When I interviewed Naim designer Steve Sells a few years back I asked which amplifier he used at home, he said the Supernait. It’s perhaps surprising that the man who developed the Statement, Naim’s most ambitious amplifier ever, uses one of the more modest models for his listening pleasure, but there’s nothing like a good […]
Italy has a long tradition of producing high quality audio equipment but Gold Note only came to my attention in recent months. Based in the Florence area, this is a company determined to cover every audio enthusiast’s needs, with a range of turntables, cartridges, CD players, DACs, amplifiers and loudspeakers. They are now being distributed in […]
Vinyl record sales are at their highest since the eighties, the era when CD started to gain a foothold with its claims of perfect sound forever and the much vaunted but ultimately empty claim that they were immune to abuse. The irony is that the most mangled piece of vinyl can be played, it won’t […]
When I reviewed Audio-Technica’s flagship open-back headphone in June last year, the ATH-ADX5000, I was mightily impressed by the Japanese audio giant’s achievement in raising the bar and creating a reference quality earspeaker that surpassed all of its previous feats. I was therefore delighted to be given the opportunity to spend considerable time with A-T’s statement […]
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 […]