Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2016 i Hi Fi News

‘Whether ‘digital’ or ‘analogue’ – the music will still move you’ Vinyl is most certainly enjoying a revival, which is just one reason why we try to bring you at least one exclusive review of a new turntable in every issue of Hi-Fi News. And LP spinners don’t come much more exclusive than Clearaudio’s flagship Statement, a turntable that, quite literally, towers over all others. Its contactless ‘magnetic drive’, the curved alloy and dense wooden tiers and massive, stabilising pendulum are already the stuff of audiophile legend. The deck is instantly recognisable, but look again and you’ll begin to pick out the detail of Clearaudio’s refinements with its Statement v2. Partnered with the Statement TT1 (tangential tracking) arm system and glorious Statement Goldfinger MC, it is arguably the ultimate vinyl-playing…

Comparisons with Clearaudio’s Master Innovation turntable [HFN Apr ’14] are instructive, for this Statement v2 design takes the concept of separate drive and playback platters, coupled via powerful magnets, to a truly massive conclusion. The in-groove rumble from a clamped test LP is about as low as possible at –73.2dB but the through-bearing rumble (measured at the playback spindle) is some 2dB lower still at –75.0dB, all DIN-B weighted. This represents the state-of-the-art for turntable engineering thus far. The sharpness of the main peak in the W&F spectrum [see Graph 1, below] is indicative of the Statement’s minimal low-rate drift while both peak wow and peak flutter are 0.015-0.02%. Power consumption varies from 13W at startup to 7W once stabilised at just 6secs – remarkable considering the inertia of the…

We caught up with Chord Electronics founder John Franks ‘on tour’ in the US with Rob Watts and new friend DAVE, and asked how the current six-strong DAC range stacks up. ‘Mojo and Hugo are clearly aimed at mobile users (but benefit from a line-level output option), with the larger Hugo TT satisfying the demands of desktop and static system users. The 2Qute, from the Chordette range, is a straight-up converter with no amplification, while audiophiles will appreciate the performance advantages of the QBD76 and QBD76 HDSD (DSDcapable) models. For the ultimate in fidelity, there’s DAVE which has a new headphone amp design.’ So what’s with DAVE’s four 768kHz ‘dual mode’ digital outputs? Franks says they’re ‘for Chord DAC/power amps that will accept the DX connection’, adding that ‘A range…

Conventional moving-coil loudspeakers, where all the drive units face forwards and their rear radiation is contained, have a directivity which narrows at high frequencies. In other words, their treble output becomes increasingly ‘beamed’. With a 25mm dome tweeter this begins to happen at about 4kHz, close to the lower end of its passband, and by 20kHz the output at 30o off-axis is down by around 10dB (and 20dB at 60o). This effect is a consequence of the size of the diaphragm and can only be countered either by making it smaller – in which case the tweeter’s output capability and power handing suffer – or by using an acoustic mirror arrangement, as adopted by B&O in its Beolab 5. (Fitting a constant directivity horn can reduce the variation in directivity…

Push-pull audio amplifiers – that is, anything that’s not a single-ended design – are the electronic equivalent of a two-man saw. Just as with the saw one man pulls while the other pushes, in a push-pull output stage one half pushes and the other pulls. What distinguishes Class A and Class B is whether this sharing of effort is mutual (Class A) or mutually exclusive (Class B). In a Class A amplifier the two halves work together continuously, whereas in a Class B amplifier each rests for half the time, leaving the other to work alone. In more precise electronic terms, in a Class A amplifier both halves of the output stage conduct throughout the signal cycle while in a Class B stage one half conducts for the positive halfcycle…

For many years, part of Rega’s strength and a good bit of its reputation rested on a product which it made in huge numbers and ‘OEM-ed’ out to a host of other turntable makers. In 1983, Rega introduced what in all its guises would become the most successful Hi-Fi tonearm ever. A manufacturing breakthrough at the time, the RB300’s one-piece silicon-aluminium alloy arm tube put it far ahead of the competition. Derivatives of the RB300 also made this design uniquely successful as an OEM product, as Rega supplied arms to many turntable manufacturers. When Goldring briefly marketed Rega-sourced turntables in the mid-2000s, Armour Group’s Steve Reichert quipped ‘All our turntables are made in the Far East – the Far East of England.’ But although that easily-recognised Rega arm tube has…

Most new DACs are replete with a raft of DSP-based digital filter options and Teac’s UD-503 is no exception with its five switchable offerings (including ‘off’) that operate on all LPCM media. The default ‘FIR Sharp’ and ‘FIR Slow’ are traditional linear-phase types while ‘Short Delay Sharp’ and ‘Short Delay Slow’ are minimum-phase filters. FIR Sharp has obvious pre/post transient ringing, which is not ideal, but traded for low phase distortion and better rejection of aliasing images (69dB). SD Sharp offers the same rejection but no pre-ringing/increased post-ringing and the same slightly peaked response (+0.2dB/20kHz with 48kHz files). The two ‘Slow’ filters offer poor stopband rejection (just 5.2dB) and a rolled-off response (–4.6dB/20kHz with 48kHz files) but much reduced pre/post ringing. I typically view these filter types as ideal for…

At first glance Musical Fidelity’s comprehensive range borders on the confusing. Actually, it can look like that at the second and third glance, too! The core M-series starts below the M5si model with the M3s line-up, at around £1100 for the M3si amp, progressing through the M6s to the £3499 M8Pre [HFN Jul ’14] and M8-700m monoblocks, at £3999 apiece. The flagship Nu-Vista range tracks back to the 1998 preamp using the sub-miniature valve from which the line-up takes its name. Today it culminates in the 300W, £7999 Nu-Vista 800 integrated amp [HFN Nov ’14]. As side dishes, there’s the entry-level V-series, including two headphone amps – one designed for the MF-200B balanced headphones [HFN Aug ’15] – a phono pre, DAC and even a miniature integrated amp, the USB-input only £150…

With its Uni-Q combination driver, first seen in 1988, KEF has aimed to overcome a fundamental disadvantage of conventional multi-way loudspeaker systems, by ensuring that sound over the whole frequency range can emanate from the same point in space. KEF was not the first to combine a tweeter with a bass unit as Tannoy’s Dual Concentric concept dates back to 1947. But KEF was able to take advantage of a new magnet material, neodymiumiron, to create a 25mm vented aluminium dome tweeter that would fit into the centre of a 125mm (5in) bass/mid unit at the front, so that the two centres of radiation were truly coincident. Later generations of Uni-Q drive units have refined overall performance almost out of all recognition, by perfecting the integration of these two elements.…

Ostensibly inspired by its flagship DirectStream DAC [HFN Aug ’14], PS Audio has leveraged some of the ideas – if not the core DAC technology itself – into this rather more affordable NuWave converter. Like the DirectStream, the NuWave DAC uses custom code running on an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) to format all incoming digital data just as, at the other end of the circuit, after the DAC, it uses a passive filter network followed by high-speed op-amps driving the balanced analogue output. In between, however, there are significant differences between these two models. Instead of resampling all digital inputs, the NuWave reclocks and passes data at its native sample rate to an ESS 9010 32-bit ‘Hyperstream’ DAC. This DAC is from ESS Tech’s ‘Mobile Audio’ range and is distinct…

With its aerospace and F1 connotations, titanium is a PR man’s dream material, mention of which will wow many a potential buyer. But if you know something of the vibrational behaviour of materials you’re likely to be less impressed. How much better is it, say, than unsexy aluminium? Answer: if we’re talking resonance behaviour, it isn’t. In the case of a thin shell like the ATH-A2000X’s titanium closures, the factor that determines the frequency of bending resonances is the longitudinal speed of sound in the material, which depends in turn on the ratio of the material’s tensile modulus (E) to its density (p). In the case of titanium the values are, approximately, E = 110GPa and p = 4540kg/m3 and the speed of sound is 4922m/s. For aluminium, E = 71GPa and p =…

Brahms Violin Concerto, Alto Rhapsody Eloquence ELQ4429788 Arthur Grumiaux’s very fine 1958 concerto recording with the Aafje Heynis Rhapsody and Tragic and Academic Festival Overtures. Bruckner Symphonies Nos 5, 7, 8 and 9 Eloquence ELQ4807068 (two discs) No 5 is of a live broadcast from 1959; No 7 is the later (1953) Decca while Nos 8 and 9 are Philips studio versions. Debussy La Mer; Three Nocturnes; Images Eloquence ELQ4646362 La Mer and the Nocturnes were van Beinum’s first stereo recordings for Philips. They’re duplicated in the Universal 6CD set 475 6353 along with Schubert Symphonies Nos 3, 6 and 8; Mozart’s ‘Posthorn’ Serenade; and Brahms. Haydn Symphonies Nos 94, 96 and 97 Eloquence ELQ4768483 (mono) Robust accounts of the ‘Surprise’, ‘Miracle’ and No 97 where you can but marvel…

EMI’s studio in Lagos, Nigeria turned out to be a veritable barn in Wharf Road in the port of Apapa, equipped with an antiquated Studer 8-track tape recorder and microphones stored in a dusty cardboard box. According to Denny Laine, ‘It was like a home studio. Nobody knew what we were doing except us.’ In that respect, by leaving behind the highly regulated and documented regime of Abbey Road, they had achieved a certain degree of freedom – but it came at a considerable price. ‘They didn’t use booths or separation barriers,’ recalled McCartney, ‘they were constructing booths just for us and the guy was saying, “Do you want glass in them?” They were just gonna make big wooden things with holes in them!’ The studio had been used previously…

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 newspapers and magazines ‘I wondered how the piece might play with more dynamic speakers’ Many audio people have probably fantasised about the ultimate multichannel recording – in which all performers are recorded and played back individually – one channel for each, from microphone to loudspeaker. Doing so with a chamber group or vocal quartet would be relatively easy, but the difficulty would increase in proportion to the size of the ensemble to be recorded – an entire symphony orchestra, for example, captured in real time but not en masse as is usually done. The result could be a quantum…

I recently re-subscribed to your magazine, which I am enjoying very much. The new stuff is of great interest, but I most look forward to the vintage reviews and your ‘From the vault’ re-prints. I have become a bit of a collector, you see! It all goes back to when I lived at home and was lent equipment by my father for use in my bedroom (an excuse, I think, for him to buy more Hi-Fi for himself). One such early system was a set of Quad II amplifiers, a Garrard 301 turntable (with SME 12in arm) and pair of B&W P2 speakers. All sadly now sold on. So while most men of my age now lust after 50cc Yamaha and Honda mopeds from their teenage years, I have the…

I’m certain that I can’t be the only middle-aged music lover who is mystified by the renaissance of the vinyl LP. But what exactly do we mean by a vinyl LP? Are we talking about the beautifully produced 180g virgin vinyl discs that I see mounted and displayed proudly on the wall of my local Hi-Fi shop that retail for between £20 and £30? Or do we mean the mercifully obsolete dross with the appallingly low production values that plagued my teenage years in the 1970s and ’80s? A trip down memory lane recalls the RCA Itzhak Perlman LP of the Sibelius and Tchaikovsky violin concertos that was little better than a bendy ‘giveaway’ disc and which distorted at any dynamic over mezzo-forte. (It took me a long time to…

THE RECORD THAT DOESN’T GO ROUND Danish engineer Jens Hansen reports on Soundstream’s digital card, which currently exists in prototype form in the company’s Salt Lake City laboratories. FROM DIRECT-CUT TO DIGITAL Jack Renner, audio engineer and part-owner of American record company Telarc, talks to HFN editor John Atkinson. A EUROPEAN CASSETTE DECK Angus McKenzie listens to the Revox B710 Mkll. NEW LOOK AT HORNS There’s still life in the old beast yet, reckons Adrian Orlowski, as he examines both historical and present-day developments of the horn-loaded loudspeaker. PICK-UP CARTRIDGES Alvin Gold listens to the B&O MMC1 & 2, Accuphase AC2, and Koetsu Black. THREE BUDGET LOUDSPEAKERS The Mordaunt Short MS20, Celestion Ditton 110 and Mission 700S auditioned by Trevor Attewell. TWO NOT-SO-BUDGET LOUDSPEAKERS Alvin Gold reviews the AR98LS and Heybrook HB3…

With well over 100 different versions having been issued over the years, I can do little more here than offer some of what I consider to be the most interesting and relevant variants. ORIGINAL VINYL RELEASE (1973) The original album arrived housed in a memorable sleeve featuring a celebrity-enriched cover shot of the McCartneys plus Christopher Lee, Michael Parkinson, Kenny Lynch, James Coburn, Clement Freud and John Conteh, all caught in a spotlight as if trying to escape from a prison [Apple Records, UK PAS10007/USA, SO-3415]. The major difference between the UK and US editions was that America got an extra track in the form of ‘Helen Wheels’, named after Paul and Linda’s Land Rover. It had been recorded in Lagos but, having already been released in the UK as…

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 ‘It’s what escorted our music from CD’s digits that grated on our ears’ Vinyl versus digital – it’s a seemingly unquenchable debate fuelled by passionatelyheld views. And I use the term ‘debate’ advisedly because I’m not inclined to treat the subjective preferences of different enthusiasts as a sign of division. While some may see themselves as one side of the coin or the other we are, after all, still a single coin and not a pocketful of change. But it was not always thus. The advent of CD ushered in a new era in domestic music replay but it also…

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 ‘There are two works in progress. One of these is Adaptive Bit Rate’ Back in the July 2015 issue I discussed the BBC’s rebuild of its iPlayer systems, which went under the name of the AudioFactory project. In part, the changes were made in order that the system would be scalable and so able to meet the ever-rising numbers of requests for the iPlayer service from listeners. The BBC also wanted to adopt openly agreed access methods. However, from the listener’s point of view, the key aim was to ensure that all the corporation’s radio stations would be delivered with the…

I thought it strange that Steve Harris’ Investigation feature in the February issue didn’t mention Alec Harley Reeves, the British engineer who patented the concept of pulse-code modulation (the basis of digital recording) in 1938 and who later had a hand in the development of fibre optic cable. Reeves was a man who should be remembered. Steve Harris replies: No-one would argue with David Mansell on the importance of Alec Reeves as a founding father of digital audio, and perhaps even in my brief introduction he should have got a mention. Reeves certainly was an extraordinary figure, who apart from laying the foundations for PCM also contributed much to the development of radar in World War II and eventually held no fewer than 82 patents. But in a feature that…

Sights and sounds from around the globe CES in transition: streaming was so much a part of CES 2016 that it’s difficult to reconcile it with the other dominant force – the resurgent vinyl LP. As an analogy, imagine a photography show split between holographic cameras and daguerreotype. Hovering above all of it was the headphone revolution. With Meridian’s MQA bubbling under, most brands showing some form of streaming-friendly device and with a flood of new turntables and cartridges, schizophrenia was the order of the day. New amps from Nagra, a mega phonostage from Audio Research, new cans from Audeze and Hifiman, a baby tube amp from Quad, rumours of an open-reel comeback: transition... but business as usual! Driven by electronics from Audio Alchemy, ELAC showed the latest in its…

Turntables with six-figure price tags and integral plinths that make them the size of an oil barrel are surprisingly plentiful. Clearaudio’s Statement v2 may be the biggest, but it has rivals that need serious floor space. I believe the Goldmund Reference of ’83 was the first ‘superdeck’ to include its own integral floorstand. So shocking was its arrival that it caught the turntable makers of the day with their guard down, their manageable record decks suddenly seeming weedy. Although Kenwood’s L-07D, Thorens’ Reference and Prestige and other massive turntables preceded it, the Goldmund was the first that didn’t leave the choice of stand up to the consumer. More recently, the much-lauded Continuum Caliburn, Basis’ extreme ART, the Transrotor Gravita and Purevox’s PV-Flagship have followed Goldmund’s philosophy of taking the matter…

The Watts Time-Aligned (WTA) filter at the heart of Chord’s DAVE employs an algorithm developed by audio consultant Robert Watts, who first came to fame when he co-formed Deltec Precision Audio (DPA) in the 1980s. Since DPA closed in the late 1990s Watts has had a close association with the Chord Electronics design team. Nevertheless, while his innovative Pulse Array DAC technology has powered Chord’s digital products since the DAC64 – introduced some 15 years ago – it’s only in the last few years with the smash-hit Hugo and Mojo USB DAC/headphone amps that this know-how has achieved its true commercial potential. In its latest generation, and running on a capacious Spartan 6 FPGA, Watts’ technology employs a combination of 256x oversampling (parallel-processed to 2048x) and truncation to a (5-bit)…

AUDIO FILE Three-way reflex-loaded floorstanding loudspeakers Made by: UK Distribution SRL, Treviso, Italy Supplied by: Henley Designs Ltd, UK Telephone: 01235 511166 Web: www.operaloudspeakers.com; www.henleydesigns.co.uk Price: £8500 ‘Bass-heavy recordings brought appreciative grins all-round’ If you’ve seen Opera Audio’s compact Callas standmount [HFN Jun ’15] you’ll appreciate that this considerably ‘grander’ Grand Callas model is an imposing floorstanding variant, albeit at £8500 just over twice the price of its miniature brother. Opera Audio already had Callas and Grand Callas loudspeakers in its line-up dating back some eight years, but these newest versions, announced in 2014, are entirely fresh-up designs. We’ve called them Callas II and Grand Callas II to avoid any confusion. You’ll also know from that June review of the ‘baby’ Callas that Opera Audio is a sister company to…

AUDIO FILE Closed-backed circumaural headphone Made by: Audio-Technica Corp, Tokyo, Japan Supplied by: Audio-Technica Limited (UK), Leeds Telephone: 0113 277 1441 Web: http://eu.audio-technica.com/en Price: £529 ‘In a crazily large A-T range, the ’A2000Z shines like a beacon’ Human resources departments have many wonderful euphemisms for giving you the sack: downsizing, right-sizing, letting you go, etc. So what’s the right term for trimming down an overly numerous and confusing product offer? ‘Rationalisation’, sometimes used for the former, is a term that actually makes sense in the latter case. So, Audio-Technica, a word to the wise: undertake some product rationalisation. SO MANY MODELS! You’d expect, of course, a company with Audio-Technica’s long history in headphone manufacture to have a broader range of models than headphone industry newcomers like Audeze (seven models) or…

BEHIND THE MUSIC WITH HI-FI NEWS & RECORD REVIEW ‘His performance of the Beethoven Seventh had me “walking on air”’ Take the train to Amersham, on the outskirts of London, and a few minutes’ walk up Hill Avenue you’ll find The Record Shop – a treasure trove of music and musical instruments. Sitting stacked on the floor, alongside a long shelf with classical LPs – the usual unwanted ’70s Karajan/DGs, but much else of greater interest – I recently discovered a mint mono copy of Eduard van Beinum’s May ’58 Amsterdam Concertgebouw recording of Brahms’s Symphony No 4 [Philips ABL3310]. And that has prompted this month’s Classical Companion subject. Van Beinum came from Arnhem, and was born into a musical family. He was playing violin in the Arnhem Orchestra at…

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 ‘“The old copper stampers were very flat, so no vertical patterns existed”’ Vinyl is on a roll. No doubt about it. Tesco is selling LPs ‘after the huge success of a summer trial’. Technics is bringing back the direct-drive turntable. UK trade body Clarity is staging a vinyl-only fan show. Specialist dealers are holding LP listening evenings. And a teenager I know has liberated an LP12 from her family, and plugged it into a ropey amp and toy speakers to play beat-up LPs bought from charity shops because ‘the sound is so much better than digital’. If…

Contributor 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 ‘A respectable budget speaker costs less than it did 30 years ago’ Imagine you’re starting from scratch, and shopping for the most basic system you can find. You want a record player, amp and speakers for as little money as possible. Starting with the speakers, you could get a pair of Wharfedale Diamonds for £69, or if you could run to something bigger, Tannoy Mercurys for £120. Oh dear, those prices come from 1985. If you’d been shopping back then at Comet, the leading discount warehouse, you could have completed your system with a Pioneer PL-340 belt-drive record deck plus fitted MM…

I was interested to read the letter in the March issue from Francis Leyva regarding older favourite equipment we regret parting with, though I am sure we sometimes remember this kit with a good deal of nostalgia as I am convinced our aural memory plays tricks on us! Nevertheless, if we really enjoyed and valued it at the time, that’s what matters most. Meanwhile, Tim Jarman’s reply in the February issue to the letter from Thomas Lee mentioned the Sony TC-229SD cassette deck, which had an ELcaset version too. I have the Sony TC-229SD’s later brother, the TC-K8B, which uses the same mechanism and layout but has wonderful and very accurate colour LCD metering. Purchased in January 1979, it remains a joy to this day. Sadly, the fast wind and…

Now midway through my 70th year and a Hi-Fi News reader from the 1960s I never in my wildest dreams ever anticipated reading of Sir Nigel Gresley and trainspotters in your publication. Well done! Although I am afraid I cannot agree totally with Ken Kessler’s analysis. Trainspotting in the manner in which it was enjoyed in the 1950s has now passed due to social changes rather than reasons related to the state of the rail network: Health & Safety legislation and parental concerns, to name but two. Interest in railways in the wider context continues to thrive as evidenced by the number of rail publications and the success of preserved railways and new-build ‘clones’ – watch out for the Gresley P2 in 2021! In contrast, as often bemoaned in HFN,…