 |
Ravenous. Dear Srajan, wishing you and Ivette a wonderful New Year. Purely for self gratification, can I ask whether you have plans to review that Raven speaker… |
 |
Wide.Bass? “Happy New Year with my best wishes to you, Ivette and that pretty cat of yours. I just checked on your site and saw three upcoming reviews where smaller widebanders combine with separate woofer enclosures…” |
 |
With the incoming US administration’s threat—shiny promise to jingoists—of seriously high tariffs on Chinese imports… |
 |
The now defunct online ‘zine Stereomojo enjoyed spilling dirty little secrets to suggest that their coverage was more unbiased and honest than… |
 |
In praise of small dreams. Today’s headline is a nod at one of my favourite Jan Garbarek albums. Its gorgeous less-is-more minimalism parallels our feature’s hardware focus. The concept is simplicity itself. If our actual not imaginary needs are really a teapot tempest not category 5 hurricane, we can hit peak performance with far simpler smaller cheaper kit… |
 |
Dawid Grzyb’s recent review of Audio Reveal’s Hercules DAC on Hifiknights.com is an interesting exposé which however misses… |
 |
Mad about Mads Buchardt who just launched his top ~4K/pr monitor? With Danish-made cabs in finger-joined 19mm to 28mm solid wood, a 1″ Danish ScanSpeak soft-dome tweeter in a waveguide, 6½” Danish Purifi woofer, 2 x 6½” Dansk-designed custom SB Acoustic rear-firing passive radiators, Danish Jantzen cross coils and Superior Z-Caps, Argento posts… this ambitious E50 effort pulls no punches on build or parts quality. |
 |
I don’t know him from Adam. If he was a she, would we say Eve?… |
 |
Canada’s Polynice & Antigone are members of the same ‘secret’ society that hosts equivalent products from Akiko, Shunyata and Synergistic. They’re all power distributors whose three secret… |
 |
We’ve come across it recently with Kinki Studio cables becoming Exact Express. We’ve seen… |
 |
Doing the sums. Dim sum is the tastiest of the lot. The lump sum is a single payment rather than… |
 |
It was ticking to countdown. Come June 10th, the floodgates burst. Reviews of… |
 |
My Zoom chat with an industry veteran took an unexpected turn when I asked about… |
 |
Benno Baun Meldgaard. We’ve come across his name as the founder/designer of… |
 |
Gamer changer. It’s what an email from the UK’s Definitive Audio said about the balanced-power conditioners from Estonia’s Audes. They certainly changed the game for… |
 |
I recently became aware of two Spanish brands which until now… |
 |
The MOC convention centre on the Lilienthaler Allee in Munich is where… |
 |
Basel Acoustics is a new project between ex Boenicke CEO and long-time collaborator Piotr Misiewicz and Sven Boenicke of the eponymous speaker house. Their first model is the Concept V01 shown here at Munich HighEnd 2024 in front of Boenicke Audio’s W22 flagship… |
 |
Tubes done different: LTA/Berning, Kora and Alieno… |
 |
Pedal to the metal. For 2024’s Munich reveal, Japan’s Furutech will bring… |
 |
D-day. That joust is just around the corner in Munich. It’s about d-coupling not spiking loudspeakers and making a public spectacle of it… |
 |
In this episode John and I cover Record Store Day, new brands Laiv and Austin AudioWorks, Plexamp’s arrival at Audiolab, full-bore professionally installed and curated Dolby Atmos and a passive compact widebander that converts to fully active bass-bin docking. |
 |
Before digital everything took over, analog design had to push the boat out. There were transistors based on germanium not silicon… |
 |
MSG again, this time with Vinnie Rossi… |
 |
First Bakoon then Enleum built a small empire around current-drive amplification. Whilst standard speakers… |
 |
In current times, the single-driver genre began its career way off the mainstream. Later Voxativ then Cube did probably most of the heavy lifting to gain it mainstream acceptance. Zu converged on the same visibility and acceptance on a rather different tangent. Regardless… |
 |
Talking points include even/odd-order THD, active/passive bass traps, active xovers, DAP + tubes, fast ‘n’ loose facts, cassettes on the go again. Tune in as John and I cover these and more topics… |
 |
THD. Short for total harmonic distortion, its measurements show how much harmonic artifacts hifi components inject. It’s a complex subject with a math aspect. As an Irish country bumpkin, I give you the super-lite version. First we need to understand… |
 |
Some gals dig broad shoulders. Some guys are done in by long legs. These days accessories get me hot under the collar… |
 |
Classy warfare. A, A/B, D. Silicon Mosfets vs GaNFets. Ethernet copper vs fiber optics. Ball bearings vs viscoelastics. Dynamics, planars, electrostats and AMT vs ribbons… |
 |
MSG is one of the most misunderstood kitchen flavorings. It was invented in 1907 by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda who boiled down cubits of kombu seaweed to extract glutamate… |
 |
I’m a worthless piece of shit. Please let me in… |
 |
Peeling Tom? This time he’s not peeping but peeling; down to the bone. And there’s two of ’em. What am I on about? |
 |
Case closed! Is it, really? |
 |
This exploded Audeze graphic from their cookbook of planarmagnetic driver design shows symmetrical push/pull magnets… |
 |
It’s not short for full-metal clank but fibre media converter. It’s how you can pimp out your router… |
 |
Numbers. If you’ve been to a classical concert, you’ll have heard the first oboe play a non-vibrato A4 to which all other instruments in the orchestra tune themselves… |
 |
Swiss Made. Although chatting with audio designers of non-conformist hardware is essential to appreciate it fully, nothing beats… |
 |
C-Wave. Non-switching Continuum Processing. Ironless motors… |
 |
Oskar Heil protegé. Ongoing AMT developer at first ADAM now HEDD – for studio/home speakers and headphones. For that CV, we call on Klaus Heinz and his Heinz Electrodynamic Designs. When he first bowed the original HEDDphone… |
 |
August 10, 2011. A year past my September 2010 review of Voxativ’s original Ampeggio… |
 |
Mark Levinson gets UK citizenship. Of sorts. His company Daniel Hertz just signed… |
 |
Southend On Sea, Essex. It sounds picturesque. It’s where… |
 |
From Dune to done in $3’295/pr? That’ll be… |
 |
When Jarek Waszczyszyn’s press release for today’s Fram Arte hit… |
 |
The art of the steal. Press releases are all about stealing eyeballs; the more the merrier. So there’s… |
 |
Audite’s bite… |
 |
Anachrophilia. Love of spiders? That’d be arachnophilia. Close but no web… |
 |
The canton of Reference, 2023. It’s not the latest Swiss county; nor its swankiest zipcode. It’s Canton’s new 8-deep Reference range which dropped at this year’s Munich show… |
 |
No woman no cry; no hifi no sound. When it comes to enjoying music playback… |
