Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2015 i Hi Fi News

What goes around comes round, a phrase perfectly suited to how we choose to enjoy our music these days. Recently I talked about 21st-century ‘virtual media’ – downloads and streamed music files – being awarded their own slot in the Official Charts and now the same honour has been bestowed upon the grandaddy of all formats: our cherished 20th-century vinyl disc. 2014 saw vinyl LPs and singles ‘going around’ in greater numbers than at any point in the last two decades. Sales reached an all-time high of 1.3 million units with a predicted growth of another 70% through 2015. Vinyl now accounts for 1.5% of all media sales – just seven years ago that was less than 0.1%... The steep upturn in the LP’s fortunes may have started as something…

Ask Naim’s CEO how the Statement project is doing, and he says that ‘orders have exceeded our expectations by about 50%, and we’re well on target to meet our forecast of selling 100 complete sets, despite 2014 being a year of tough economic conditions.’ The Statement started shipping rather later than anticipated, not least due to the weight of the product: ‘We had to install custom lifting equipment and new handling processes throughout Naim, while building a Statement production team with the right skill mix.’ Stephenson started with the company in 1981 as Sales Director and opened up much of its distribution in export markets, so he’s well aware that shipping 385kg amplifiers around the world brings its own problems, as ‘it’s not a regular delivery to a hi-fi store!…

The Lilium is, with the exception of our Ex3ma, the first Sonus faber to be developed with instrumentation more accurate and precise than previously available. These tools have not replaced the “humanistic approach” that has always been the foundation of our design philosophy, in which nothing is subordinated to human perception. ‘Listening remains the centre of our design process, but it is also true that the new tools, in particular our anechoic chamber, enable us to raise the levels of performance. Definition, transient speed, transparency and ability to correctly reproduce the silence – an essential component of music – are much improved. All this is combined in developing membranes for materials able to reproduce sound in a natural way, without causing fatigue – a traditional Sonus faber quality. ‘We’ll move…

While the Prime features a new chassis aesthetic, its 9kg alloy platter, 24-pole AC-synchronous motor and inverted bearing (with hardened stainless shaft, chrome ball/PEEK thrust pad and phosphor bronze bushing) are familiar VPI staples. As a result there are no surprises when it comes to wow and flutter or rumble. The former is a low 0.06% (peak-weighted) with a very low 0.02% low-rate wow component – evidenced by the ‘sharpness’ of the W&F spectrum [Graph 1, below]. Absolute speed accuracy was –0.37% (centre pulley groove) while rumble, measured through its bearing, was low at –70.4dB and perfectly in line with earlier models [HFN Oct ’14 and Nov ’09]. The partnering 10in 3D tonearm features VPI’s familiar (JMW Memorial) unipivot bearing, which necessarily offers very low friction (<10mg). Stability is greatly…

Opera Loudspeakers was founded in 1989 and is based in Treviso, Northern Italy. It shares its headquarters with sister company, Unison Research, which may explain why Opera’s speakers are considered to be quite valve amp friendly! From the beginning, the company aimed to make loudspeakers that successfully combined the most advanced internal technology for optimum sound quality, with an exterior based around traditional Italian craftsmanship. The first design to bear the Opera badge was the Caruso, named in honour of one of the great voices of the opera, Enrico Caruso. The Callas name followed soon after this and has endured, with the range undergoing several iterations. The present Callas line-up consists of these standmounts plus the Grand Callas floorstander. This £8500 masterpiece currently represents the pinnacle of the Opera range.…

Wadia’s S/PDIF inputs are upsampled to 32-bit/192kHz while USB inputs may be handled natively (48kHz as 48kHz etc) or upsampled (48kHz to 192kHz etc) via its driver software control panel. The PC USB drivers (sourced from CEntrance) still require the streamed sample rate to be set manually as we saw with Audio Research’s CD6 [HFN May ’14] – another of the Fine Sounds Group’s house brands. In another parallel, while the USB and S/PDIF A-wtd S/N ratios are almost identical at a (very impressive) 118dB, low-level resolution falls away quite dramatically (–9dB re. –90dBFs) via the former but stays true to ±0.1dB over a full 100dB dynamic range via the latter. This is clear from the THD vs. digital level plots [Graph 1, below] where the best-case distortion is a…

Don’t be fooled: Aëdle is French (think Citroën), although the name, apparently, is a play on the Danish word ædel, meaning ‘noble’ – a word that Aëdle uses a lot to describe the materials from which its headphone is made. If the company is new to you then that’s because the VK-1 (VK stands for ‘Valkyrie’, although whether this signals Wagnerian predilections is unclear) is the first product of this start-up company, based in Paris and established in 2011. As you might expect of a French enterprise, the VK-1 is not assembled somewhere in China but in the company’s own factory in Brittany. Behind it are founders Raphaël Lebas de Lacour and Baptiste Sancho, two young men who would appear to be of independent means or have deep-pocketed backers. AN…

Oppo may have been early to the high quality Blu-ray player market, but it’s late to the portable headphone amplifier one. There are now a great many products from a wide range of manufacturers on sale, spanning from Cambridge Audio’s DacMagic XS (£100), Arcam’s rPAC (£150) to Furutech’s ADL X1 (£400) [all HFN May ’14] up to Chord’s Hugo (£1400). They’re all portable, battery or USB-powered headphone stages with DACs built in, and they’re all good. With the possible exception of the Arcam, none of them can equal the slickness and portability of the Oppo. Sadly, you’ll have to pay over £1000 more than the cost of the HA-2 to significantly better its sound – the Chord is expensive for a good reason. Don’t be surprised if the market continues…

Beethoven Symphony No 4, Amsterdam Concertgebouw/Josef Krips LXT 2874 The Austrian conductor’s Decca (later Philips) LPs were ‘hit and miss’ but this was a delightful disc, bubbling with good humour. Britten Serenade, Les Illuminations, Peter Pears/Dennis Brain/NSO Strings/Eugene Goossens LXT 2941 Pears’ 1954 Serenade had the magical horn playing of the young Dennis Brain. (You had to pay six-pence extra to get the words!) Dvorak Symphony No 7, Hamburg RSO/Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt LXT 2807 Bearing the old numbering ‘No 2’ this was one of the German conductor’s finest LPs. Bizet Jeux d’enfants etc, Chabrier Suite Pastorale, Paris Conservatoire Orchestra/Edouard Lindenberg LXT 2860 This charming programme – in demonstrationworthy sound – was by a now almost forgotten conductor. It’s included in the mono CD set. Mozart Symphonies Nos 28 and 29, Suisse…

Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman was famed for his lifelong devotion to state-of-the-art audio. ‘I loved the technology as much as the music,’ he has revealed. ‘Even as a kid I would take toilet-paper rolls and wrap aluminium around them and scratch the surface to see if I could make a sound. I got my first disc-recorder in the ’40s, using aluminium acetates.’ From the day he started Elektra in New York City in 1950, Holzman’s company established a peerless reputation as one of the foremost providers of high quality recordings – folk and classical in the ’50s, and then thinking-man’s rock in the ’60s. ‘Magnacord put out a very good tape recorder in 1950, which was portable,’ he remembers. ‘I would put that on my motor scooter, with a…

Editor Technician and writer on all things audio for some 30 years, Paul Miller took over the editor’s chair in 2006. He invented the QC Suite, used across the audio industry Our exclusive technical review of Naim’s incredible Statement amplifier necessarily touches on the – er – touchy subject of its price tag. At £155k, the NAC S1 preamp and NAP S1 monoblock combo is certainly the costliest amplifier we’ve ever reviewed in Hi-Fi News. It’s probably the most expensive (production) amplifier in the world, although a Constellation Reference Altair/Hercules II Mono would likely run it close... Our reviewer, Andrew Everard, adroitly second-guesses the naysayers by applying the predictable hi-fi /automotive analogy. Yes, the Statement costs as much as a premium Bentley (for whom Naim is its ICE partner), but…

Science Journalist Jim Lesurf has spent a lifetime in audio, both as an engineer at UK hi-fi company Armstrong and reader in Physics and Electronics at St Andrew’s University While they’re loved by many audiophiles, I’ve never really liked moving-coil cartridges. In part this was because for quite a while I was forced by circumstances to listen to one I hated. I won’t name and shame it now, but at the time it was being used for demos because so many others thought it was the bee’s knees. To my ears it sounded like a horse’s behind in full song. That said, I have nothing against moving-coil in theory. It’s just that in my view many examples suffer in practice from a problem few mention. High effective tip mass. This…

The quest to reduce amplifier power consumption without sacrificing audio quality has never been more important [see Opinion, HFN Mar ’15]. Class D technologies, where the output transistors are either switched fully on or off, are usually the most efficient but are not without their engineering foibles. Class G, on the other hand, makes use of a conventional output stage fed from two or more power supplies which are introduced according to signal demand. The higher PSU rails are only switched in once the audio output rises above a certain level – a method first introduced by Arcam in its AVR600 [HFN Jul ’09]. Although the Class G concept is at least 40 years old, Arcam’s refined version sees its PSU smoothly track the audio level rather than switch abruptly…

Opera claims 89dB sensitivity for its new Callas, which accords well with our measured pink noise figure of 88.6dB. The quoted nominal impedance is accurate too: eschewing nonsense like ‘8ohms compatible’ Opera specifies 4ohm with a minimum of >3ohm, which is entirely consistent with our measured minimum modulus of 3.5ohm. Impedance phase angles are sufficiently well controlled that the minimum EPDR (equivalent peak dissipation resistance) is 1.9ohm at 139Hz, a little higher and more amp-friendly than for many nominally 4ohm designs. The forward frequency responses, measured at tweeter height at a distance of 1m, show an obvious concave trend through the presence band (which will tend to increase the apparent stereo image depth and slightly soften the overall sound) and a shelving up of output in the last half-octave to…

The ongoing ‘vinyl revival’ has resulted in a wide variety of standalone phono stages. Given that many amplifiers still lack a suitable input for this purpose, using a turntable means one of these devices is often a necessity. Ranging in price from a few tens of pounds to many thousands, there has never been a better time to buy a phono stage. The likes of Pro-Ject, Rega and Cambridge Audio offer excellent, affordable designs that perform far better than their humble price tags might suggest, while more and more companies such as Unison Research are occupying the middle price ground. Of course, if money is no object then exotica from the likes of Whest Audio, Allnic, Tron and Music First Audio will fit the bill. These examples, in particular, use…

Provided that a loudspeaker or headphone diaphragm is thin enough, relative to its other dimensions, it behaves vibrationally like a shell rather than a plate. In practice this means its bending resonances depend on the linear velocity of sound in the diaphragm material: the higher this velocity, the higher the frequency of the first breakup mode. Short of exotic materials like synthetic diamond and boron, this puts metals in pole position. But as they have little internal damping, the breakup modes need to be pushed above the working range of the driver. In headphones with a single full-range driver, this means above the audible range. Best is beryllium, with a sound velocity of about 13,000m/s. But beryllium is expensive and, in particulate form, highly toxic, so its use is rare.…

ORIGINAL VINYL EDITION (1972) Nuggets, a lush gatefold item [Elektra – 7E-2006], hit the shops in a startling, not to say mindexpanding, cover by Abe Gurvin who had been working for Elektra for several years. At first glance it’s just a brilliantly coloured kaleidoscope but look a little closer and you see a young couple in the front seats of an open-topped car, their minds being blown by the music surging from the car radio. It’s now hard to imagine Nuggets adorned in any other way, but Gurvin was not the first choice. ‘Jac Holzman gave me a lot of leeway to put Nuggets together,’ points out compiler Lenny Kaye. ‘For example, he didn’t say “Nay” when I wanted it to be a double album or when I turned down…

DOUG MACLEOD Exactly Like This Reference Recordings RR0135 (HDCD) Deservedly winning awards all over the place for his mix of acoustic blues, uptown jazz and R&B, MacLeod has long been an audiophile fave because of Reference Recordings’ productions. This latest set is immediately involving, the sublime sound reeling you in with its natural tenor. All of the tracks are originals, but the fun is identifying his influences, most of which are worn on his sleeve. The opener is the kind of rock ’n’ roll homage that Brian Setzer could cover, while the other ten tracks include pure slices of Tony Joe White-style swamp rock, the sort of slow burners Keb’ Mo’ favours and more. A modern blues album – if you can handle the oxymoron. KK Sound Quality: 91% THE…

KEVIN EUBANKS & STANLEY JORDAN Duets Mack Avenue MAC1092 These two guitar wizards first thought about teaming up in 2011. After touring together briefly, they recorded this album in Eubanks’ own well-equipped studio. Both play piano too, so you hear Eubanks at the keys accompanying Jordan’s guitar on Thad Jones’ ‘A Child Is Born’ while Jordan returns the favour on Miles’s ‘Blue In Green’. More typical, perhaps, is the opening ‘Morning Sun’ where Jordan’s two-handed ‘touch technique’ and Eubanks’ fleetest fingering build up a shimmering web of sound. Yet this isn’t a battle where virtuosi try to outdo each other. It’s a true collaboration of kindred spirits, creating a warm, engaging and relaxing musical experience. SH Sound Quality: 85% GILAD ATZMON & THE ORIENT HOUSE ENSEMBLE The Whistle Blower Fanfare…

Technology journalist Barry Fox trained in electronics with the RAF and worked as a patent agent, but he gave that up to enter journalism. He is one of the world’s top technology writers It seems a safe bet that the next big thing in hi-fi will be hi-res streaming, with 96kHz/24-bit music playing on demand. But when and how? French online music service Qobuz recently held a ‘Music Is Back’ press briefing (with surprisingly few hi-fi press invited) and handed out promotional material which promised hi-res streaming ‘early this year’. Obviously not too early this year, though, because in March Qobuz was still saying it was ‘early days yet’. CEO Yves Riesel and Business Development Director Benoit Rebus admitted that they still have no sure way to get the data…

Contributing Editor Steve Harris edited Hi-Fi News between 1986 and 2005. He loves jazz, blues music, vinyl and vintage hi-fi and anything that makes good music come to life As I write this it’s almost exactly two years since Edward T Dell, Jr passed away peacefully, having not long since celebrated his 90th birthday at his home in Peterborough, New Hampshire. It was only in 2011, when he was 88, that Dell relinquished the reins of the publishing business that he’d started in 1970. Ed Dell had lived through the history of high-fidelity from its beginnings and, as the founder, publisher and editor of The Audio Amateur and related publications, he was part of that history for more than 40 years. All this came to mind when, by chance, a…

Having discovered that I could send music files from a hard disk drive or USB pen to a DAC via my Oppo BDP-105EU Blu-ray player without needing to have a computer in operation, it was time to have a play. The highest resolution my then dCS Elgar plus DAC could handle was 96kHz/24-bit. This meant I could compare a hi-res version of a track from Amy Duncan’s Cycles Of Life album download from the Linn site with the same track on CD. It did sound better – a bit like comparing the SACD layer of a hybrid disc with the CD layer when heard on my dCS Verdi La Scala player. Encouraged by a friend who was busily ripping all of his CDs to hard disk, I downloaded dBpoweramp and…

I recently came to the end of what I termed a ‘project’, but on reflection it dawned upon me that the process had taken 40 years! It all began in about 1975 when I was working as a lab technician at the BBC Designs Department in London. One lunchtime I spotted a pair of Quad electrostatic loudspeakers for sale in the window of REW in Charing Cross. They were brand new and were on sale at £120 each. That must have been a bargain, even in 1975. I bought them and was delighted, though I couldn’t afford the amplifier I would have liked (probably a Radford). My Rotel integrated amp could not handle the Quad’s capacitive load so I had to pad-out the speaker loads with 4ohm high power resistors…

Hi-Fi News Sept 1982 Each month HFN will bring you an article from our vast archive of features and reviews from yesteryear It is almost two years since my last look at some of the most costly moving-coil cartridges [see HFN Nov ’80]. During the intervening period there has been a great expansion in numbers of these expensive cartridges and not all of them can be covered here. We have chosen the new and less expensive Black Koetsu at £350; the latest Dynavector Karat Diamond at a new reduced price of £350 and the latest and most costly Denon – the DL-305 – costing £370. An obvious competitor to the Koetsu Black has emerged in the form of the Kiseki Blue at £350 and we’ve also included an updated review…

There’s much that’s bespoke about the NAP S1, not least its in-house designed power transistors. Naim wanted its amp to combine ‘speed’ and ‘grunt’ with as few high power transistors as possible – realised by photo-etching single wafers of silicon for each batch of the N-type (NA009CN) and P-type (NA009CP) devices. This precise device matching ensures that current-sharing, among other characteristics, is utterly predictable across the full performance bandwidth. This has allowed Naim to engineer as elegant an amplifier circuit as possible with just four bridged output stages in parallel (that’s 16 transistors in total per channel). The final production version of these devices have an alternative, non-ferrous case to that shown – the internals are unchanged, bonded onto a copper heat-spreader before being protected by a non-resonant epoxy shell.…

In a reflex-loaded loudspeaker, port output is due to Helmholtz resonance between the mass of air in the port and the compliance (springiness) of the air contained within the enclosure. Above the resonance frequency the port output is in-phase with that from the driver and adds to it, thereby bolstering output; below resonance the port and driver outputs oppose, increasing bass roll-off to 24dB/octave from the 12dB/octave of closed box loading. Reflex loading increases sensitivity and reduces distortion but there are downsides: airflow through the port can become turbulent, adding ‘chuffing’ noise at high outputs, and ‘organ pipe’ resonances can occur within the port tube itself. Sonus faber’s patented Stealth Reflex system is termed ‘para-aperiodic’, ie almost non-resonant, because the inner surfaces of the port duct(s) are lined with sound…

While 3D printing is becoming more commonplace at the development stage in hi-fi circles, aiding prototyping before a design is finalized, seeing 3D printed hardware adorning the hi-fi products we buy is much rarer. With a background in CAD and 3D printing, Mathew Weisfeld was quick to bring this technology to VPI and exploit the advantages it brings to tonearm design, where a polymer based arm tube is likely to be much lighter than its metal equivalent, while remaining rigid. ‘This was a crazy idea I threw at the wall almost two years ago,’ says Mathew. ‘We were working on re-engineered techniques, but the development was taking way too long and holding up production of our flagship Classic Direct. Using 3D printing techniques seemed the best approach since it could…

Some suggest that Wadia has become a bit ‘lifestyle’ under Fine Sounds, the company stable it has been a part for nearly five years, but there’s not much sign of compromise in the design of the 321. Even that aluminium chassis/casework and glass top are, of course, non-magnetic and thus form a suitably inert enclosure for the electronics. This, after all, is an engineering-led company, founded by former 3M telecommunications engineers back in 1988, and setting out its stall in no uncertain fashion with the 2000 Decoding Computer, launched as the 1980s rolled into the ’90s, and using proprietary code-based upsampling ahead of the digital-to-analogue conversion. The 2000’s 64x digital filter boasted over 70,000 instructions a second to ‘fill in the gaps’ in its upsampled 16-bit CD signal and used…

›Amp No.1 is batterypowered, fits easily in the palm of the hand and weighs just 90g. ›It can be used on the desktop either at home or on the road, and also connected to the likes of smartphones and tablets by way of sonic upgrade. ›Inside can be found a 950mAh lithium-ion battery that boasts a 60-hour battery life on a single charge. ›The amp comes with digital and analogue cables, a carrying case and a rubber band to allow it to be strapped to your iPhone, or similar device. ›A slider switch to the rear of the unit selects between the digital input and the front-mounted 3.5mm line-in. There are two headphone outputs also on 3.5mm sockets, and a combined volume and on-off switch. ›In-akustik is based on the…

Journalist for top American audio-video publications While his main interest is high-end audio, Barry Willis also writes about the culinary industry, visual art and theatre for a huge variety of US newspaper and magazines Until this past January, I believed that the resurgent interest in vinyl records was a passing fancy – an exercise in nostalgia for the middle-aged music lovers among us, and an exercise in retro-cool for the younger crowd. I’m not so sure anymore. Most hip recording artists now release new albums first on vinyl, followed after a respectable interval by CD, downloads, and streaming. It’s almost become a matter of professional pride to launch new releases this way. The music-buying public can’t seem to get enough of it. According to impressive statistics published in the March…

Correspondents express their own opinions, not those of Hi-Fi News. We reserve the right to edit letters for publication. Correspondents using e-mail are asked to give their full postal address (which won’t be published). Letters seeking advice will be answered in print on our Sound Off pages, but due to time constraints we regret we’re unable to answer questions on buying items of hi-fi or any other hi-fi queries by telephone, post or via e-mail. As a reader of Hi-Fi News over many years, I am disappointed by the lack of reviews of loudspeakers made in the UK by companies that are 100% British. Many well known English makes are now foreign owned, such as Wharfedale. British companies’ products, like those made by Harbeth and Proac, etc, are rarely reviewed.…

Barry Fox really hit the spot when writing about PC back-up in his April Opinion. I share exactly the same view and his tip to try restoring a backed up music file onto your PC hard drive to see if it is truly backed up is a good one, which I shall try. For 44.1kHz/16-bit files I don’t have this problem because I still buy CDs and then rip them. This means that I keep the CDs as ‘negatives’. Hi-res files I burn to a DVD as I do not trust PC HDDs. I have seen too many problems with them in other contexts. An aspect of computer audio that is not often mentioned is how complicated it still is to use a PC as a music server. Sound quality…

CHICAGO CES John Atkinson reports on hi-fi developments, with some asides on the evils of coax and the significance of ‘tunes’, plus a piece by Enid Lumley on the virtues of wood and air. SOUNDINGS by Donald Aldous. FM RADIO Angus McKenzie’s round-up. THE DIRECT METAL DISC Martin Colloms examines Teldec’s new process, and considers its implications. HOW SHOULD IT GO? In the second of three articles on musical basics, Bernard Keeffe discusses accuracy, phrasing, and the unexpected. ARMSTRONG POSTSCRIPT Martin Colloms looks again at the ‘730’ preamplifier. FOUR BUDGET CASSETTE DECKS Mike Jones hears the JVC DD5, Technics RS-M230, Marantz SD1030 and Hitachi DE-57. FOUR LOUDSPEAKERS Alvin Gold listens to the Celestion SL6, B&W LM1, Linn Sara and Celestion110. RECORD REVIEWS Classical issues and collections, plus rock, jazz, folk…