Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i Hi Fi News

Over time, most hi-fi brands develop an image: ask any audiophile and you’ll be told this one is warm, that one is all about rhythm and timing, and another is ‘bright and detailed, but I could never live with it’. Of such generalisations, myths are born, and I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet that most enthusiasts ‘know’ what Krell is all about – big, heavy, and massively powerful American amps, with the ability to drive just about any speaker to any level you want, or could imagine. Of course, the name helps. Derived from the extinct race of highly advanced beings at the heart of the 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet, it gave the brand instant mystique when it made its debut at the beginning of the 1980s. Well,…

Allegiance to LP playback is something of a mission for that indefatigable champion of optical cartridges, DS Audio’s President, Tetsuaki ‘Aki’ Aoyagi. ‘I intend to pursue the reproduction of analogue records as can only be done with optical cartridges’, he promises. Of course, this latest twist in the DS Audio saga – the Extreme’s single-piece diamond stylus/cantilever – is an ‘on trend’ approach in high-end cartridge design [see boxout, p50]. ‘I have learned’, says Aki, ‘that the sound changes so much depending on whether the stylus is glued or a single-piece. I would also like to make the vibration system lighter to retrieve the stylus tip information more directly’. Research continues beyond the stylus/cantilever but some aspects of the cartridges’ basic optical topology seem settled. Regarding immunity from stray light,…

Hegel makes no special claims for the prodigious output of its H600, in fact the only specification is a humorously precise ‘303W/8ohm’ [see Lab Report, p63]. In practice, however, the H600, like its H590 predecessor, resides in the top drawer of the world’s most powerful integrated amplifiers. Its 315W/8ohm and 600W/4ohm output is very close to Musical Fidelity’s latest Nu-Vista 800.2 [HFN Aug ’23] which achieves 325W/8ohm and 575W/4ohm. Both amplifiers have big PSUs, tight regulation and ‘relaxed’ protection, achieving maximum dynamic peaks of 2.3kW (48.0A) and 2.2kW (46.9A), respectively, into 1ohm. McIntosh’s MA9500 [HFN Jul ’22] delivers 420W/8ohm but fares less well into low impedances (1.03kW/1ohm) in much the same way as Rotel’s Michi X5 [HFN Jul ’21] pumps out 446W/8ohm and 770W/4ohm but falls away to 590W/1ohm under…

The RS130 may have pretty simple basic functionality – digital data in, via a choice of ports, and then out again via a similarly wide range of connectivity – but it also offers a choice of means of control. The big, bright and clear touch-panel display is one way, as is the Bluetooth-connected remote handset [see p67], and (once the licensing is sorted) Roon will offer another approach. However, the Rose Connect app, free for Android and Apple/iOS smartphones/tablets, is the most appealing: not only does it put control in the palm of your hand, but it’s also highly optimised for, and integrated into, the operating system of the player itself. Thus the HiFi Rose app provides direct access to every aspect of the RS130’s setup and operation, overlaid with…

Look around the rear of the Windsor Duke’s cabinet [p71] and you’ll see the ‘Made in Britain’ certification stamp. In the past, such logos have not necessarily distinguished between design, manufacturing or just plain ‘assembly’ in the UK so, for clarity, IAG has signed up to the not-for-profit business initiative at https://www.madeinbritain.org. An ‘official’ UK-centric campaign since 2013, the Made in Britain trade body also counts Monitor Audio [for its flagship Hyphn – HFN Jun ’23] and Cyrus among its 2000 or so members. Eligibility requires that ‘One hundred per cent of labour/human resource that makes the finished product carrying the mark is in Great Britain or Northern Ireland’. For Castle’s Chinese-owned parent group, IAG (International Audio Group), this has been expedited by the recent expansion of its premises in…

Emotiva has a product catalogue that looks to cover all (affordable) bases across hi-fi and home theatre. It produces stereo amps, DACs and pre/power combinations; multichannel processors, power amplifiers and AV receivers; and loudspeakers, subwoofers and headphones. This multi-pronged approach finds its way into the BasX TA2, which is far from your common-or-garden stereo integrated amp. The addition of an FM tuner – a ‘digital’ front-end integrated into the Bluetooth receiver solution – is not uncommon practice on AV amplifiers (or ‘receivers’) that are intended to function as a full system hub. Incidentally, DAB radio is not an option on the TA2. Moreover, the amplifier’s home theatre bypass connection allows it to be incorporated into a multichannel set-up, acting as a – most likely more powerful – amplifier for the…

AUDIOPHILE: VINYL JOHN LEE HOOKER Burnin’ Craft Recordings/VeeJay 0888072424609 (180g vinyl) Although this is a 60th Anniversary reissue, it suffers an anomaly you’d have thought was eliminated by 1961: JLH’s vocals are extreme stage left, suggesting (like early Beatles LPs heard in original, true stereo) that this was a two-track recording intended for a mono remix. Get past that, and it remains one of the best-sounding blues albums of all time. Its influence is such that it must have blown minds in the UK; the opener, ‘Boom Boom’, provided a hit for The Animals. Backed by one of the earliest lineups of Motown’s peerless Funk Brothers, it’s truly electric, and the title says it all. Burnin’ ranks up there with Muddy Waters’ Folk Singer and Junior Wells/Buddy Guy’s Hoodoo Man…

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 Barry Fox’s ‘Network Fail’ Opinion piece in the July issue, in which he described the problems he has with Ethernet cables, certainly struck a chord with me. Although some years ago I also began using a NAS to hold music files, I eventually decided that a more appropriate acronym for this type of drive was PITA rather than NAS. One reason for this was that I also had issues with the cables – although in my case these didn’t appear to degrade as time passed, perhaps because we have better air quality or less sunlight where I live in Scotland. However, the plugs…

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. IMPEDANCE CONFUSION AMP COMPATIBILITY AND EPDR EXPLAINED I have a question regarding the review of the Sonus faber Homage Amati G5 loudspeaker, which was published in the August 2023 issue. The boxout ‘Drive Hard’ referred to an accompanying graph [see right] and stated the following: ‘The Sonus faber Homage Amati G5’s minimum impedance is 2.36ohm/93Hz…

BUILD THE U-LINE SPEAKER Richard McDonald describes the construction of a small but effective KEF Uni-Q based transmission line speaker. WADIA 6 Ken Kessler tries this eagerly-awaited integrated player. Is this the end of the two-box era? AUTUMN WINNERS Martin Colloms tests the Aiwa XC-300, Denon DCD-890, Sony CD-P597, Technics SL-PG420 and Rotel RCD-955AX players. THREE BRITISH POWER AMPS The Arcam Delta 120, EC Lectern and Sugden A21aP tested by Peter J Comeau. PIONEER A300X Alvin Gold tries the ‘Mk II’ version of Pioneer’s ‘giant-killer’ budget integrated amplifier. LINAEUM LFX Ken Kessler on a US miniature speaker that features a unique treble drive unit principle. JVC PRO LOGIC VIDEO John Nelson reviews a VCR with surround sound – the RX-1010. LONDON JUBILEE The cartridge that Decca should have built? A…

Over 40 years since Krell’s iconic Class A power amps [HFN Nov ’21 & May ’11] hit the high-end, and over the last two decades of the brand’s steady evolution [see interview sidebar, p45], the company is now offering very refined, sophisticated amplifiers, packed with proprietary thinking but still underpinned by prodigious power. The fully balanced, direct-coupled ‘current mode’ amplification has been the backbone of its amplifiers for some time but the ‘XD technology’ [not to be confused with Cambridge Audio’s XD ‘crossover displacement’ output stage technology – HFN Jun ’14] is more recent. Here the amplifier’s output impedance is reduced as far as possible, without impacting on stability, to improve its resilience to low and variable impedance speaker loads. The KSA-i400’s input and driver stages have all been optimised…

It’s too easy to presume, just because only one change separates a new model from an earlier one, that assessing it will be a breeze. DS Audio’s £18,995 Grand Master Extreme optical cartridge differs from its stablemate solely in its cantilever/stylus assembly. Aside from a different body colour for easier identification, I wrongly imagined that a side-by-side shoot-out with the earlier Grand Master [HFN Feb ’21] would suffice, and that a couple of LPs’ worth of listening would reveal all. Silly me. Actually, ‘assembly’ is the wrong word because the whole point of the Grand Master Extreme – pun intended – is that the ‘Micro-Ridge’ stylus and diamond cantilever are formed as a single piece, manufactured by Orbray (formerly Namiki Seimitsu). This is a new trend in the high-end, with…

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 As jazz pianist Les McCann sang: ‘Make it real – compared to what?’. Or as one reader of this magazine told me when we met by chance at a concert at Cadogan Hall in London: ‘Anyone buying an expensive hi-fi should be brought here and made to sit and listen before choosing a home system. Then they would know how music from their hi-fi should sound’. He’d read my hobby-horsing about the value of live music as an audio benchmark for home hi-fi. ‘You should go to Pinner and hear what we do there’, he added. I bought a…

Peter Quantrill has been writing about music for magazines and record labels for 30 years. When not hunched over a CD player, he’ll be at a concert, or the cricket Two years on, and I still don’t know what to make of Spatial Audio after getting my hands on a pair of Apple’s AirPod Max headphones in the middle of 2021. At that time the promise of the technology seemed as intriguing as the control and purpose of it was opaque. To produce surround sound recordings with new software that left you with the impression of sitting in the room with the sound source: this I understood. But remastering old recordings – some very old indeed – to draw out (or make up) an acoustic you’d never heard before? How…

Dave Goodman, Director of Product Development, explains how Krell’s amplifiers have evolved from the very earliest Class A amps [HFN Aug ’83] with their basic single-ended voltage-mode circuit and manually adjusted DC offset and output stage biasing. ‘Our Current Mode circuitry made its debut in the FPB series of amplifiers’, says Dave. ‘By operating in current-rather than traditional voltage-mode the circuitry is less affected by capacitance and its bandwidth is opened up. A key circuit element, the current mirror, has been improved in each generation of Krell amplifiers, resulting in lower distortion and better sound quality. Sym-Max, our latest technology, also suppresses even-order harmonic distortions by adjusting out gain differences in the positive and negative halves of the complementary circuitry.’ Krell’s Class A biasing remains the foundation of its amps.…

While both ‘Grand Masters’ share the same dual-mono LED/photocell, and decorative white LED at the front, it is their stiffer diamond cantilevers and reduced moving mass that most clearly benefit their performance over DS Audio’s boron [HFN Dec ’22] and alloy-cantilever [HFN Oct ’21] models. Although these optical designs are free of coils and magnets the precise communication of information between groove and – in this instance – beryllium shading plates [just visible in the inset picture, right] faces the same challenges as a regular MM or MC. Ideally the pick-up’s cantilever/stylus would be both infinitely stiff and of vanishingly low mass. In practice this is unlikely, but at least the EX’s one-piece diamond avoids the extra mass of adhesive, and potential compliance, of a joint between the cantilever and…

How time flies: it’s just over a decade since MartinLogan applied its expertise with hybrids to box-type systems instead of the usual electrostatic-panel-plus-cone-woofer which defined most of its models. Even though MartinLogan started out with a full-range ESL – the legendary CLS [HFN Feb ’87] – its engineers swiftly excelled in the black arts of combining two speaker technologies, so the Motion range created a whole new field for them to plough. In this case, it’s a cone woofer and a ‘Generation 2 Folded Motion Tweeter’ [see PM’s boxout, p57], found here in the £1395-per-pair Motion B10 standmount model. This handsome mini arrived wearing the gloss black finish, while ‘White Satin’ or walnut are available without a price penalty. It occupies 318x178x248mm (hwd) with the supplied screw-in feet and features…

As if on a one-company mission to prove all the variations possible when it comes to network audio, Korean brand HiFi Rose has gone in very short order from being an upstart newcomer to its current role as a pillar of the digital establishment. And it’s done so not by the simple expedient of taking one platform and pitching it at a range of price-points, but rather by expanding its offering to fill every niche from the all-in-one ‘just add speakers’ system [HFN Mar ’22] to the highly-focused high-end network component explored on these pages. Beginning as a side-project of an executive of Citech, a Korean company founded in the 1950s to make set-top boxes for TV before developing touchscreen Internet kiosks, HiFi Rose has a rapidly evolving lineup of…

What do you get if you take a venerable British loudspeaker marque, mix with the (from 2007) owners’ fabrication facility in China, stir in a highly respected German loudspeaker designer and top the whole creation with British assembly? In this case, it’s the Castle Windsor Duke loudspeaker, an elegant £4500 standmount design that’s the fruit of a truly worldwide network. Along with their smaller £3850 Windsor Earl brothers, the Dukes are the latest Castle products from the IAG stable. However, while IAG’s Director of Acoustic Design, Peter Comeau, has been overseeing new creations for Wharfedale, plus the new Mission 770 [HFN Jun ’22] and 700 models, the ‘Castle project’ was outsourced to none other than Essen-based loudspeaker guru Karl-Heinz Fink. GUN FOR HIRE Alongside his own FinkTeam [HFN Feb ’21]…

You shouldn’t even need to see the £1099 price tag of Emotiva’s BasX TA2 to understand it’s one of the American manufacturer’s entry-level products: the clue is in the name. Yet this integrated amplifier is about more than just covering off the ‘basics’, not least as it’s positioned as a step up from the £669 BasX TA1 [HFN Nov ’22]. That model, also described as a ‘stereo preamp/DAC/tuner with integrated amplifier’, claims a 2x60W/8ohm (and 100W/4ohm) Class AB power output, and features a slender, 67mm-high chassis. The BasX TA2 is beefier both inside and out, upping the claimed power to 135W/8ohm, and growing in height to 102mm. It’s still easily accommodated, of course, but will look a little more serious than the waif-like TA1 on your hi-fi furniture. SUPERIOR SUPPORT…

Hi-Fi News is the exclusive UK representative for the Hi-Fi Expert Group within EISA Welcome to the EISA Awards for 2023-2024. The world’s largest independent consumer electronics awards panel was made truly international and successfully rebranded as the Expert Imaging and Sound Association in 2018. Now over 40 years strong, EISA reflects the collective opinion of 58 of the most respected specialist magazines and web publications across the EU community in addition to India, Canada, Australia, the US and Japan. Just as hi-fi and music-loving enthusiasts relish the discovery of new equipment – everything from turntables to digital streaming solutions, amplifiers and loudspeakers of all sizes – the members of EISA’s Hi-Fi Expert Group collectively scour the globe for audiophile gems. Similarly, on an EISA-wide level, member magazines/websites pool their…

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 Every once in a while, some eager audiophile will find a stash of old unsold products: ‘new old stock’ or NOS. This can be a bonanza for those who fancy old gear, but also a sad waste of time and money, depending on what it is and how it’s been stored. A while ago, at an estate sale, I came across boxes of NOS Ampex GrandMaster open-reel tape. Weeks later I popped one of my purchases open and immediately noticed that the tape pack seemed unnaturally swollen. That didn’t deter me from threading it onto a Pioneer RT-707 to see if it…

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 Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2023, Rega is more prosperous than ever. But looking back, each of those five decades had its challenges. Founder Roy Gandy’s first turntables were made in his spare time while he was still working as a technical editor at Ford Motor Company. He didn’t have the resources to make a conventional 12in diameter platter, and wanted something that looked different, so he fabricated a skeletal support for the record using three round ‘pods’ attached by spokes to a central hub. When hi-fi dealer Tony Relph suggested going into business, the two each put in £1000, coined the name…

Vinyl fans in the early ’80s were well catered for when it came to affordable turntables. If your budget was tight, the capable NAD 5120 made a fine starting point. But if you could stretch your funds a little further then there was only one choice: the Dual CS 505 [HFN Feb ’13]. First introduced in 1981, it proved to be a robust and reliable performer at its bargain price of £75. A few years later came an upgrade to this deck in the form of the CS 505-2, but by this time, Dual had decided it was time to bring the fight to the next level of the turntable market, which meant taking on the mighty Rega Planar 3. The design the company came up with in order to…

New ideas are being introduced at Celestion to bring its upmarket SL series into the 1990s. The first example, designed by Bob Smith, was the 100 [HFN Nov ’91] followed now by the 300 reviewed here. This is a £1000 floorstander that aims to bring improved bass extension, power handling and superior dynamics to the genre, while sensitivity remains below average at 84dB/1W. A remarkable aspect of the 300 is its transmission line loading, a first for Celestion, and developed with an unusually authoritative theoretical approach, by the designer Martin Roberts. TALL STORY The 100 series styling is derivative of the SL series, with the original fine horizontal ribbing of the front casting replaced by fewer vertical grooves. The 300 looks for all the world like a 100 perched on…