There are different ways of starting a hi-fi company, the traditional route of building products in the shed and working up to larger scale operation is the best known but also the slowest, there are plenty of brands that started out that way but the world is changing. Now large corporations own many of the […]
The unseasonably hot night of Wednesday, April 18th saw the launch of a new sound system at Mayfair’s Tape London nightclub. Great: what’s this got to do with The Ear, you might ask? And rightly: last time I looked, we hadn’t been taken over by International DJ magazine. But Tape is a venue with a difference […]
At the Bristol show last month I caught up with AVM boss Udo Besser to find out about the AVM30 range that his company produced to celebrate its 30th anniversary last year. Initially built as a limited edition for the German market Udo took the opportunity to launch them at the show with UK distributor […]
Every year on a cold day in February numerous audio enthusiasts converge on the Angel leisure centre in Tonbridge, Kent in search of a bargain. This year it was bright and frosty when I arrived to join the queue of sellers at 8am but inside the big hall things were bustling with kit being wheeled […]
When I reviewed the Rega RP8 turntable I was very impressed with it indeed but felt that something was holding it back. A bit of investigation revealed that the power supply was the weak link and I found that putting a turntable oriented mains conditioner between the wall and the TTPSU brought about significant improvements […]
It’s been a bumper year for great new albums, so much so that we have had to expand our list to thirteen titles all guaranteed to make your system sing and your soul ascend. With pretty well all the important genres covered there should be something for all tastes let alone the adventurous musical explorations […]
If you want to stream music through a decent system there isn’t a huge choice of providers and top of the heap you have Tidal and Qobuz. Both offer lossless streaming of a quality that while it’s not quite up there with locally stored music files is pretty close and more than good enough to […]
I became aware of Samuel Yirga a few years ago when I first heard his Habasha Sessions album. I was instantaneously struck by the natural flow of musical style that combines into a stream of emotional creative narrative and defies classification. It is an album I play often and continue to discover anew each time […]
The Ear took a room at Indulgence this year in order to demonstrate a system that’s very close to the one used for our reviews, and for the opportunity to meet our lovely readers. It was also a good excuse to listen to some great music for three days. The system consisted of a Rega […]
The death was reported last week of long-time audio doyenne John Borwick who devoted his life to all things audio After 11 years at the BBC, where he began as a Studio Manager and became an instructor in Studio Operations, he was made anchor-man of a weekly programme directed at a growing hobby of audio enthusiasts […]
Reuben Klein continues his assessment of the music of Steely Dan and has the audacity to omit the finest song on The Royal Scam, that being the title track. But at the Ear we are open minded (eared) and are willing to tolerate opinions that do not exact with our own, most of the time. […]
In an attempt at honouring the work of the late great Walter Becker, Reuben Klein attempts to establish the finest songs that he and Donald Fagen created. The Dan’s creations are too great of an opus to summarise at one fell swoop. This therefore is part one of three before we get down to the […]