One of the first notes I made after installing the Aphelion 2 in a Rega P10 was: it’s not going to do anyone’s vinyl habit any good. Three months and several hundred tracks later I realise that not only does this cartridge make you want to listen to more vinyl but if that vinyl is […]
Where would we be without vinyl? Whether you love it or hate it, it’s been a major element of home music replay for many decades from its earliest beginnings in the heady days of acoustic shellac discs to the refined electronics and modern pressings we can enjoy today. Not that it’s without its foibles. Talk […]
I left hi-fi retail in 2015 and moved to Devon, bringing with me the best system that our limited budget would allow, and made a few purchases on the advice of respected industry friends to ensure that I could continue to enjoy my record collection for as long as possible. Included in the equipment which […]
For a company that only made moving magnet cartridges in the first three decades of its existence Rega has thrown itself into moving coils with gusto. It started with the original Apheta in 2005 which became the Apheta 2 nine years later and was joined by the Aphelion a year after that, then in 2017 […]
It may have been a rocky year for politics in the UK but that hasn’t stopped hi-fi manufacturers from creating some spectacular pieces of kit to help us hear more of our music and thus gain even greater enjoyment from the most transcendent of artforms. Vinyl continues to grow in popularity with ever more albums […]
There are a few cartridge companies that have mastered their microscopic art so well that they not only produce moving coils and moving magnet designs under their own name but do so for other brands as well. This so-called OEM (original equipment manufacturer) model exists elsewhere in hi-fi of course but rarely does it apply […]
Back in the first decade of this century, I was a well-paid employee of a well known high tech firm, that’s when I bought my first piece of Naim equipment, a CD5X disc player. Within five years that had somehow grown into two racks of Fraim, with a CD 555, a NAC 552, a NAP […]
Recently I seem to have had a lot of contact with Italian audio components and the latest to grace my equipment rack is the Norma HS-IPA1. Packed into its diminutive case work there is a solid state amplifier, a phono stage, a headphone amplifier and a DAC, which is really quite remarkable. Norma is based […]
Cartridge design has changed very little over the years. There have been some differences in the generator unit itself, but most still revolve around the ‘wiggle a magnet inside an electrical coil’ (or vice versa) principle. As with anything, exotic materials can be employed, and in some cases the magnetic field is created using field […]
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 […]
It is a long time since I had a separate pre and power amplifier in my system, the last being the highly accomplished Naim NAC 552 pre and NAP 300 power amps. They had to be sold when redundancy struck in 2008 and we needed to turn some of our less essential assets into cash. […]
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 […]