Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2025 i Hi Fi News

‘Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden’. Now, I’m pretty sure that when these thoughts were penned by the Roman poet Gaius Julius Phaedrus almost exactly two thousand years ago, he did not have hi-fi in mind. Nevertheless, Phaedrus was prescient, for our audio world is replete with products that defy cursory observation. In almost every issue of Hi-Fi News we explore the unexpected and reveal what lies beneath the bonnet, the claims and specification of the latest hardware releases. Or at least that’s our endeavour! And this month we have two absolute doozies – an amplifier and loudspeaker that are both packed with innovation and yet hide all this cleverness and leftfield thinking…

FEZZ DOUBLES UP Hand-built in its native Poland, the Luna EVO (£2495) and Luna Mini EVO (£1695) are the latest integrated tube amplifiers from Fezz Audio. The more affordable model claims 2x10W from its Class A, dual EL34 topology, while the Luna EVO (4x EL34) is a push-pull Class AB design rated at 2x40W, and offering a choice of triode and ultralinear modes. Sub outputs, 3x RCA inputs and expansion slots feature on both amplifiers. www.fezzaudio.com SIGNATURE CANS Brooklyn, NY-based headphone specialist Grado has boosted its Signature Line with the S750, priced £1650. New components include 50mm ‘S2’ carbon fibre/paper composite drivers, mounted in open-back enclosures, and the company’s upgraded ‘B cushion’ material on the earcups. The supplied, detachable cable is 6ft long – suited to ‘hi-fi listening’ – and…

Sometimes, sitting in front of a product for review, a degree of puzzlement sets in. Yes, the style of the £40,000 Sphinx Audio Element 3 speakers, which made their debut at the UK Hi-Fi Show Live in Ascot in Sep ’25, is entirely in accord with the name of the brand. The stone-effect outer panels, harp-like side profile and sphinx-like head housing the tweeter are all redolent of the 1920s Art Deco Egyptian revival, following the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922. So far, so well and good – we’re used to artistic influences being brought to bear on the industrial design of high-end audio components. But there’s another question one faces when confronted with the substantial, but not exactly huge, Element 3s, and their larger Element…

Fans of affordable vinyl reproduction are somewhat spoilt in Europe as the continent is home to the titan that is Pro-Ject Audio Systems, responsible for half the turntables sold above €200 or so. It becomes easy to understand why some manufacturers might take the route of ordering an OEM model from this Austrian powerhouse and labelling it as their own. However, Netherlander Rik Stoet is made of sterner stuff and, with a background in engineering [see PM’s boxout, p63] and a great deal of knowledge at his disposal, he took a different route into turntable manufacturing. His Takumi-branded models are all made in-house and the first design to arrive on UK shores, courtesy of distributor Sound Design Distribution, is the £1599 Takumi TT level 2.1DC. SMALL BEGINNINGS Rik’s first turntable…

It never hurts to have a sibling manufacturer making phono stages when you’re also offering cartridges. Better still is having a range of tonearms and turntables in the family, too. In this case, the oh-so-Britishly-named Kensington Audio can boast being part of the Talk Electronics group, along with Edwards Audio and Kestrel Audio, so its quintet of cartridges is in good company. As is a long-established practice with families of cartridges, Kensington’s five models vary in stylus profile and cantilever material, all sharing the same alloy body but differentiated by colour. The C-600 (£850) reviewed this month, in fetching crimson, features an elliptical diamond and boron cantilever. Boron is usually a costly element to work with, so the entry level C-500 (£600) uses a less rigid, less expensive aluminium cantilever.…

AUDIOPHILE: VINYL DONOVAN The Hurdy Gurdy Man Impex IMP6055 (180g vinyl) This immaculate reissue of Donovan’s 1968 opus is a reminder that his albums were always fine-sounding as well as musically rewarding. Whether or not he’ll be the subject of rediscovery I can’t say, but he deserves it: this still sounds as fresh as it did nearly 60 years ago. The title track is a perfect example of psychedelic/folk/world music, its sound uniquely mystical, while ‘Jennifer Juniper’ is a peerless hippie anthem. Impex has produced a must-have here: all-analogue HQ-180g vinyl derived from a 1-to-1 copy of the US master tape by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering, plated and pressed at RTI. Welcome, too, is the heavy weight laminated sleeve and 4pp insert. KK Sound Quality: 90% LONNIE JOHNSON…

New from Canadian brand Simaudio is the MOON 371, a ‘just-add-speakers’ amplifier that kicks off its latest Compass Collection of hi-fi components. Trickledown technologies inside its full-width but slender (89mm-high) chassis include the ‘zero-feedback MOON Distortion Cancelling Amplifier circuit’, and MOON Hybrid power supply, seen in Simaudio’s upper-tier 861 power amp. Rated output is 2x100W/8ohm, doubling into 4ohm. Network music playback, meanwhile, is handled by the company’s MiND 2 platform, with integrated streaming services (Tidal, Qobuz, etc) and associated iOS/Android app control. The ’371 is also Roon Ready, and adds a Bluetooth connection to its roster of USB, network, HDMI and S/PDIF digital ins, and line-in (RCA, XLR) and MM/MC phono hookups. Control over all this functionality, plus album art, is shown on the unit’s 17cm-wide display. Pricing, in black…

The Exposure DAC (£2500) is a standalone D/A converter styled to match the company’s 3510 and 5510 series components, and said to offer ‘digital precision, analogue soul’. Supporting both fixed and variable output, the latter via a 99-step digital volume control, it handles PCM sample rates to 192kHz/24-bit over its bank of seven S/PDIF connections, in addition to 768kHz PCM and DSD256 over USB. Outputs are on both unbalanced RCAs and balanced XLRs. Leveraged from Exposure’s new 5510 integrated amp [p72] is the DAC’s white-text OLED display, sandwiched between control buttons on the brushed metal fascia (a remote handset is also supplied). Finish options for the 440mm all-aluminium casework are black or titanium. Exposure Electronics Ltd, Lancing, UK, 01273 423877; www.exposurehifi.com…

In high-end hi-fi, it’s common to see the phrase ‘two-man lift’ applied to heavyweight loudspeakers, amplifiers and subwoofers. Yet the top-of-the-line InPoL Legacy from Italian manufacturer Pathos goes one (well, two) better. This integrated amplifier, priced £51,995, arrives in a purpose-built wooden crate on wheels, along with two metal ‘pull-up’ bars that slide underneath the chassis once the crate has been disassembled. It’s then a four-person job to lift the bars and manoeuvre this 140kg beast into position. Amplifiers at this size and weight aren’t unheard of – D’Agostino’s Relentless Epic 800 monoblock [HFN Jun ’24] tips the scales at 146kg, for example – but I’m struggling to think of other integrated models of a similar stature. The InPoL Legacy’s width is a bigger-than-standard 550mm, and it extends back a…

When we first saw MoFi Electronics’ SourcePoint 888 floorstander [HFN Jan ’25], its sheer size, at the £5599 price, raised an eyebrow. But designer Andrew Jones (ex-ELAC, TAD, KEF) hasn’t stopped there. Selling for £8800, the company’s new flagship takes the style and shape of the ’888 and scales it up, resulting in cabinets measuring 1239x394x505mm (hwd) and weighing 72.6kg. Music lovers with small listening rooms need not apply, and even those with larger spaces may be surprised by how imposing the V10 ME (Master Edition) looks. Much of this is down to the no-nonsense styling. Save for the slight tapering of the cabinet side walls, and the angled baffle – all part of the concentric mid/treble driver’s waveguide – the V10 ME is a boxy, serious-looking thing. Colour options…

You know where you stand with Rotel. This is a long-running company, still family-owned after almost 70 years, and with a commitment to spending money on what’s on the inside of its products rather than the cosmetics. It still winds its own transformers, and tightly specifies other components it buys in. Its halo brand, Michi, has striking looks [HFN Apr ’25 & May ’24] – from the originals with their Japanese lacquered side-panels to the understated chic of the black-on-black current generation – but the core products remain plain and simple [HFN Apr ’22], looking functional to the point where some might even consider them dour. Except… things are changing at the Japanese company with the arrival of a new generation of products, spearheaded by the £1399 DX-5 DAC/amplifier we…

PRODUCTION NOTES At producer Mutt Lange’s direction, Def Leppard started work on Pyromania in Sheffield in 1982, creating guitar riffs and vocal snippets they could then build into complete songs, rather than finished demos. The band then convened at Battery Studios in North West London for recording sessions that lasted until November of that year. Vocals were captured by Neumann U 67 mics, with various delays applied to Joe Elliott’s leads. Lange (yes, Lange!) joined the band in singing background vocals. Up to 40 vocal tracks per part would be dumped down to 20 on one track, followed by 20 more dumped to another track to complete the stereo pair. ‘They’d add the backgrounds to that part, bounce them down two tracks, and then hand-sync them back into the choruses’,…

While Compact Disc’s 1982 promise of ‘Perfect Sound Forever’ was largely aimed at the silver discs themselves, hardware engineers were not sitting back and thinking ‘job done’. Disc transport, error-correction, digital audio processing and DAC technology progressed at pace with players becoming bigger and more feature-laden. It was around the middle of the decade that ‘proper’ flagship players arrived, often in multiple enclosures. Early examples of the multi-box players included the Cambridge Audio CD1 [HFN Apr ’86 and May ’14] and Sony’s CDP-552ES/DAS-702ES [HFN Jun ’85]. Although their designs were very different, both brands identified that the sensitive DAC and analogue circuitry would benefit from being kept away from the player’s transport and digital sections. DOUBLE DUTCH Philips and Sony were the co-inventors of the format, but the former lagged…

Quad’s flagship Platina series has launched with a £3499 integrated amp ready for digital and analogue sources. Claiming 2x200W/8ohm and boasting a 4.3in colour display as part of a new ‘industrial design’, it integrates 768kHz PCM/DSD512 DAC and MM/MC phono stages, in addition to a headphone out. Inputs include balanced XLR analogue, USB-C and HDMI, but Quad has eschewed a network connection as it preps a matching Platina Stream network player. A custom-made 630VA toroidal transformer, bespoke capacitors, surface-mount circuit design and active analogue volume control are among the Platina amp’s under-the-hood refinements. Quad Hifi (International Audio Group), China, 01480 452561; www.quad-hifi.co.uk…

22-23 NOV Hi-Files Show, Radisson Blu Old Mill, Belgrade, Serbia; https://www.hi-files.show 20-22 FEB Florida International Audio Expo 2026, Sheraton Tampa Brandon, Florida; https://floridaaudioexpo.com 20-22 FEB Bristol Hi-Fi Show 2026, Marriott City Centre Hotel, Bristol; www.bristolshow.co.uk 08 MAR Audiojumble 2026, K2 Crawley; www.audiojumble.co.uk 10-12 APR AXPONA Audio Expo North America 2026, Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Centre Hotel; www.axpona.com…

To misquote those old M&S adverts, this isn’t just a network streamer, this is the HiFi Rose RS451 Master Fidelity Network Streamer. The latest addition to the Korean company’s ever-expanding digital audio offering, it features second-generation technology trickled down from the high-end RS151 [HFN Jul ’25] launched earlier this year. This makes it, in HiFi Rose’s terms, ‘a semi-reference level network streamer’. True, the RS451 isn’t exactly a budget model, especially in the face of bargains from brands including Eversolo and WiiM, but at £2699 it offers a £1600 saving over the flagship model. That difference might fund a partnering power amp or – for a really minimalist set-up – a pair of active speakers, because in common with many network-connected devices these days, the RS451 has both fixed and…

By kicking off its new 5510 series with an integrated amplifier, Brit brand Exposure (Malaysian owned but still based near Brighton) is already ringing the changes over its previous 5010 line, which only included a preamp and monoblock power amplifiers [HFN Nov ’18]. You can expect 5510 pre/power models to arrive in due course, but until then the 5510 Integrated, at £4600, can be considered the company’s flagship. This amp also introduces some notable changes over Exposure’s more affordable 3510 Integrated [HFN Nov ’21], even if the two models are cut from a similar cloth. Like its sister amp, the 5510 is – out of the box – an all-analogue, all line-level affair, with the option of being fitted with a module to handle digital or vinyl sources. It’s identically…

Sometimes in classical music, a musician seems to embody a work so fully that the line of identity separating them melts away. When I think of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony, it’s the figure of conductor Sir Roger Norrington that springs to mind. As he would have been the first to acknowledge, the piece isn’t owned by anybody. This is music ‘that is greater than it can be performed’, in Artur Schnabel’s phrase. All the same, what is intrinsic to the nature of Schubert 9 – the purposeful drive, rhythmic momentum, sunshine and exhilaration – belonged also to Norrington’s music-making no matter the score in front of him. FACE THE MUSIC With the memory of two live performances at the BBC Proms, I can see him now, in the mind’s…

ORIGINAL VINYL & CASSETTE The original 1983 UK Pyromania LP [Vertigo VERS 2/6359 119] stakes its claim as an of-the-era production benchmark, as does the cassette [Vertigo VERSC 2]. ORIGINAL CD & UPGRADES The West German-pressed 1983 blue-swirl Vertigo CD [810 308-2] indeed rocks, rocks until you drop, but the digital upgrades that follow it are much better spins. Most notable are the 24K gold plated 1989 Mobile Fidelity UltraDisc [UDCD 520, pictured above] – the chugging guitar riffs on the verses in ‘Billy’s Got A Gun’ are simply sublime – and 2009’s 2CD Deluxe Edition on Bludgeon Riffola/Mercury [060075319168(2)]. This adds a second disc with 15 tracks cut live at the LA Forum in California in 1983, including a barn burning, show-closing cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Travellin’ Band’.…

Those who pay attention to the field have been amazed and encouraged by advancements in audio design – not merely in improvements in playback gear, but in the capture, storage, transmission, and retrieval of recordings. It’s astounding how far we have come since the early days of primitive radio and shellac records. All of this is due to engineers working fanatically to extract the last few drops of sonic detail and dynamics. And therein lurks a problem. Engineers push technical limits, but their focus on technical perfection – if such a thing is even possible – can ignore the fact that music is an emotional art form. Like their scientific cousins, engineers tend toward emotional detachment as a professional necessity. Objectivity comes first. MOOD MUSIC Many advancements in audio have…

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