LG OLED48CX

We’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time. The first OLED TV arrived on the scene in 2007 and was tiny, at only 11 inches, not to mention ludicrously expensive. In 2012, the first full-size OLED TV arrived in shops, and that had a 55in screen. It has taken until now for a model between the two sizes to appear. That model is the OLED48CX, a 48in OLED from LG. The Korean company was an early investor in OLED tech and is now reaping the rewards: to the best of our knowledge, every OLED TV you can currently buy – whether it’s branded Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Hisense or anything else – features an LG panel. Predictably, more 48in OLEDs are now on the way, but the 48CX is…

11 min

What Hi-Fi?|October 2020

Audeze LCD-1

There are certain things we expect to hear when using a pair of open-backed headphones. And if an open, well-balanced and supremely detailed presentation is what you covet from a pair of home audio over-ears, then the Audeze LCD-1s could be the ones for you. We don’t often see open-back headphones that are designed to be so easily portable, but that’s a nod to Audeze’s intention for the LCD-1s to be used in the studio as well as at home. The company’s decades of experience making products for professional musicians and audio engineers are clearly evident in terms of build as much as sound quality. So their foldable earcups and lightweight design – they weigh only 250g – come with plenty of padding for extra comfort during long listening or…

3 min

6 min

What Hi-Fi?|October 2020

HOW TO CHOOSE AND SET UP A STEREO AMPLIFIER

While we like the idea of plug-and-play set-ups as much as anyone, there’s more to getting the best out of a stereo amplifier than simply powering it up on a hi-fi rack, plugging in speakers and going wild with the volume dial. Wondering where to start? Fear not; we’ll run you through the basics here. Integrated vs pre/power If you’ve already bought your amplifier and are now eyeing it up a touch warily with a view to getting started, you may wish to skip straight to the ‘system matching’ section. But if you’re reading this before you’ve chosen the amp needed to drive your system, you have an important decision to make. Do you go integrated or separate pre/power kit? The former is the most simple, convenient and space-saving option,…

7 min

What Hi-Fi?|October 2020

HOW TO BUY SECOND-HAND AND VINTAGE STEREO SPEAKERS

You know how it is; you do your research and read plenty of reviews, but the pair of speakers you really want are priced just out of reach. There’s a way around that problem: to buy second-hand. It takes a fair bit more legwork to get exactly what you want compared with buying new, but there is a fair chance they’ll be more affordable. Therein, of course, lies the appeal of second-hand hi-fi. How affordable? Typically, you’ll find at least a 30 per cent drop in the price of a product that’s just one year old and around 50 per cent on something that’s closer to three years old. After that, the price is determined as much by condition as age. Of all the various components that make up a…

5 min