English Electric 8Switch
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 MU1
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 […]
dCS Network Bridge
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 […]
Hegel H120
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 […]
Gold Note DS-10
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 […]
Lyngdorf TDAI-3400
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 […]
Moon 780D v2 & 700i v2
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 […]
Auralic Altair G1
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 […]
Best Hi-Fi Components of 2019
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 […]
Naim ND5 XS 2
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 […]
Stack Audio Link
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 […]
Auralic Aries G1
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 […]