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 […]
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 […]
It’s about time Rega incorporated a phono stage into its entry level turntable. With the world awash with cheap, flimsy turntables that are more likely to destroy vinyl than do it any justice the market is crying out for easier solutions. Unlike all other forms of music players in the home the turntable is the […]
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 almost miraculous that the MP3 generation has brought about a revival in the fortunes of vinyl, of all the people to grab hold of a format that has long been dear to the audiophile’s heart you wouldn’t have expected it to be the ones who can carry all their music around on a mobile […]
Goldring has to be the longest running British cartridge maker, in fact it’s about the only cartridge company of any scale on these shores. The only competition is Rega but they make the whole gamut of components so are a little different. Goldring is part of the Armour Group alongside QED and Q-Acoustics among others […]
Audio Technica ART1000 moving coil cartridge The Audio Technica ART1000 is the most radical moving coil cartridge on the planet. It turns conventional cartridge design ideas on their head by moving the coils from one end of the cantilever to the other. Not since the Decca London of the fifties has anyone produced such a […]
With a range that’s trebled in recent times Rega have clearly got their MC production line up to speed, Ania is the latest and least expensive moving coil that the company has made but it has a lot in common with its pricier range mates. There are more similarities between Ania and both the Apheta […]