YBA. Am I the only one who thought Young British Artists? Tracy Emin and unmade beds, Damien Hirst and pickled sharks? Wrong answer. In the context of good music reproduction, YBA can only mean Yves-Bernard André, whose initials grace the brand he launched way back in 1981. Since then he has been dedicated to combining […]
ifi Pro iDSD DAC & headphone amplifier Ifi have a good go at blinding you with science on the webpage for the Pro iDSD, the list of features and technologies is confusing even if you know what half the terms mean. This is a marketing approach that is often inversely related to the sound quality […]
What do you do after you have set up a vinyl mastering studio using vintage hardware and established its credentials with some truly great sounding records. If you’re Darrel Sheinman founder of Gearbox you decide to make a turntable using the brand that’s been so carefully nurtured. And not just any turntable, the Gearbox Automatic combines technology […]
Most loudspeaker makers improve their products by degrees; they refine cabinets, drive units and crossovers and gradually make them better. You get the occasional jump in performance when a new cone or dome technology is developed but on the whole it’s an incremental process. Newcomer Kii Audio takes a rather different approach. Rather than using […]
It’s an inconvenient fact of the vinyl enthusiast’s life that most turntables do not have a built in phono preamp or stage and equally that few integrated amplifiers offer such a feature today. In order to enjoy a turntable you need the extra amplification and equalisation that a phono stage provides, without one the signal […]
AVM announced their 30th anniversary last year with a new entry level range and at this year’s Sound & Vision Bristol show I asked MD Udo Besser how he got into the hi-fi business, his jokey response was: “Very easy, I just filled in a form, it was the wrong form!”. He went on to describe a […]
ATC aren’t into change for changes sake, they won’t revise the range every year or so just to refresh its profile in the market, indeed even when they give something a major overhaul as is the case here the appearance remains much the same. The only external difference between the new CDA2 and its predecessor […]
If you play a competitive sport at almost any level you will become aware that there are people who are better than you and others who are better than them, and so it goes until you get to Roger Federer. There are almost limitless gradations between beginners and champions, yet at every level of ability […]
It’s been a bumper year for great new products at the Ear, there have been so many that our list has had to be expanded to cope. But fear not these are still the most essential new products to appear in 2017. The first one has not yet been reviewed on the Ear but René […]
It came as a surprise when I noticed that people were using the word Sonos as a generic name for streaming or multiroom sound systems. The brand has made it to Hoover status in under 15 years. It did this by making affordable attractive products with a control system that anyone could use, in the […]
In our steady progress through Auralic’s slowly expanding range of streaming devices we have enjoyed the Aries Mini network streamer and Altair streamer/preamplifier, so it made sense to move onto the Altair based all in one integrated amplifier, DAC and streamer the Polaris. This was until recently the top model but the introduction of the […]
Less is more when it comes to output devices. Naim have proved that with the Statement amplifier and Gamut made the point some years ago with their D200 power amp, a product that was clearly ahead of its time. Nick Gorham appreciates that the fewer transistor pairs you have the better the sound, presumably because […]