Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2016 i Hi Fi News

Developed by Professor Richard Baker of MIT and patented in 1964 as ‘A Gateable Bridge Network Having Power Gain’, the original Diamond Circuit describes two pairs of bipolar transistors in a four-terminal bridge, or as crosscoupled complementary pairs. Envisaged as a unity voltage gain but high current gain buffer used in IC op-amp solutions to this day, when leveraged as a power amp stage it offers advantages over a standard complementary configuration, not least by avoiding bias (emitter) resistors. However, because the input and output transistor pair of the bridge need to be of the same type, this makes a Diamond power amp circuit more current-hungry, hotter running, and also a much tougher impedance for the preceding (voltage) amp stage to drive. Ayre biases its Diamond output section to operate…

AUDIO FILE Four-way floorstanding loudspeaker Made by: Wilson Audio Specialties, Utah, USA Supplied by: Absolute Sounds Ltd Telephone: 0208 971 3909 Web: www.wilsonaudio.com; www.absolutesounds.com Price: £109,000 Wilson Audio’s Alexx loudspeaker aims to surpass the performance of its Maxx 3, and ultimately replace it. It’s the new-born child of Alexandria, sister to Alexia [HFN Mar ’13], cousin to Sabrina [HFN Aug ’15], and a precocious WAMM granddaughter. In a word, it’s a genetic cocktail that ‘incorporates Wilson’s latest thinking on loudspeaker design in the areas of time-domain geometry, driver configuration, and driver development’. The XLF resemblance is obvious [HFN Oct ’12], albeit smaller but still roomdominant: 158cm tall, 226kg in weight (each) and costing £109k. The Alexx is made of X-material – a proprietary ultrarigid military grade phenolic composite – cut…

WILSON AUDIO ALEXX Wilson Audio unusually claims a spot-frequency sensitivity for the Alexx of 91dB at 1kHz, which according to our measurements is an underestimate of the impressive broadband figure, our pink noise result of 91.9dB suggesting that a 92dB specification is justifiable. Very low impedance is used to help achieve this, though, the modulus dipping to a minimum of 1.4ohm at a high 2.9kHz. Together with moderately high impedance phase angles, the low modulus contrives to drop the EPDR (equivalent peak dissipation resistance) to an extremely challenging minimum of 0.72ohm at 3.4kHz, although a second dip to 0.94ohm at 60Hz may be more relevant in practice. The forward frequency responses, measured on the tweeter axis with all grilles removed, improved with measurement distance from 1m [Graph 1, below] to…

ACOUSTIC SIGNATURE PRIMUS Acoustic Signature has been absent from the UK until recently [HFN reviewed the Thunder in Nov ’11] but makes a welcome return with this sub-£1000 package. The ‘Tidorfolon bearing’ and thin, square-section drive belt are familiar Acoustic Signature staples but the Primus’ DC motor marks a change from the AC synchronous types used elsewhere in its range. The polished steel/sintered bronze bearing assembly achieves an impressively low rumble figure of –72.2dB (DIN-B wtd re. 1kHz/5cm/sec), sufficient to ‘expose’ a cluster of resonances, possibly from the particleboard plinth, between 50-90Hz and a single spike at 106Hz. The in-groove rumble is necessarily slightly worse, but at –68.2dB is still creditable. As supplied, and before readjustment, absolute speed was rather slow on our sample (–0.6% would likely be audible to…

MERGING TECHNOLOGIES NADAC Leveraging off its expertise in developing professional digital recording solutions, Merging Technologies has been able to hit the ground running with this ‘consumer-facing’ networkattached DAC. The vanishingly low distortion achieved by the quad-differential ESS DACs over the top 15dB of the NADAC’s dynamic range (as low as 0.00002% at –10dBFs through bass and midrange to 0.00009% at 20kHz: far better than Merging Technologies’ specification) necessitates an expanded Y scale on our usual THD versus digital level plot [see Graph 1, below]. The only other DAC to have previously disappeared off the bottom of the 120dB scale was Chord’s DAVE [HFN Apr 16]. The maximum output is 3V via the balanced XLR connections which offer a low 29ohm source impedance and wide 113dB A-wtd S/N ratio with truly…

QUAD Z-4 Quad’s tradition of conservative specification is upheld in the Z-4’s quoted sensitivity of 90dB: our pink noise figure of 90.8dB indicates that even 91dB would be fair. But we couldn’t match Quad’s stated minimum impedance of 3.6ohm, our measurement recording a dip to a full 1ohm lower at 584Hz. Impedance phase angles are fairly well controlled but in combination with the low modulus the EPDR dips to a minimum of 1.3ohm at 99Hz and again to 1.4ohm at 838Hz, so the Z-4 is a tough load to drive. Forward frequency response, measured on the tweeter axis with the grille removed, is shown in the red and black traces [Graph 1, below]. Key features are a marked presence band dip and shelved-up upper treble, despite which the response errors…

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 I’d happily see new laws making extended drum solos a criminal offence. So why did I recently spend a whole Sunday at the sixth annual Festival of Percussion held at The Royal College of Music in London? To hear renowned US drummer Dave Weckl talk about his studio work, to hear British percussionist Paul Clarvis talk about film scoring in the UK and watch Weckl do a spookily credible job of becoming Buddy Rich with the RCM Big Band led by Gay Barker. After telling how as a teenager he had dissected Rich’s recordings by spinning LPs at 16rpm,…

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 Over the last ten years, the fall and rise of the vinyl LP has been accompanied by the fall and fall of the audio CD. According to New York-based data information provider Nielsen, total US album sales declined from 618.9m units in 2005 to 241.3m in 2015. Of these around 100m units were downloads, but those figures don’t account for streaming or single-track downloads. Vinyl sales in 2015 had grown to 12m units, or roughly 5% of the total. It’s easy to see why there are now very few high-end CD players that don’t double as DACs, and why Hegel intends its Mohican…

Can your experts tell me if there is any technical reason why the 320kb/s bitrate ‘stream’ used by the BBC on its iPlayer service is not also used for its Freeview radio stations? I have confirmation that Radios 1 to 4 are at 192kb/s on Freeview. I assume this cannot be a bandwidth problem since a Freeview ‘slot’ should have the capacity to carry both video and sound information. The reason I ask is that my PC is in a different room to my audio/visual system, so Freeview is much more convenient for me. A cynic might suggest that the BBC is only prepared to invest in ‘platforms’ that allow reception on portable devices, such as car radios. People who want to listen at home in comfort, on decent equipment,…

I was interested to read the letter from Mike Bailey in the September 2016 issue, and Ken Kessler’s reply to his comment about Decca cartridges. In the 1960s I also used Decca cartridges starting with the ceramic Decca Deram in a Garrard AT6 semiautomatic turntable. I then upgraded to a Goldring GL75 turntable. After some time I felt the need to upgrade to either the MM or MC design, and chose the early Decca FFSS cartridge – similar in design to the company’s later ‘London’ models. I have to say the sound from it was amazing, so vibrant and clear – alive – just as Ken so accurately describes. The only problem was it suffered from a loud hum on one channel. Decca suggested I return the cartridge for servicing,…

Yamaha NS-5000 ICONIC THREE-WAY, STANDMOUNT LOUDSPEAKER REIMAGINED Tucked away in Yamaha’s impressive booth at the IFA show, this €15,000 loudspeaker was ‘soft-launched’ to selected visitors. Clearly reminiscent of the iconic NS-1000M, launched nearly 40 years ago, this reimagined version (dubbed the NS-5000) shares the same left/right mirroring of its three drive units but uses entirely different materials technology. Out go the beryllium-domed mid and treble units to be replaced by lookalike drivers fashioned from a high-tech metallised polymer weave called ‘Zylon’. Claimed to offer a similar acoustic velocity to beryllium, Zylon was originally developed for space suits! What’s very rare here, if not unique, is Yamaha’s use of the same material in its 30cm woofer cone, 8cm mid and 3cm tweeter domes. Each lacquered and polished reflexloaded cabinet is made…

In the early 1990s, Charles Hansen made his mark on the high-end scene as designer of the original Avalon Ascent and Eclipse speakers. He then quit the speaker business and, believing that solid-state electronics gave the most scope for innovation and progress in design, set up Ayre in 1993. As he put it, ‘Instead of being hobbled with the limitations of tubes, Ayre’s approach has been to understand precisely what tubes are doing better than transistors, and then solve those problems on a fundamental level – not simply apply band-aids to hide the flaws.’ All of Ayre’s technologies are built on a clear foundation that includes ‘zero’ feedback, the importance of the PSU, and fully-complementary, fully-balanced circuit design. ‘Not only do we avoid the gradual degradation in performance of tubes,…

Currently scheduled for release at the end of 2016/beginning of 2017, David Wilson’s self-styled ‘Magnum Opus’ was first shown, albeit under wraps, to HFN at a private briefing during CES 2015. Much about Wilson’s ultimate flagship is still shrouded in mystery and even its name – ‘The New WAMM’ – is likely to change. Nevertheless, the speaker will certainly be a ‘Wilson Audio Modular Monitor’, a two-tower system standing 84.5-86.5in (2.15-2.2m) and weighing 1000lb per channel. The original WAMM’s electrostatic midrange will not be retained, suggesting it’ll look more like a grand Alexandria XLF, but with five modular enclosures comprising a treble section sandwiched between two pairs of midrange modules in a huge D’Appolito array. Offering the possibility of precise and intricate time-alignment, this top section will be married to…

AUDIO FILE Integrated amplifier. Rated at 8W into 8/4ohm Made by: Luxman Corp., Japan Supplied by: IAG (International Audio Group), UK Telephone: 01480 447700 Web: www.iaguk.com; www.luxman.com Price: £15,000 It’s appropriate in this anniversary year for the now-nonagenarian Luxman to look to its past, and – indeed – highend audio’s earlier ventures. No, make that ‘Japanese audio’s earlier ventures’, because the MQ-300 celebrates a cult that started in Japan before travelling to the rest of the planet. As one who noisily opposed the single-ended triode’s lack of useable power, the oft-fat bass and the typical fragility of the main practitioners’ creations – I am perhaps not the ideal candidate to review the MQ-300. HOMAGE TO THE 1980s And yet… I respect and even covet Luxman products so much – and…

AUDIO FILE Network-attached USB DAC Made by: Merging Technologies S.A., Switzerland Supplied by: Emerging Ltd, Hants, UK Telephone: 0118 402 5090 Web: http://nadac.merging.com; www.emerginguk.com Price: £8457 (£9402, eight-channel) Just when you thought you’d seen every twist on the design of standalone DACs, from those with built-in streaming capability to filterless models claiming superior sound, along comes another variation on the theme. In this case it comes from Swiss company Merging Technologies, which has more than 25 years of history in professional digital audio including the development of the Pyramix Virtual Studio, which uses the DXD format to tackle the challenges involved in editing DSD recordings. More on Merging Technologies in the boxout, but here we have the company’s first consumer-facing product, the £8547 Merging+NADAC. This is a network audio DAC…

AUDIO FILE Three-way floorstanding loudspeaker with ribbon tweeter Made by: International Audio Group, China Supplied by: IAG Ltd, Cambs Telephone: 01480 447700 Web: www.quad-hifi.co.uk; www.internationalaudiogroup.com Price: £3200 Since recorded sound first appeared over one hundred years ago, humankind has mastered air travel, put men on the moon, developed weapons of fearsome power and advanced science and medicine in an amazing way. Sadly though, loudspeaker design hasn’t progressed in a commensurately gamechanging manner. Indeed, considering the bewildering number of loudspeakers on sale today, there’s a surprising lack of diversity – with most manufacturers preferring to stick to variations of the theme of basic moving-coil drive units in a chipboard box. Quad, however, is not guilty as charged. It has a unique tradition of innovation as far as speaker design is concerned,…

AUDIO FILE Closed-back circumaural headphone Made by: Fostex Co. (Foster Electric Co., Ltd), Japan Supplied by: SCV Distribution, Hertfordshire Telephone: 03301 222500 Web: www.fostexinternational.com; www.scvdistribution.co.uk Price: £569 The only Fostex headphone to have come our way previously was the TH-900 [HFN Oct ’13], now in Mk2 form and which may, in fairness, be quite different. I was not especially enamoured of its generously shelved-up bass response and described it, despairingly, as ‘yet another modern headphone in which excessive bass output not only colours the sound but drains it of life and interest’, and likened it to a portly family dog rather than a whippet. I’m delighted to say that the new TH610, despite being a lot cheaper at £569, is not a chip off that particular old block. In the…

BEHIND THE MUSIC WITH HI-FI NEWS & RECORD REVIEW I cannot pretend my fi rst encounters with Bruckner’s music were encouraging. I remember going to see Klemperer, giving a Royal Philharmonic Society concert at the Festival Hall, at a time when he was only just starting to record for EMI, where he programmed the Symphony No 4, ‘The Romantic’. I thought it was a truly awful piece, so disjointed… and to present this with the bust of Beethoven overseeing the music too! (Those RPS concerts then had a plinth and bust on stage – do they still?) I was mindful of the Beecham quip about ‘several pregnancies and miscarriages’. Then I tried a 1955 Vox LP of the Ninth Symphony: a grim-sounding work in a grim-sounding Vienna recording with the…

PRODUCTION NOTES Making records was an expensive business back in the early ’70s so Can were in a privileged position to have 24-hour access to their own recording studio. They established a regime of daily playing and this helped nurture their open, improvisatory approach and spontaneous compositions. Holger Czukay was crucial to the structure of some of the songs since he was an expert tape editor. ‘Paperhouse’ is made up of two different rhythmic and melodic ideas skilfully edited together while ‘Halleluwah’ was also edited from a number of different takes, some with overdubbed drums. However, the recording set-up was basic, comprising two 2-track Revox reel-to-reel recorders – giving the option of bouncing down to get extra tracks – and four microphones. This meant the group had to ensure that…

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 For people of a certain age, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones represent the ne plus ultra of pop music. Where I live, The Greatful Dead cast a long shadow over all things musical. But for me, Pink Floyd are the pinnacle of the late 20th century. A long-time fan – dating back to The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, I’ve never paid close attention to celebrity trivia or creative disputes, and wasn’t much interested in details about Roger Waters’ mid-’80s departure from the group, or his subsequent tentative return two decades later, but I admired the band’s lifelong…

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. Send in your views to: Sound Off, Hi-Fi News, AVTech Media Ltd, Suite 25, Eden House, Enterprise Way, Edenbridge, Kent TN8 6HF or email your views to: letters@hifinews.com – please use ‘Sound Off’ in your subject field Do any of your reviewers have experience of the SHM-CD format? Recently I saw that Universal Japan had…

I was slightly concerned after reading Ken Kessler’s review of the Mark Levinson No536 monoblocks in your September issue. Using The Band’s ‘Up On Cripple Creek’ as an example of the amp’s fidelity, the man whose ‘Golden Ears’ I have always trusted, remarked: ‘Even twangy Jew’s Harp, that least expensive and least complex of instruments, acquired a weird majesty all its own.’ I’m sure it did Ken, as the Jew’s Harp you listened to was surely a Hohner Clavinet played through a wah-wah pedal. I’m sure you will not be publishing this critical letter, however one of your magazine’s senior reviewers not being able to differentiate between an acoustic and an electric instrument, when using ‘state of the art’ playback equipment, leaves me very concerned. Ray Singer, via email In…

There are few hi-fi products quite as enigmatic as Philips’ Motional Feedback loudspeaker (MFB). It’s widely known by audiophiles yet seldom encountered while there are those who argue that it represents the greatest single advance in electromagnetic loudspeaker technology since the invention of the moving-coil driver. Some believe Philips abandoned the design due to insurmountable technical difficulties. Others maintain that the speakers were costly to produce and quickly fell from favour after being dismissed as a gimmick. Given that the series was on sale for ten years, from 1975 to 1985, it is unlikely either opinion is true. CONSIDERABLE RESOURCES Before discussing the technology behind MFB in general (and our beautifully preserved pair of 22RH544 speakers in particular) it is interesting to consider why Philips would put its considerable resources…

Aside from acquiring ‘famous’ pairs, like Spencer Hughes’ own and pair 001/002, we mixed it up with some success, as our comprehensive listing illustrates below. We’ve left out oddities such as those customised by the Mod Squad. Also, acknowledging Trevor Butler’s definitive LS3/5A history from Hi-Fi News, March 1990, we accept that wannabe licensees like JPW and RAM probably never produced speakers which actually reached the street: 1 Rogers 15ohm 2 Rogers 11ohm 3 Rogers 11ohm Studio Edition 4 Rogers 11ohm bi-wire 5 Rogers 11ohm Limited Edition (lacquered rosewood finish) 6 KEF 11ohm bi-wire 7 KEF 11ohm Limited Edition (with Piano Black lacquer finish) 8 Spendor 15ohm 9 Spendor 11ohm 10 Spendor 11ohm bi-wire 11 Spendor 11ohm Cardas Wire Special 12 Harbeth 11ohm 13 Harbeth 11ohm Gold Pro (rosewood cabinet,…

Latest from the UK’s only high-end hi-fi show 29th-30th October Advance tickets are on sale for the UK’s premier highend audio event – The Hi-Fi Show Live at the Beaumont Estate conference centre, Old Windsor on Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th October 2016. Tickets cost £20 (£30 for a weekend pass) via www.the-hifi-show-live-2016.eventbrite.co.uk or from the link on our website where HI-FI NEWS and Hi-Fi Choice subscribers can discover details of our special £15 day pass. Please return regularly to www.hifinews.co.uk/show for more details. B&W Histor y Zone The Hi-Fi Show Live will not only provide enthusiasts with the opportunity to compare models from B&W’s award-winning D3 range from 2016 but we will also be taking a trip down memory lane with earlier examples of the 800 marque, including the…

It took him years to take credit publicly for a Wilson speaker: the Sabrina. Now, with the Alexx, he is giving the XLF a run for its money. Daryl is currently VP of New Product Development. ‘I am responsible for the creative process from speaker concept to a finished product’. So far Daryl has been involved in the production of many speakers since 2007 including, more recently, the Alida, Sabrina and Yvette. ‘And the best is yet to come’. Daryl has worked his way up through this family-owned company. ‘I’ve learned, and intimately understand, the business, design and manufacturing processes that a Wilson Audio product goes through before it reaches the customer. From taking the raw materials and shaping them into an enclosure, to crating the finished product in shipping,…

Horns ’n’ triodes and I do not get along. By that, I mean their Western cultists. For the Japanese, it was a phenomenon that was once explained to me to indicate that a foreign listener could not grasp the cultural significance any more than a vegetarian could comprehend the French love for steak tartare. In the USA, the UK and Europe, it attracted a very vocal fringe, with neither practical nor sonic justification in my view. High-sensitivity horns were merely the enablers. Anti-establishment? Perhaps, but its poster children would habitually prefer anything just because it wasn’t mainstream. At the pinnacle were the Japanese-made offerings, preferred because of their superiority in every way to occidental offerings. In 50 years as an audiophile, though, I can count on one hand the Single-Ended…

Acoustic Signature was founded in 1996 by Gunther Frohnhöefer, an electronics engineer. However, his main love was always mechanical engineering and this led him to combine two skills and begin turntable production. The company‘s first deck was sold only in Germany but a very positive reception led Gunther to develop a new model: the Final Tool, which was marketed internationally. It was later upgraded to Mk2 status before being replaced by the Storm (also now in Mk2 guise). Acoustic Signature has grown steadily and remains focused on vinyl replay, taking the high-mass approach to turntable design, with 13 available models. Gunther also turned his hand to tonearms in 2014, and produced the TA-1000. It now offers no fewer than seven different models. The company also makes phono preamplifiers and accessories…

Claude Cellier founded Merging Technologies – based in Chexbres, Switzerland, just along the shore of Lac Leman from Montreux – in 1990. Previously with Nagra Kudelski, Cellier was at the heart of the team developing that company’s analogue tape recorders, including the Nagra IV-S and Nagra T-Audio TC, but the initial work of his new company was on an audio solution for the Commodore Amiga PC. Since then he has worked extensively on lossless audio compression, and is also the chief designer of the company’s Pyramix Virtual Studio, widely used in the recording industry: working at up to 11.2MHz/DSD256, it now has a new 3D panning engine for surround recordings. Working with Philips, Cellier developed and marketed the 352.8kHz/24-bit DXD (Digital eXtreme Definition) system for DSD editing and SACD mastering,…

Quad design director Peter Comeau first made a name for himself in the late 1970s with Heybrook. The company produced a range of mid-price loudspeakers which was extremely well received by the hi-fi press and buyers alike. The mainstays of the company’s range used conventional drive units, but Comeau was always a big fan of ribbon tweeters. Indeed, he first got interested when he heard a speaker using the Decca Kelly ribbon. ‘It really opened my ears to how clean a treble response could be given the right transducer,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately its limited power handling made it unusable with today’s high power amps.’ Years later, in the early ’90s, Heybrook’s superb-sounding flagship Sextet floorstander paid homage to this. ‘This used a quasi-ribbon tweeter, but the one in the new…

Roksan’s Tufan Hashemi says the new blak series is the company’s multi-purpose separates range, offering real-world facilities that modern buyers want without compromising on sound. The amplifier includes features like a Bluetooth input plus hi-res DSD/PCM support via USB, while the CD player spins the silver discs. ‘The blak amplifier fits in the top bracket, price-wise, of our integrated range’, although Tufan stresses that the more traditional M2 Caspian series is still very much alive. ‘Caspian is our purist, modular ‘audiophile’ range – there’s no internal phono stage, headphone amp, Bluetooth or USB DAC, for example.’ On the other hand, the Oxygene series [HFN Aug ’13/Mar ’16] is a highly streamlined and aesthetically pleasing lifestyle solution, but which still gives serious hi-fi sound in a part of the market where…

Cellulose is one of biology’s most important structural macromolecules. Whereas we vertebrates use the proteins collagen and keratin for structures like bone, skin and hair, the plant kingdom uses cellulose for cell walls, a polysaccharide comprising a chain of sugar molecules rather than amino acids. In combination with lignin, it enables structures as large as the giant sequoia – the tallest living thing on the planet. Processed to form paper, it has also played a central role in the loudspeaker industry down the decades, cones made from paper pulp having once been ubiquitous. Although plastic alternatives have become increasingly popular since the 1960s, paper has physical properties – particularly its ratio of tensile modulus to density – that make it superior to unreinforced plastics, although not as good as metals…

At what point does the rHead transition from Class A into AB? The standing (aka quiescent or idling) current in its output stage is specified as 90mA, which means it should deliver 180mA peak (127mA rms) output current in Class A. Into a 16ohm load this is equivalent to 259mW, into a 32ohm load 518mW and into a 300ohm load 4.86W. But the last (equivalent to an output voltage of 38.2Vrms) far exceeds the approximately 6Vrms that the rHead can deliver [see PM’s Lab Report, p71] – hence the output power is restricted to a specified 0.13W into 300ohm (equivalent to 6.24Vrms). Specified outputs into 16 and 32ohm are 2.0W and 1.1W respectively (equivalent to 5.66Vrms and 5.93Vrms), so the transition from Class A to Class AB takes place at…

BEHIND THE MUSIC WITH HI-FI NEWS & RECORD REVIEW STEVE SUTHERLAND Steve edited NME from 1992-2000, the Britpop years, launching NME.com and reviving the NME Awards. Previously he was Assistant Editor on Melody Maker. Among his many adventures he has been physically threatened by Axl Rose, hung out awhile with Jerry Garcia and had a drink or two with Keith Richards... If there’s a more generous song in the history of popular music than Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, I’ve yet to hear it. Carole King’s gorgeous ‘You’ve Got A Friend’ runs it close. As does Bill Withers’ lovely ‘Lean On Me’. Maybe REM’s ‘Everybody Hurts’ at a pinch. But for sheer soothing comfort and charity of spirit, ‘Bridge...’, with all its ‘When you’re weary, feeling small,’ ‘when…

ORIGINAL LP (1971) The double album was originally released in Germany and France in February 1971 on United Artists [UAS 29 211/12] and came in a gatefold sleeve featuring Ulrich Eichberger’s paintings. There were two versions: one in a matt sleeve, the other in a laminated one. The version released in the UK appeared on United Artists later that year [UAD 60009/60010], with a textured, single flip-top sleeve. The front featured an onstage photo taken from behind drummer Jaki Liebezeit with just himself and vocalist Damo Suzuki in shot [pictured below]. The rear of the cover carried the title and tracklisting along with a piece by Duncan Fallowell that was published in Melody Maker in October 1971. It was rare in the ’70s to use sleeve notes, but clearly the…

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 Yes, this is Hi-Fi News. And, yes, that is a picture of a mobile phone. The fact that both are occupying the same space is a reflection of just how ‘converged’ the market for consumer electronics has become. The pace of this evolution has the power to render entire CE species extinct – just as the lens technology, corrective DSP and pixel resolution of cameras in mobile phones very suddenly decimated, if not obsoleted, the compact camera market. In truth, none of the big camera brands saw this coming or, if they did, none had a lifeboat swift enough to…

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 Over the past few months I’ve gradually been collating a ‘machine readable’ index of early issues of Hi-Fi News. It occurred to me while I worked away that it was, in its own way, an example of something common in the past among hi-fi manufacturers. It’s a practice people at the old Armstrong Audio company used to call ‘continuous development’. What this meant was that although the model number and appearance for a given component might remain unchanged, its internals would evolve and be improved. This was to take advantage of better electronic devices, tweaked circuit details, etc. Thus, performance improved and exceeded…

Having read the Vintage Review of the Hitachi DA-1000 CD player in the September issue I now wonder whether Dual marketed a clone of this player. This is because I have one in my collection that looks the same as the Hitachi. Remi Balestie, via email Tim Jarman replies: There was indeed a Dual version of the Hitachi DA-1000, Remi, and it was known as the CD 120. A few other lesser-known names (in the UK in any case) also took the Hitachi machine and produced their own badged versions: Brandt, Nordmende and Thomson to name but three. Hitachi rivalled Philips in this respect, although Philips must still be able to lay claim for having the largest number of OEM derivatives for any one model. As for Dual itself, the…

Once the speaker had been designed, the BBC licensed various companies to build it for them, and from around 1976 these licensees started selling the LS3/5A to the public as well. This meant that at any one time you’d normally have the choice of three brands of LS3/5A. For example, in 1978 the line-up was: Audiomaster £168.75/pair; Chartwell £168.75; and Rogers £173.81. For 1984 we had: Goodmans £194.00; Rogers £228.00; Spendor £220.00. There was a design change in 1987: a slightly different KEF bass/mid unit was adopted, with a new crossover that no longer used an autotransformer and resulted in a lower impedance of 11ohm rather than 15ohm. As far as I can tell, the production numbers in pairs from the four major suppliers were: Rogers around 50,000, Spendor 22,000,…

SYSTEM SETUP Reader’s valve-based system with an unusual mix of components for punchy rock. BARRY FOX Is the music industry drowning in watermark issues? JOHN CRABBE Pitch perception and an unusual case of aural alteration. ELECTROCOMPANIET SYSTEM EMCi CD player, EC4.7 preamp and AW180 monoblocks. ORTOFON CARTRIDGES The Kontrapunkt A and B, reviewed by Tony Bolton. LAMM ML2 MONO POWER AMP Ken Kessler reviews these Russian-tubed monsters, with their 6C33C output valves. PHILIPS SACD-1000 World’s first multichannel SACD player, which doubles as a DVDVideo player, by Alvin Gold. B&W CDM 9NT LOUDSPEAKER Sub-2k floorstander with a good measure of B&W’s Nautilus tech. GROUP TEST: CD AND DVD-A British-made Arcam CD92, Creek CD43 Mk2 SE and Roksan Kandy KC-i CD players vs Far East DVD-A rivals: Denon DVD-3300, Pioneer DV-939A and…