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 […]
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 […]
In a previous review I wrote about the Naim Supernait 3 integrated amplifier, which I thoroughly enjoyed. While it was here I was also lucky enough to have the latest version of Naim’s entry level streamer here as well. I have owned and used a Naim NDX since 2015, I was interested to see and hear whether […]
If you want to become an audio equipment manufacturer the easiest part of a system to make would appear to be a loudspeaker. All you need is a nice cabinet, a set of drive units and a crossover, half of which can be bought off the shelf. Making a speaker that you and your mates […]
You’ve seen one Auralic product, you’ve seen ‘em all. Or at least it sometimes seems to be the case when reviewing products from their G series where the case looks pretty much identical from one to the next. But look beyond the box or look a bit more closely at it and you start to […]
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. […]
The only reason that CD still has a place in the hearts of sound connoisseurs is that they have so many discs and streaming systems add a layer of complexity that seems intimidating to the uninitiated.In practice setting up a streaming system is very straightforward especially if you have any form of network at home, […]
This has been a great year for new hi-fi, so good that our list has once again expanded so we can include all the best pieces of kit. We have had to make some tough decisions, all of the products chosen by the ear’s reviewers have made a very strong, positive impression both at the […]
If you want digital audio that can compete with the best of analogue get yourself a dedicated audio server, a data store for the bits ripped from CDs or high res downloads. See our reviews of servers by Innuos and Melco to get some idea of what such supercharged NAS drives can achieve. Yet they all require attachment to […]