Back in June of this year I wrote a review of the Lyngdorf TDAI 1120, which was sufficiently enthusiastic that, after a discussion with me, our editor awarded it our coveted Best Buy award. As part of that discussion we wondered how it would fare in a comparison with some of its rivals in what […]
When is a streamer not really a streamer, in Auralic’s case that is when there is not Lightning DS operating system onboard. Auralic has been making the Aries which is purely a streamer with digital only outputs, and the Vega which is ostensibly a streamer with onboard DAC for some time now but the latter […]
Despite Apple’s best efforts USB has become the de facto connection for everything from rechargeable torches to watches, computers and digital audio. It was never designed to send an audio signal but the fact that most laptops can send digital audio via this ubiquitous connection mean it has become the way that the majority stream […]
Regular readers of The Ear may recall that some months ago I reviewed the Lyngdorf TDAI 3400 and that I was absolutely smitten with it. In fact I was so enamoured that I have since taken ownership of one and it sits proudly at the heart of my system. It is a source of hours […]
It says something about the state of British manufacturing when a brand that once adorned trains and jet planes is used by a cable company on a network switch, but English Electric became part of GEC in the late sixties and like some of the great audio marques of that era it pretty well disappeared. […]
Grimm Audio is a Dutch company with studio connections that entered the hi-fi market with the LS1, a DSP active loudspeaker system with bass and mid/treble sections separated by a stand. The MU1 is Grimm’s first entry into the streaming market and it’s equally if not more distinctive than the LS1. In essence it’s a digital […]
Semantics are particularly problematic in the niche within a niche that is ‘serious’ hi-fi. The word streamer is a classic example, is it something that delivers music from cloud based services such as Spotify or Tidal, or does it deliver music that you have stored on a hard drive on your network. Furthermore does it […]
Readers may recall that I wrote enthusiastically about Hegel’s entry-level Röst integrated amplifier/DAC back in 2017 and was very excited when an upgraded replacement was announced late last year. The Hegel H120 is born and, to all intents and purposes, looks almost identical to the Röst which I have continued to use with great satisfaction. For those […]
2019 was without doubt, my year for Italian audio, and the foremost brand for me was Gold Note. I loved their PH-10 phono stage and PSU enough to buy them for my own system, so I was very intrigued indeed when John Simm of UK distributor Audio Pinnacle offered me the chance to hear and […]
Back in 2009, just after I moved into the audio industry having been a customer of it for almost 30 years, I heard a Lyngdorf all digital amplifier for the first time and was sufficiently impressed to buy one to use in my own system. It was radically different from what had gone before and […]
A friend has described (on more than one occasion) the times he lay on his teenage bed playing Close to the Edge through headphones and feeling like he was levitating, such was the potency of that classic Yes album. I didn’t do that, no headphones for a start, but if the Moon homepage is any indication it seems that […]
I reviewed an Auralic Altair back in May 2017 but that was a rather different beast to the Altair G1 you see on this page. Auralic’s early products were a bit piecemeal when it came to casework with the small curvy Aries looking totally different to the larger but still compact Altair. With the G1 and G2 […]