Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2021 i Australian HiFi

Researchers at McGill University in Montreal have proved what audiophiles have known all along: listening to music is better than having sex. OK, so I’ve tweaked that introduction just a little, because what Dr. Robert Zatorre, neuroscientist at The Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, at McGill University, actually discovered was that: “the pleasurable experience of listening to music releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain important for the more tangible pleasures associated with rewards such as food, drugs and sex.” The results of his research, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, are one key to the reason why music, which has no obvious survival value, is so significant across all human societies. “These findings provide neurochemical evidence that intense emotional responses to music involve ancient reward circuitry in the brain,”…

Readers interested in a full technical appraisal of the performance of the Revel Performa3 M105 Loudspeakers should continue on and read the LABORATORY TEST REPORT published on the following pages. Readers should note that the results mentioned in the report, tabulated in performance charts and/or displayed using graphsand/orphotographsshouldbeconstrued as applying only to the specific sample tested. Graph 1 shows the in-room frequency response measured by Newport Test Labs using a pink noise test signal. You can see that it is exceptionally flat, very linear and nicely extended into the very lowest and highest frequencies. Importantly, there’s no skew to the overall response that would tend to favour one frequency band over another. Looking at the section of the response between 100Hz and 10kHz, which is the three decades (or seven…

The fact that KEF’s new KC62 subwoofer uses a force-cancelling driver array is not new or even news, because dozens of subwoofers use force-cancelling driver arrays. But it is true that it was once news — big news — because KEF was the first company in the world to build a commercial loudspeaker that employed force-cancelling drivers-the KEF Reference 104/2, way back in 1984. What is totally new about the new KC62 — and also very newsworthy! — is that KEF has built a completely different kind of bass driver that has force-cancelling as an integral part of its mode of operation. So, whereas all other manufacturers use two separate drivers to achieve the force-cancelling function (as did KEF in 1984 with the 104/2 and in 2010 with the KC92),…

All luxury brands have ‘affordable’ models in their ranges. Mercedes-Benz has its A-Class, BMW has its 1 Series and B&W has its 600 Series. First introduced in 1995 the performance — and looks — of the various models in B&W’s 600 Series have been upgraded quite a few times, but the first significant upgrade, which was so dramatic B&W decided it deserved the addition of a ‘Series 2’ to the original model numbers, was three years ago, in 2018. But come 2020, B&W realised it was the 25th anniversary of the 600 Series’ introduction, so it decided an ‘Anniversary’ issue was in order. The problem was that B&W’s engineers had already made the Series 2 model pretty much as good as they could. Which means this 603 S2 Anniversary model…

In the hi-fi business, the company names that are the most famous are often those that are named after the person who founded them. And in all cases, that person is either a talented engineer, a visionary or a gifted marketer — or sometimes all three. Let me compile a brief inventory of famous hi-fi company founders off the top of my head for you: Paul Klipsch, Saul Marantz, James Bullough Lansing, David A. Wilson, Ray Dolby, Frank McIntosh, Mark Levinson, Nelson Pass, Harold Leak, Dan D’Agostino, Hermann Thorens, Peter Lyngdorf, and Torakusu Yamaha, to name but a few. There have been quite a few famous hi-fi partnerships as well, such as John Bowers and Roy Wilkins (B&W), Camillo Bang and Svend Olufsen (B&O), Sidney Harman and Bernard Kardon (harman/kardon),…

THE WILDHEARTS 21st Century Love Songs [Graphite] Ginger Wildheart says this album was an opportunity for his band to flex its creative muscle. That appears to be quite some understatement. On the face of it, there are ten 21 st Century Love Songs here. But within those tracks are roughly 121 hooks, 68 choruses, 27 gags, 40 swear words, 99 riffs, and 14 daft samples. The splenetic intensity of these songs, constructed via a turbo-charged supermarket sweep of styles: snatches of hardcore here, grunge there, a swipe or six from the power-pop aisle, a couple of lurches into thrash, and some rockabilly is impressive. For the most part it makes every other record released this year sound like hopelessly anodyne easy-listening. Selected highlights are Sleepaway, which pinballs between a lovelorn…

CHUBBY AND THE GANG The Mutt’s Nuts [Partisan] You think you know what ground you’re on with The Mutt’s Nutts. The first half of the album is a collection of unfiltered, no-frills hardcore, Charley Manning Walker’s cockney rasp harking back to UK punk’s earliest days when it collided head-on with pub rock. They rail against gentrification and police brutality, highlight the plight of young lives spent rotting in prison, and paint a surprisingly furious picture of a day in the life of a cabbie (On The Meter). A pitch shift in the middle demonstrates just how much more there is going on here, though, with a love of vintage pop gleaming through the noise. From the tender Take Me Home To London, with its ripples of tambourine echoing the Jesus…

All subwoofers have to conform to Hofmann’s Iron Law and the KEF KC62 is no exception however KEF’s White Paper states that “Iron Laws cannot be broken, but they can certainly be bent.” So I guess we should take a look at Hofmann’s Iron Law and how it applies to the KC62! Hofmann’s so-called ‘law’ of low frequency reproduction was coined by Joseph Anton Hofmann, who was one of the three founders of KLH Loudspeakers, a company that in its hey-day was the largest loudspeaker manufacturer in the world. In fact, the first letter of his surname was the ‘H’ in KLH. The other two initials were contributed by Henry Kloss (who helped found Acoustic Research before KLH and later founded Advent), and Malcolm Scollay Low (who had also helped…

Books for hi-fi enthusiasts, when they can be found at all, are invariably ‘how to’ guides: how to buy, how to test, how to set up equipment, how to listen and what to listen to. This makes ‘HiFi’ by one-time New York lawyer and lifetime audio tragic Gideon Schwartz, a rare thing indeed. First published late 2019, this is a beautifully presented book celebrating high-end audio. It’s exactly the thing with which rusted-on readers of a magazine such as Australian Hi-Fi yearn to relax, ideally with gentle music and a glass of bloody good red. And like any item of high-end audio esoterica it’s damn hard to find. I’ll get to that. First of all, it’s beautiful. Phaidon has a solid track record of publishing beautiful books and this is…

Revel is the brand-name applied to high-end loudspeakers made by the giant conglomerate Harman International (an independently controlled subsidiary of Samsung). I mention this specifically because Harman International is also the parent company behind two of the world’s best-known and highly-regarded hi-fi loudspeaker manufacturers: JBL and Infinity, which not only puts loudspeakers made by Revel on a pedestal, but also means that Revel’s engineers have access to all the same research and development facilities as the engineers at JBL and Infinity, as well as to all the same materials and manufacturing facilities. EQUIPMENT When Revel introduced the original Performa series in 1999, it was the first time that the company’s premium metal diaphragm drivers had become available on any loudspeaker other than Revel’s flagship Ultima Series models. Two different alloys…

First a declaration: Stax enabled one of my first hi-fi writing successes. It was the late 1980s, and I had been taken on as Assistant Editor for What Hi-Fi? magazine, located then a short walk from the Thames in Teddington, West London. After several years on Electronics Today International I was thrilled to have pushed open the door of more audio-based publishing, but the then-Editor of What Hi-Fi?, Simon Davies, may have had a sadistic streak, as the first test he allocated to me was an enormous group of some 40 blank cassette tapes, to rate using WHF’s famous five-star ratings for sound, build, and value, to deliver a final verdict ranking all 40 blank tapes in order of performance. This Herculean task would have been impossible using the budget…

ROGER TAYLOR Outsider [UMUSIC] This is Queen drummer’s sixth solo album, and at age 72 Taylor has turned in the solo effort of his life. Taylor plays almost everything himself — drums, of course, but also guitar and most of the keyboards — but he’s in cahoots with Joshua J. Macrae. Taylor has dipped into his own backcatalogue to gently re-jig Absolutely Anything from Terry Jones’s 2015 film. More radically, his rocking 1994 single Foreign Sand is re-cast as a bittersweet ballad, while there’s a spartan, brassy trawl through The Clapping Song. Clumsy title aside, More Kicks — A Long Day’s Journey Into Night...Life is Taylor at his most grizzled and jagged. The real surprise is how graceful this lockdown-inspired album is: Taylor prefers the word ‘autumnal’, and he’s spot-on.…

JESSE MALIN Sad And Beautiful World [Wicked Cool] It’s certainly been a long and winding road for Jesse Malin. From teenage hardcore band Heart Attack and glam-punk outfit D Generation to his ever-evolving role as gilt-edged songwriter. Expanding on the meditative mood of 2019’s Sunset Kids, this 17-tracker finds him showing off those songwriting skills, delivering country-tinged ballads (Sinner), bubblegum pop (Come On) and twinkling Americana (Greener Pastures) in typically effortless fashion. It’s when he lets his guard down, however, that Malin is at his most impressive. Crawling Back To You finds him looking back over the ups and downs of a 30-year career, while the scalding The Way We Used To Roll is a funky kiss-off to bad habits. State Of The Art, meanwhile, is the sort of stirring…