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 […]
We are used to miniaturization today, the Japanese got very good at it many years ago so we tend to take for granted what are tremendous engineering feats. Nonetheless the feature count on the Mytek Brooklyn does take the proverbial biscuit. For a start it's both an analogue and a digital preamplifier with single ended […]
Someone called the other day and said what’s your favourite valve amplifier in quick fire, fingers on the buzzer style. The first one that came to mind was the Ongaku, as made by Audio Note Japan in the eighties and nineties, I mean what else is there! I don’t use valve amps because decent ones […]
Tom Evans is obsessed with noise, or rather he is obsessed with reducing it in his phono stages and amplifiers. So when he gets some new regulation chips in and upgrades his range of Groove phono stages a great deal of enthusiasm can be found to be emanating from Aberbargoed in south Wales. Tom is […]
iFi goes in for compact audio in a big way, I've lost count of the number of models there are that look a bit like this but they seem to do nearly everything including digital to analogue conversion, USB power line clean up, headphone amps and a tube preamp to name but a few. I […]
Despite being 35 years old the Halo Integrated or Hint is the first integrated amplifier that Parasound has made. It’s not clear why it took them this long but it may be something to do with the companies enthusiasm for offering more features than you can shake a stick at in products that have audiophile […]
It would have been easy for Cyrus to have made a straightforward phono stage, they could undoubtedly have made one that sounded great and it would have sold to fans of the marque. But instead they chose to do it a little differently, to make a product that had features not found on any other […]
Rega turntables are like buses it seems, you wait an age then two come along at once! It’s been a while since Rega made a Planar or P2 but back in the day there were only two turntables in the range and this was the more affordable option. The last P2 was introduced in 2000 […]
It has been a while since Rega used this name on a turntable but in the seventies, eighties and nineties the Planar 3 was considered the next best thing to a Linn LP12. The company built its reputation on the Planar 3 and cemented it with the RB300 tonearm, a turntable and arm that remained […]