Ah yes, the death of vinyl. Avid put a further nail into that coffin.

Ayon did the same for the ongoing relevance of tube electronics. Notice the rather attractive diffusor array behind the rack? If you're curious, fire off an e-mail to the Ayon folks and find out who makes it.


For a review of Ayon's two-box Polaris II preamplifier, you might enjoy reading Wojciech's assessment. In case you wonder where the tubes are hiding, notice the quartets of horizontally mounted 'black capacitors' on either side of the green circuit board? Those are C3m pentodes just as I have in my Yamamoto A-09S 300B SET - except Shigeki-San peels them out of their metal cages for a nude look (and, as per him, superior sound).

As a competitor explained, EU stipulations for tube cages are satisfied by having them available. That doesn't mean manufacturers have to sell 'em or customers have to buy 'em. They just have to exist. Makers sweating the design of such solutions which don't ruin aesthetics -- nearly impossible as the below proves -- can stop sweating.

B&M does not refer to B&M Acoustics under designer Mirko Bevanja from Belgrade but Backes & Müller from Germany.

That wooden slot emitter active above 800Hz releases a cylindrical wave with just 3dB of SPL loss over doubled distance (standard spherical emitters lose 6dB). Attendant math was perfected by the Fraunhofer Institute in Kaiserslautern.

behold prefers that the signal remain in the digital domain for as long as possible to avoid resolution losses and allow comprehensive adaptive signal processing. For vinyl, that does mean - yes, digitalization. Or is that digitation? Or just, dig it?

Thomas Blumenhofer of Blumenhofer Acoustics premiered his big hornspeaker which our review & company introduction alluded to. Parties interested in hearing it were shuttled to the factory.