Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 1 2019 i Audio Esoterica

PMC’s new Fact Series Fenestria loudspeaker is a six-driver, three-way design that uses four 165mm carbon-fibre flat-diaphragm bass drivers, a 75mm dome midrange driver and a 19.5mm Sonoflex-domed tweeter, all designed from the ground up for use in this flagship $89,999 pair of speakers. For vibration management they use a ‘mass-damper’ vibration cancellation technology taken from the science of skyscraper contruction — sky-high high-end! More information: interdyn.com.au…

AUDIO ESOTERICA: So the ND 555 — could you possibly make it any heavier? STEVE SELLS: There’s another trillion kg of copper in the ground waiting to be made into Naim brass suspension systems… so we could have! Such self-control… AE: In a nutshell then, what are you most proud of, regarding the ND 555? SS: For me it’s the sound performance and hearing the evangelical feedback from customers. They have been patiently waiting for the 555 to add 500 series quality streaming to their 500 series systems. During development it was seeing the new ideas come to life from ‘sketch books dreams’ to reality, such as the master clocking, the nested faraday cage and the DR regulators directly below the DAC. AE: The master clock arrangement applies only to network sources, rather…

The Colibri XGW Signature Stradivarius is van den Hul’s latest flagship phono cartridge, priced at $10,499, made from cross-grained Brazilian Pau wood (a high density wood often used in instrument bows), coated with a ‘Stradivarius’ lacquer, named after the famous violin maker, and fitted with a solid boron cantilever tipped with a proprietary Type 1s, 2×85μm stylus. Each one is hand-built to order by A.J. van den Hul personally, and the build process can even be tailored according to the user’s preference. For more information: audioactive.com.au…

“the spindle is rotatably mounted in the sleeve, and a plate in said sleeve, the spindle being formed with a bearing portion which has point contact with said plate to support said spindle…” It’s hard to believe today, but in the early days of hi-fi, there was little recognition of the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ philosophy. The signal was the signal, amplifiers just made it bigger, and it was your loudspeakers that made all the difference between good sound and bad sound. No matter that the art of LP reproduction had remained substantially unchanged since 1948 when Peter Goldmark, head of research at CBS-Columbia in the US, had delivered a lightweight tone-arm and sapphire needle to play his new 12-inch 33⅓rpm vinylite LP with microgrooves (the 45rpm 7-incher arrived the…

Famous Swedish loudspeaker manufacturer Marten is a family concern. It’s run by three brothers. Jörgen Olofsson is Marten’s CEO, Leif Olofsson is Marten’s Chief Designer, and Lars Olofsson is Marten’s Art Director. So why isn’t the company called Olofsson? It’s because it was Leif who originally founded the company (in 1998) and his full name is Leif Mårten Olofsson. Originally called Marten Design, the company abbreviated its name to the crisper, snappier ‘Marten’ in 2007. In 2018, to commemorate its 20th anniversary, Marten released the Mingus 20, which it calls a ‘special edition’ of the company’s first production speaker, which was called the Mingus, but since the original Mingus was a two-way design, and the Mingus 20 is a threeway design, it’s obviously a very special edition! In fact, the…

GoldenEar’s Triton Reference has just won the top-tier loudspeaker award from our sister magazine Sound+Image — it is their ‘Loudspeaker of the Year over $10,000’. More specifically this flagship model sells at $17,995 the pair. So possibly some readers may be surprised that one of the key words Sound+Image used to describe the Triton Reference is “value”. With which we would concur — that’s exactly what GoldenEar has achieved here. Indeed we gather that the Triton Reference was originally envisaged as having a six-figure price-tag. But it was apparently decided that this price would not be in keeping with GoldenEar’s motto, which is “We make high-end affordable”. Yet despite the reduction in resources necessitated by having to build to a selling price less than one twentieth that of the original…

Yamaha’s long-awaited 5000 Series of two-channel audio is now complete, or will very soon be so, once the final element, the GT-5000 turntable, arrives officially on the market early in 2019. The combination of turntable, separate pre-amplifier and power amplifiers, plus the iconic NS-5000 speakers, manages to deliver something which is both fresh and modern, but which clearly leverages both Yamaha’s past classics and its engineering technologies developed over the company’s 121 years. We first saw the complete system at IFA in Berlin, in September 2018, where we had the pleasure of interviewing Mr Susumu Kumazawa, Yamaha’s Head of Hi-Fi Development; you can read our interview at the end of this article. But first let’s take a look at the system itself, and the elements which comprise it. ALL ANALOGUE…

JOHN MARTIN: It’s crucial. It’s where the customer will often have their first experience with our brand. Therefore we work closely with our retail partners on every aspect of presentation, demonstration, product knowledge and customer service. We want to be regarded as a benchmark brand for not only sound quality but for the overall ownership experience, starting with that first in-store consultation and hopefully continuing for life. AE: For B&W, what were the goals for the new space at Audio Solutions? What makes it different to more general spaces in other stores? JM: The newly renovated space is a rethink of the original showroom we created instore a few years back. Customers will now get a better demonstration of a wider range of products, in particular we are now able to…

“It’s not like, OK which one is better? They all have their character, because they are different products and have different treatments. I want them to be different.” The last time we interviewed Brian Zolner, the ‘Bri’ in Bricasti Design, we learned a good deal, and were especially taken with his explanation of why hardly any digital DSD recordings are really truly DSD, and why most of the few that are, aren’t worth having. This time we interviewed Brian Zolner during the Australian Hi-Fi & AV Show, where Bricasti was showing its new M21 and its recent M5 in the suite of its distributor, Studio Connections Australia. To briefly recap the story so far, Bricasti Design was formed by two former employees of Lexicon, joined subsequently by engineers from Madrigal…