Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 i Hi Fi News

Have you noticed the growing trend among Insta-hi-fi posters to display one or two racks of kit, altar-style, between their loudspeakers? I suppose we cannot blame anyone for wanting to look at all that, typically, expensive equipment by way of reinforcing the listening experience. But is this a smart location for turntables, tube amps and any other potentially microphonic hi-fi component? Is it even a good idea to clutter the space between the speakers? In both cases I’d argue not – power amps with short cables located on the floor next to big loudspeakers is the one exception. Otherwise we should endeavour to keep our kit as far away from the sonic ‘launch area’ as possible while allowing our speakers room to breathe free from adjacent racks of ragged reflection…

27-28 SEP The UK Hi-Fi Show Live, Ascot Racecourse Grandstand, Ascot Berkshire SL5 7JX; www.hifishowlive.com 17-19 OCT Tokyo International Audio Show 2025, Tokyo International Forum, Japan; http://iasj.info/Hotel, Warsaw, Poland; www.audioshow.pl 24-26 OCT Audio Video Show Warsaw 2025, Radisson Blu/Sobieski Hotel, Warsaw, Poland; www.audioshow.pl 22-23 NOV Hi-Files Show, Radison Blu Old Mill, Belgrade, Serbia; https://www.hi-files.show…

Given that Michell Engineering is not exactly known for its breakneck pace in launching new models, the announcement of a new product at the beginning of 2025 got many a vinyl fan’s pulse racing. With the wraps now off, Michell marks a return to electronics manufacturing in the form of the new £3500 Apollo phono preamp with its matching Muse power supply. Audio electronics is nothing new for Michell, although its heyday for pre, power and phono amps was back in the 1980s and ’90s. The Delphini was its last phono stage before electronics manufacturing stopped in 2001 when founder, John Michell, fell ill [see boxout, p51]. After this, the Delphini’s designer, Graham Fowler, continued to make the preamplifier for a number of years under his Trichord Research brand. Graham…

Standmount? Or floorstander? It’s a question faced by many hi-fi enthusiasts. On one hand there’s the potential for a tight, clean sound from a smaller enclosure, albeit with the need for a stand to bring the speaker up to listening height and stabilise it. Meanwhile, the argument for floorstanding speaker designs involves the possibility of a bigger, more forceful presentation, often taking up no more floorspace than that smaller speaker on its stand. Then again, which design is more aesthetically pleasing is very much a matter of taste… French company Revival Audio has either the best, or the worst, of both worlds. Yes, it makes conventionally sized standmount and floorstanding designs, but its flagship Atalante 7 Évo, selling for £9390 per pair in walnut [pictured] or ebony finishes, comes in…

The standalone Preciso DAC is the latest offering from Florence-based Volumio, which was founded ten years ago by CEO Michelangelo Guarise. With the Preciso, the company has opted to deliver a USB DAC at an affordable, rather than more rarified, price point. And while the congenial £699 tag fits into Volumio’s broader strategy of accessible products, it could not practically be achieved without outsourcing its PCB build to China. That said, there’s no mistaking the Italian flair on offer here! Initially, Volumio was set up to evolve the eponymous software from a hobby project to a fully-fledged product, moving into hardware seven years ago [see boxout, p79]. Since then, its devices have included the EISA Award-winning (first generation) Primo DAC/streamer and the Rivo digital transport [HFN Sep ’23]. There’s something…

On the day war broke out, in September 1939, the BBC shut down its TV transmitter at Alexandra Palace. German aircraft could have used its signal to find London ‘blind’. The TV service started up again in 1946, using the same VHF 405-line system, rather than a higher definition system such as the 525-line service in the US. Why miss the opportunity to improve on 405? Because the government and BBC, then pretty much the same thing, worried about bad press if they made pre-war TVs obsolete. However, many of those old sets no longer worked because their capacitors had leaked gunge during the seven-year downtime. A CHINK IN MY ARMOUR We got UHF 625 lines in 1964 and colour in 1967 but black-and-white 405-line transmissions were not switched off…

Compared to many new and newly remastered box set releases on vinyl, the 17LP ‘Original Source’ package of Karajan’s Bruckner cycle on Deutsche Grammophon was a snip at under £300, which may be one reason why it has sold out. Sets can be found here and there online, of course, and the ‘Original Source’ project has now generated quite a back catalogue, with recent issues including Abbado’s first Mahler 2, and Pollini’s classic Chopin Polonaises. A fellow Bruckner-phile recently alerted me to a fascinating discussion and behind-the-scenes documentary on YouTube, led by the LP mastering team at Emil Berliner Studios. Rainer Maillard is a name well known to many of us as a guru in ‘pure analogue’ recording and mastering. I treasure his ‘AA’ recording of Bruckner’s Seventh conducted by…

B&O’s Beogram 1000 was one of those turntables that seemed to be everywhere in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Combining simplicity with careful design, for many years it was one of the most popular high-quality decks on the market. As ubiquitous as a Garrard SP 25 [HFN Jun ’25] or a Pioneer PL-12D [HFN Jun ’25], the inexpensive Beogram 1000 made great sound available to listeners of all levels of experience. STEREO STALWART The design of the Beogram 1000 had its origins in a previous and visually similar B&O turntable called the 42V. It was with this model that B&O introduced the SP1 and SP2, its first moving-iron (MI) stereo cartridges [see p54]. These offered a similar output to standard MMs and were highly regarded in the early days…

German loudspeaker manufacturer ELAC has unveiled a new flagship model. The M 807 is a four-way floorstander, with ‘sound tuning’ features, and is in the vanguard of a new Concentro 2.0 series. The speaker evolves the design of ELAC’s previous top-tier Concentro, once again combining front-facing mid and treble drivers with side-mounted bass units. Here, however, the Kiel-based marque has surrounded its latest JET 6 AMT tweeter [HFN Oct ’24] with six 40mm A-XR (Aluminium eXtended Range) high-midrange cones. This central ‘VXe’ (Variable Coaxial Electric) array is married to a five-position directivity rotary on the speaker’s rear panel, offering the user a choice of focused, broad or ‘depthemphasis’ soundstages. Above and below the VXe drivers are 115mm lower-mid-range aluminium sandwich cones, which handover at 150Hz to the M 807’s pair…

ORIGINAL THINKING Furutech has kicked off its new Origin series with the Origin NCF-UK(R), a £925 power cable featuring the Japanese brand’s ‘Floating Field Damper’ ground/earth jumper system that ‘combats magnetic interference’. Terminated in insulated connectors incorporating Furutech’s proprietary Nano Crystal Formula (NCF) compound and high-pressure fixing clamps, the 1.8m cable shields its 35-strand OFC conductors in ‘anti-resonance’ triple-layer PVC sheaths. The outer 19mm-diameter jacket, meanwhile, is made from braided nylon yarn. www.furutech.com DIVA RE-WRAPPED Three new finishes have been introduced for Focal’s Diva Utopia [HFN Dec ’24]. The active, network-attached floorstander, which launched in 2024 with its moulded polymer enclosure wrapped in a grey felt fabric, can now be bought in Black High Gloss, Dune High Gloss and Off White High Gloss lacquers. Existing customers can also upgrade their…

French audio marque Devialet has been on quite a journey. Its first product, in 2010, was the D-Premier [HFN Apr ’10], an innovative integrated amplifier showcasing the ADH (Analogue/Digital Hybrid) topology of designer/company founder Pierre-Emmanuel Calmel and colleague Mathias Moronvalle [see PM’s boxout, p39]. Eye-catchingly designed, thrillingly innovative and a sonic marvel, Devialet’s amplifier was a shot in the arm for the hi-fi industry. The company followed it with a slew of successor models over the next eight years, evolved from the original. Yet, buoyed by plenty of outside investment, Devialet also expanded into other areas, most notably its Phantom active loudspeakers [HFN Feb ’15], but also home theatre soundbars and in-ear headphones. As the 2010s rolled into the 2020s, some wondered if it had moved on from making amplifiers…

Timed to coincide with its 85th anniversary, Nagaoka is launching the MP-700 as the new flagship model of its longstanding MP series. Sidestepping the usual cartridge question – is it moving-magnet or moving-coil? – by answering ‘moving-permalloy’, this range is already well established. Until recently it topped out with the venerable £799 MP-500 [HFN Jan ’23], which was introduced about fifteen years ago, yet the MP line is even older than that, dating back to 1979 and itself based on earlier cartridges from the company. To this day Nagaoka remains a family concern and one of the largest manufacturers of stylus tips worldwide. It’s not hard to see why the introduction of this cartridge is considered an important milestone. LEGACY LOOKS This sense of tradition is writ large with the…

A wish fulfilled? I have already admitted in an ‘Off The Leash’ column [HFN May ’24] that, among the products I’ve never owned, I ‘lusted after’ an AirTight amplifier. So this review was accompanied by more than the usual sense of expectation, this legendary amplifier already relaunched last year as the 2024 Edition, but now officially called the ATM-1e (£8295). This is the third incarnation of the artisanal Japanese brand’s cornerstone stereo ‘power amp’, though as it’s equipped with separate left-and-right gain controls, it’s best described as a very minimalist integrated model. All ATM-1 versions [see boxout, p71] have possessed this crucial feature, lifting them above the level of a basic power amplifier and allowing the purist to use a fixed output source without an intermediate preamplifier. Also, while the…

ORIGINAL VINYL & CASSETTE The 1972 Argus LP [MCA MDKS 8006 in the UK, Decca DL 7-5347 in the US] set the benchmark for how Wishbone Ash’s dynamically charged tracks should sound on two opposing vinyl sides. The album was issued on cassette in the same year [MCA MKPC 8006]. A 1978 rainbow-label MCA reissue LP [MCA-2344] is a lower-grade product of the lesser-vinyl-quality times. The 180g 2010 digitally remastered LP from Decca/Universal Music Group [DL 75347/B0013902-01] does sound better, though certain acoustic sections are a bit louder than need be. FIRST CD The first Argus CD appeared somewhat belatedly in 1991 [MCD 10234, pictured below] with ‘No Easy Road’, previously the B side for the single release of ‘Blowin’ Free’, as its bonus track. In 2007, Island released a…

Redundancy can be hilarious. As we passed a gym still packed at a late hour, a highly educated former girlfriend said: ‘Look! All those great big huge gigantic workout guys’ – a glorious string of adjectives describing enormity. Her vocabulary had momentarily defaulted to the level of an eight-year-old when she couldn’t come up with ‘bodybuilders’. Visitors to the Magico factory in Hayward, California may feel similarly awed, a bit like Lilliputians, the tiny people in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Everything about the company’s production facility is enormous and oversize – from the building to its display areas, its assembly and shipping departments, its production equipment, and its ultra-impressive listening room. OBJECTS OF DESIRE In early March, my friend Ken Askew and I enjoyed an invitation to tour Magico’s plant…

For months and years now, as I write this, pearls from one of the more amazing record collections of our time have been quietly trickling out on eBay. Well, not so quietly. They’ve been plucked from the 30,000 albums amassed by Classic Records founder Michael Hobson, who ran the respected audiophile label from 1994 until 2010, when he sold it to Chad Kassem of Acoustic Sounds. Anyone on the Classic Records mailing list will have received weekly bulletins listing the latest albums to look for. This ‘thinning’ of the ‘Michael Hobson Private Collection’ follows earlier sales from his archive that offered the carefully graded first-stamper copies of Classic Records titles that Hobson had kept for himself. Finally, in 2021, Hobson auctioned the best of these, his #1 copies, as a…

Appearances are almost always deceptive. Take Teac’s new £1300 VRDS-25. Here’s a CD player that looks rather like the established VRDS-10 and VRDS-7 [see p131], featuring the CMK3 version of its VRDS transport with wafer-thin drawer mechanism, elegant orange-coloured display and basic range of onboard controls. As ever, a huge variety of track/index skip, repeat, program and fade options remain available on the matching remote control. Around the back you’ve the choice of balanced (XLR) and unbalanced (RCA) outputs plus both coaxial and optical digital ports to service future upgrades. Under the lid, however, Teac’s VRDS-25 has abandoned the bitstream technology of its siblings in favour of an advanced 20-bit topology lifted straight out of the exceedingly high-end X-1s player. DOUBLE DAC Complementing its VRDS mechanism to the full, the…

Not to be confused with Ortofon’s £3399 MC 90X ‘Exclusive’ model [HFN Jun ’25], the company’s new quartet of MC X moving-coil cartridges is priced from £269 to £865. The X10, X20, X30 and X40 all feature the same new body shape, with a honeycomb-structured stainless steel inner chassis made through Metal Injection Moulding (MIM), and vapour deposited surface treatment. The carts also debut a newly developed magnet system and range-specific custom rubber dampers, while ‘pure’ silver wire is used for their quad coil windings. Where the four MC X units principally differ is in the choice of diamond stylus, with elliptical, nude elliptical, nude fine-line and nude Shibata types, respectively, for the X10, X20, X30 and X40. The latter model also sees its cantilever upgraded from aluminium to boron.…

Is Technics trying to recreate its phonographic glory days of the 1970s? Back then, its catalogues were filled with 10-15 different models, while the arrival of the new £2799 SL-1300G turntable takes the current tally to seven across DJ, Grand Class, Premium Class and Reference Class ranges, plus the odd limited edition. So, the modern day Technics brand is inching closer! The SL-1300G is positioned in the middle of the Grand Class line, above the £1800 SL-1200GR2 [HFN Sep ’24] and below the £4000 SL-1200G with which it, and the flagship SP-10R, share the same coreless, dual-rotor direct-drive motor. The SL-1300G also incorporates a similar alloy top-plate and BMC chassis structure to the SP-10R (though that top model is not equipped with Technics’ new Delta-Sigma motor drive technology) and is…

Two years ago, when Musical Fidelity relaunched its Nu-Vista hardware line with the four-box PRE/PAS amplifier system [HFN Mar ’23], owner Heinz Lichtenegger – whose Audio Tuning company had acquired the brand in 2018 – confirmed plans for two sibling integrated amplifiers. The first of those, the 800.2, surfaced a few months later [HFN Aug ’23]. Now, perhaps belatedly, comes the turn of what Lichtenegger told us would be the ‘lower-power’ Nu-Vista 600.2. And yes, this amplifier’s claimed 2x160W/8ohm output puts it some way behind the 330W/8ohm rating of both the 800.2 and Nu-Vista PAS [see PM’s Lab Report, p63]. But only the most power-hungry audiophile would consider the 600.2 a lightweight, its beefy stature emphasised by its size and mass. Tipping the scales at 36kg, it’s just 5kg less…

Just as the American audio manufacturer Perlisten sells a varied range of loudspeakers [HFN Apr/Jun/Aug ’22 and HFN May ’25], it also features an equally expansive line of active subwoofers. They don’t quite come in all shapes and sizes – the shapes never vary beyond flavours of cuboid – but there’s a broad sweep of price and specification to match different room sizes. Towards the top of the lineup is the £5500 D15s, reviewed here. Presently, this is the most expensive of Perlisten’s single-driver models. Above it in the hierarchy are two dual-driver units, the D212s (£7000) and D215s (£9000), while below are several models, single and dual-driver, in the D series and more affordable R series. The naming convention is straightforward, so you soon learn that the D15s has…

AUDIOPHILE: VINYL HELEN HUMES Songs I Like To Sing! Craft/Contemporary CR00714 (180g vinyl) Every genre is dominated by a mere handful of its practitioners – in the oft-overlooked Humes’ case her colleagues would have been Fitzgerald, Washington, Holiday, Lee, and Vaughan. But wow! She could match them in tone, phrasing and delivery, her readings of the standards enjoying added depth with her blues, R&B and gospel sensibilities, yet with a clarity to rival Ella’s. Backed by Contemporary’s stable of jazz geniuses, including Barney Kessel, Leroy Vinnegar, Shelly Manne, Ben Webster, and André Previn, she delivered this 1961 masterpiece, cut by Bernie Grundman from the original masters. Just wait until you hear ‘Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone’. Delicious. KK Sound Quality: 90% EDEN’S CHILDREN Eden’s Children Sundazed LP5688…

Having worked on and used hi-fi equipment over many decades, I often encounter various examples of the question: ‘Should I “upgrade” what I’ve been using?’. It’s a question that tends to pop up in the mind of hi-fi enthusiasts almost from the moment they’ve bought, installed and started to listen to their initial audio system. And there’s no doubt that the electronic devices, designs, and manufacturing methods have all improved since the long-past days when, say, the first issue of Hi-Fi News appeared! PERFECT PARTNERS? The question cropped up again for me when I learned about Quad’s new versions of its 33/303 pre/power amplifiers [HFN Jan ’25]. After some consideration I decided to buy a new 303 power amp. However, this then raised an issue: should I also ‘retire’ my…