Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 2 2019 i Audio Esoterica

A classic brand delivers a choice of two thoroughly modern preamplifiers in the solid-state McIntosh C53 (below) and the valve-laden C2700 (left), the first two products to include the company’s new and upgradeable seven-input DA2 Digital Audio Module, offering HDMI ARC audio alongside coaxial, optical, and USB-B up to 384kHz PCM and DSD512 playback. Their analogue input sections add another nine inputs each, including moving-magnet and moving-coil phono stages for turntable playback. And both, of course, sporting those trademark McIntosh ‘teal’-coloured VU meters… More info: www.synergyaudio.com.au…

Dan D’Agostino is bringing all-in-one convenience to his Progression range, with his latest ‘Integrated’ model offering five analogue inputs and an optional digital input module alongside 200W of power into 8 ohms (400W into 4 ohms), in a chassis significantly more compact than, say, his massive 1500W Relentless monoblocs. The signal meters switch to volume mode when making adjustments, and there’s even the extravagant luxury of Bluetooth remote control. More info: www.advanceaudio.com.au…

AUDIO ESOTERICA: Back in the day, Halcro was probably the most famous high-end amplifier brand in the world, but then it just vanished off the face of the earth. What happened? MIKE KIRKHAM: Halcro was owned by a company called MineLab, which manufactured metal detectors designed by Bruce Candy, who also designed the Halcro amplifiers. When MineLab was acquired by Codan, Codan simply decided to shelve the Halcro operation because it didn’t regard it as the core business. AE: Surely it would have made more commercial sense to sell off Halcro rather than just shelve it? MK: The problem with Codan selling off Halcro was that the main reason they purchased MineLab in the first place was so they could keep Bruce Candy designing metal detectors — he was more valuable…

In this magazine’s previous coverage of Bowers & Wilkins, we have focused on the highest echelons of the company’s loudspeakers — the 800 Series Diamond, as famously installed in Abbey Road Studios and widely considered one of the world’s great designs. But of course B&W’s loudspeaker ranges extend to more affordable offerings, most recently the 600 Series, which trickle that high-end technology down to speakers more easily accommodated and purchased by those perhaps less affluent, yet still of discerning taste. Now something new — although long-expected and awaited, ever since B&W was taken over in 2016 by Silicon Valley start-up EVA Automation. Finally now, here it is — the B&W Formation Suite, a collection of five new products that communicate via a proprietary mesh wireless network able to stream up…

The Focal Kanta N°3 is the top-of-the line model in this range from the French manufacturer. The next step up would be to the Sopra Series, and from there quite a leap to the premiere Utopia Series, whose flagship model, the Grande Utopia EM EVO, will set you back a cool $335,000 — making the Kanta N°3 look something of a bargain… EQUIPMENT The Kanta N°3s are large loudspeakers, 1.28-metres tall on their unique integral Zamac base. But they’re so drop-dead gorgeous that you’ may wish they were even larger, so you could gape at even more gorgeousness. If you’re looking at the photos here and wondering what the fuss is about, I can assure you that they don’t do them justice. These are loudspeakers you really have to see…

One small thing that endeared us to NAD’s M10 very early on was that it was always ready to go. The amplifier it had replaced in our test system had the rather annoying default of powering itself down automatically after 20 minutes of inactivity; so much as a phone call and you’d be required to press its power button or fumble for the remote control before being able to listen to it again, through cold Class-AB circuits. Not so the M10. For one thing, it uses the Ncore version of NAD’s HybridDigital amplification platform, and Ncore is notoriously efficient, so there’s no real warming up to do. But mainly because the M10 only appears to power down, its large 15 x 6cm TFT LCD touch-screen being fully off, but the…

For its Concert Grand series, Vienna Acoustics allocates a composer to each model, according to stature. Haydn gets standmounts, Mozart the smaller floor-standers. But the new Concert Grand Reference model goes to Beethoven — who else to represent the zenith of the range, featuring Vienna’s patented flat Spidercone technology (as used in the flagship Klimt ‘THE MUSIC’), along with flawlessly-executed hand-coated silk-dome tweeters and unique midrange units containing two cones made from different substances, all in slim 119cm-high cabinets finished in Premium Rosewood, Cherry, or piano-gloss black and white. More info: audioactive.com.au…

“Everything that earned Triton Reference Absolute Sound’s Golden Ear Award in a totally gorgeous, super sounding more compact and even more affordable package!” “…an important debut…the speakers certainly bring Triton Ref bonafides to a lower cost segment, with glowing hand-rubbed piano-black lacquer cosmetics and impressive internals.” –Neil Gader, The Absolute Sound GoldenEar Technology is pleased to announce the introduction of the new Triton One.R. This extraordinary new reference quality loudspeaker is a smaller, less expensive follow up to the Triton Reference. The T Ref has been compared with speakers selling for over ten times its surprisingly affordable cost. It has had a remarkable response from both music and hifi enthusiasts as well as press and reviewers from around the world, who have bestowed upon it innumerable Speaker-of-the-Year and Product-of-the-Year awards.…

Halcro’s founder, Bruce Halcro Candy, says he’s been an audiophile since the age of 13, when he could be found tinkering away in his home workshop aiming to combine his love of music with his technical skills to build the world’s ‘ultimate’ amplifier. In 2001 he told Jon Iverson, of Stereophile magazine, that his lifelong love of music and his ability to evaluate audio components were informed by the fact that he had a rare ability to hear frequencies so high that they are inaudible to most other people. Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic. “I can hear up to 23kHz in one ear and 21kHz in the other, and when I was younger, I could hear much higher frequencies than these,” said Candy: “Unlike all my…

Sound quality should be the only criteria used to judge loudspeakers, but since all the very best loudspeakers need to be present in the room with the listener, their visual design is always a consideration. The visual designs of the loudspeakers built by Vivid Audio stop most people in their tracks, and always polarise public opinion. Some compare Vivid Audio’s cabinet designs to modern sculptures. Others see resemblances to famous robots, drawing similarities between the Vivid Audio B1 and R2D2, for example. The appearance of Vivid Audio’s top-line Giya G2 is often compared to that of Maïwenn: Diva, a character in the movie The Fifth Element. As for the Kaya 90 reviewed here, viewed from some angles it could be a model for a friendly cartoon character. But the common…

THE MAGNETS IN the three cone drivers of the Focal Kanta N°3 all feature Focal’s Neutral Inductance Circuit (NIC). This is not an electrical circuit but a magnetic one… or rather a small part of a larger magnetic circuit. One major problem with all moving-coil drivers (also known as dynamic drivers) is that their operation is dependent on the interaction between two magnetic fields, the one surrounding the driver magnet and the other surrounding the voice coil. Without an audio signal going through the voice coil, the coil doesn’t have a magnetic field and the magnetic field of the driver magnet is therefore stable. The problem arises when you pass an electrical current (i.e. an audio signal) through the voice coil, which creates a magnetic field around it that then…

Wilson Benesch labels its P1.0 as a ‘floorstanding/two-way design’, a description which should immediately result in questions from the floor, the most obvious one being why it’s called a ‘floor-standing’ design when, as you can see quite plainly from the photographs accompanying this review, the P1.0 looks very much as if it’s a stand-mount design, with the bookshelf speaker-sized cabinet being, after all, perched atop what looks very much like a speaker stand. The not-so-obvious question is whether the P1.0 is a two-way design at all, because unlike almost every other two-way loudspeaker on the market (about which more later), its bass/midrange driver is connected directly to the speaker terminals at the rear of the cabinet, so there is no crossover network between it and your amplifier. I’ll get around…

The latest planar magnetic headphones from Audeze promise unrivalled accuracy and power from what Audeze describes as “the most powerful open magnetic circuit ever created”, allowing the company’s Uniforce voice coils to be spread across diaphragms one-tenth the thickness of a red blood cell. And remarkably this flagship version of the LCD-4 has a 15-ohm impedance, so can be driven even from portable devices. RRP is $5799. More info: www.busisoft.com.au…

Halcro is very likely the most famous Australian hi-fi brand you’ve never heard of. Indeed you’re likely to be more familiar with the name of the company that founded it — Minelab — than you are to be with Halcro, since you can buy a Minelab metal detector almost anywhere in the country… which isn’t true of Halcro, at least not yet. Hi-fi and metal detectors — what could these possibly have in common? The answer is quite simple: inventor and physicist Bruce Halcro Candy, who founded both companies EQUIPMENTX Halcro builds the Eclipse in two versions: a monobloc power amplifier (as reviewed here) and a stereo power amplifier. The model name of both amplifiers is the same, so it is important that I differentiate them by referring to the…

Hegel is a Norwegian company which had a rather strange beginning. ‘Way back in 1988, Bent Holter, a young electrical engineering student studying at the Technical University in Trondheim (NTNU) was paying his way through his university degree by playing in a heavy metal band called ‘The Hegel Band’. As the band became more successful and started playing larger venues, it needed more powerful amplifiers, so Holter decided to save the band some money by building them himself, using a new amplifier topology based on a circuit he’d developed for a thesis in which he’d proved that it was possible to reduce distortion in an audio amplifier without adversely affecting other performance parameters — in particular frequency response and damping factor. That circuit is now trademarked by Hegel as ‘SoundEngine…