Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 2 - 2020 i Audio Esoterica

It would seem that Marantz’s engineers have made the most of the COVID crisis and the factory shut-downs by developing two totally new models which not only have new internals, but also a brand new exterior ‘look’ as well, and it’s a very classy, good-looking look too! The two new models are the Model 30 integrated amplifier ($5,990), which is rated at 100-watts per channel into 8Ω (200-watts per channel into 4Ω) and the SACD 30n ($5,990), which is a Networked SACD/CD player with HEOS built-in that can also operate as a DAC and a Streamer. “The SACD 30n is built to meet all the requirements of the modern audiophile who wants to be able to play back a digital music collection either from disc or stored locally, as well…

Famous French loudspeaker manufacturer Focal has released the Aria K2 936, a limited edition loudspeaker that combines the classical architecture of the Aria 936 with the dynamic, powerful nature of the K2 cone. “As you’d expect of one of the world’s leaders in loudspeaker technologies, the Focal K2 936 has a very linear response, with impressive dynamics, plus it also features an elegant design and a small footprint,” said George Poutakidis, of BusiSoft AV, which distributes Focal in Australia. “Focal’s French designers intended it to be used for monitoring activities, which of course makes it perfect for audiophiles who are serious about hearing their music exactly as the musicians and their producer intended.” One of the reasons for the elegant design of the new Aria K2 936s is that they…

When Yamaha announced its 5000 Series of two-channel audio, one choice was fascinating — it would be all-analogue. There is no digital source for the system, although of course Yamaha has other products in its ranges which could do the job. But in pride of place at the front of the 5000 Series is the GT-5000 turntable, the final component to be released in this combination of turntable, separate pre-amplifier and power amplifiers, plus the iconic NS-5000 loudspeakers. We’ve now spent time with the entire system, and together they manage to deliver something which is both fresh and modern, yet which clearly leverages both Yamaha’s past classics and its engineering technologies developed over the company’s century and a quarter. SOLID BUILD FROM SOURCE TO SPEAKERS The first impression of the…

Krell’s Foundation 4K processor is a pre-amplifier with surround functions, going beyond the Digital Vanguard’s stereo processing into true multichannel support. And it has a remarkable 10 HDMI inputs, four supporting 4K, while HDMI ARC on the HDMI outputs adds input from sources plugged into your display. There is a brilliant ‘Intelligent HDMI switching’ system which avoids the whole issue of re-establishing connections when switching HDMI inputts — no more missing audio at the start of a track, or waiting for the picture to appear on the TV. Plus there’s still legacy support for components that output component and composite video. There are also three optical digital audio inputs, three coaxial digital audio ones, four sets of analogue audio inputs via RCA, and one set via balanced XLR. So it’s…

Trade secrets and proprietary materials are de rigeur in Hi-Fi, nowhere more so than in loudspeaker drivers and cabinet construction, but there are few materials over which such secrecy has been established as Wilson Audio’s X-Material, now in its third ‘iteration’, and long the cornerstone of Wilson’s composite technology (along with SMaterial and M-Material). Wilson claims that X-Material remains unbeatable for rigidity, inertness, intrinsic damping, and just good-old extreme hardness. According to Wilson the result of applying X-Material to the full SabrinaX enclosure is that “music emerges through SabrinaX from a blacker background … bass transient performance and clarity are vastly improved … listeners will hear superior silence between the notes which, among other factors, enhances SabrinaX’s rhythmic timing and pace.” But what is it? It’s often described by outsiders…

The golden-eared souls who review high-end Hi-Fi components are, as you’d imagine, rather protective of their hearing, so when I fired-up the newest arrival in my listening room, I wondered just who had it in for me. The APL Hi-Fi DSD-AR, you see, has a programmable volume control that, once it’s programmed with a level, defaults to that level until it’s changed manually. Someone had programmed my review sample to default to ‘maximum’, so that if I hadn’t been on my toes, I could potentially have blasted my loudspeakers to kingdom come. No doubt this was the work of the person who had reviewed the APL Hi-Fi DSD-AR prior to me receiving it, however I think the DSD-AR’s designer, Alex Peychev, should share at least some responsibility because I think…

“Audio is engineering and science,” declares Alan March of March Audio. “There’s no magic to it. I know a lot of audiophiles think there’s ‘something that we don’t really understand’ about these things, but no: It’s engineering. And I’m an engineer rather than an audiophile — it’s very much a ‘no bullshit’ attitude I have towards it.” March Audio is based in Albany, Western Australia, where it appeared on the scene a little more than two years ago and quickly carved a niche as a supplier of power amplifiers that use the latest Class-D technology from Hypex and more recently from Purifi. Other products then followed — a DAC, a headphone amplifier, and now a stereo preamplifier and a pair of large standmount speakers which incorporate drivers also from Purifi.…

German Physiks loudspeakers, which are still entirely hand-built in Germany, are once more available in Australia. All the speakers in German Physiks’ range are unique because they use a distinctive inverted ice-cream-cone-shaped ‘DDD’ driver that stands vertically, radiates omni-directionally and has an exceptionally wide seven-octave operating range extending from around 180Hz right up to 24kHz. DDD drivers are based on the unique driver invented and patented by Lincoln Walsh in 1969. The Walsh driver acts as an ultrasonic transmission line, such that sound travels through the cone of a Walsh speaker at a velocity higher than that of the sound radiated to the air so that each incremental slant length of the Walsh speaker cone emits inphase sound effectively creating a single coherent and omnidirectional sound source. The first commercial…

The Gryphon Essence stereo power amplifier is a very, very unusual audio amplifier. Which, if you know anything at all about this proudly Danish high-end audio specialist or its recently-retired founder, Flemming E. Rasmussen, should not come as a surprise. Although Flemming is still associated with Gryphon, the company is now owned by Valdemar Martin Borsting and Gryphon’s employees, which includes electronics designer Tom Moller, who has been the head of the design team at Gryphon for many years now. The power amplifier is so unusual that it needs an unusual preamplifier to drive it, so for this review it’s been partnered with the Essence Preamplifier. (In point of fact, the Essence power amplifier can be used with any preamplifier at all, but only Gryphon’s preamplifier can take full advantage…

Krell Industries reached its 40th anniversary on December 1st, 2020, and after four decades the company name still reverberates through the audiophile cognoscenti as a near-synonym for high-quality, high-power amplification. Named after the aliens in ‘Forbidden Planet’ (see panel on opposite page), Krell was originally established in 1980: “Dan and I started Krell with a thousand square feet in the basement of an old manufacturing building in Bridgeport, Connecticut”, remembers Krell’s President, Rondi D’Agostino. Starting with the KSA-100 solid-state super-amp, cited by The Absolute Sound as one of the 10 most significant amplifiers of all time, Krell spent the next three decades forging a reputation as solid as the build of its ultra-high performance equipment. There was a dubious interregnum following the investor-invoked departure of both Rondi and Dan D’Agostino…

The design brief for the new K-300i was to bring Krell right up-to-date in terms of the level of connectivity that’s required in this modern, digital, streaming world, without sacrificing the performance levels for which the company became famous. It comes in two versions: a ‘standard’ analogue integrated amplifier ($9,999), and one with a factory-installed digital module ($11,999). The digital module enables the USB-A connector on the front panel, adds a USB-B connector to the rear panel, along with coaxial and optical, Bluetooth with aptX and also two HDMI 2.0a HDCP 2.2 inputs and one HDMI output so you can connect video sources too. The digital module also enables streaming functionality (using the free mconnect Control app) enabling access to streaming services in your area such as Spotify, Tidal and…

NAD is a company that made its name in solid and relatively affordable Hi-Fi separates — the classic CD, amp and speakers ‘student’ system. Yet it has also been at the forefront of two of hi-fi’s most transformative technologies in the last decade: streaming, and ‘digital’ (or switching) amplification. The main streaming technology adopted by NAD was developed by its parent company, Canada’s Lenbrook, first as Bluesound and then as the BluOS wireless multi-room platform, which NAD has since incorporated into a number of highly successful smart amplifiers, most notably the multi-award-winning M10, with its large visual display and excellent amplification. The M10 was (and still is) part of NAD’s Masters Series, which began a little over a decade ago to showcase the company’s other innovation, which was to bring…

ROLLS-ROYCE GHOST The Rolls-Royce Ghost was engineered for internal silence, with Rolls-Royce’s acousticians tuning interior components to a specific resonant frequency and using 100kg of sound-absorbing material “to create a sense of serenity”. They then added a low ‘Whisper’ to prevent the silence becoming just too eerie. On top of that silence you can enjoy a ‘Bespoke Audio Speaker system’ where the woofers port into the body’s sill section so that “in essence this transforms the motor car into a subwoofer”, says Rolls-Royce. Elsewhere, ‘exciter’ speakers are used to transform surfaces including the Starlight Headliner ceiling into giant distributed-mode speaker surfaces.…

A fascinating story. If you look at the rear of the Pilium Elektra DAC – Divine Line, you’ll find a label that says ‘Made in Greece’ and the founder and owner of Pilium Audio, Konstantinos Pilios, is certainly as Greek as Greek can be. But Pilios lists his company’s address as Tsar Boris III No 6, Petrich, 2850, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. This I found fascinating, because Greece and Bulgaria may share a border, but they’re two different countries. Two very different countries. It turns out that when Pilios established Pilium Audio he had the misfortune to do it in 2012, which was the time of the huge economic crisis in Greece, during which many countries were trying to get Greece kicked out of the European Union. Pilios wanted to have the…

Wilson Audio Specialties introduced the Sabrina five years ago, as the company’s ‘entry-level’ floorstander, though of course one must bear in mind that what is ‘entry-level’ for Wilson Audio Specialties rises rather above the highest achievements of many other loudspeaker companies. “Wilson Audio is one of those high-end loudspeaker brands that most people aspire to own one day,” as Nigel Ng from Wilson’s Australian distributor Advance Audio puts it. “Their performance is second to none, and it’s really great to see Daryl Wilson carrying on Dave’s legacy with this new SabrinaX. It’s truly a benchmark product at this price category.” The concept behind the original Sabrina was to take what had been learned during the development of the company’s then top-of-the-line Alexandria XLF and bring it to a more affordable…

As noted, NAD has an impressive record of working with new and innovative amplification technologies in its Masters Series products (and trickling down to its other ranges). And for the M33 the company has turned to the latest amplification technology in town, which purports to take Class-D concepts to new levels, with negligible distortion, extraordinarily low noise, load-invariant frequency response, exceptionally clean clipping, low losses and high efficiency, while delivering 400W of power without even getting hot. It comes from Purifi, in Denmark, which has named the technology ‘Eigentakt’, which is German for ‘self-clocking’. We’d exercise our usual caution with such remarkable claims, but what makes us more inclined towards credence in this case is, besides NAD’s rush to adopt it, the team that’s behind it. The three listed co-founders…

Do you know what would improve Musical Fidelity’s new M8xi integrated amplifier immediately? Feet. Four of them. Four big large feet. Oh, and handles. Four of them too. But I’ll get to grips with those issues a bit later in this review. Probably the important thing I can say about this new M8xi is that unlike many famous companies that have been sold whose new owners have subsequently, let us say, “dropped the ball”, Musical Fidelity’s new owner, Heinz Lichtenegger, has instead moved the company to the top of the Hi-Fi league table. Not only has Lichtenegger retained the services of long-time Musical Fidelity designer Simon Quarry, he has also decided that rather than shifting the production of Musical Fidelity’s components to one of his own factories in the Czech…