Musical Fidelity has three small and attractive boxes in its MX-series: MX-HPA headphone amplifier; a MX-VYNL phono stage and the MX-DAC digital to analogue converter. All three are fully balanced, a speciality you would not expect at the price. It means you could combine the MX-series with costly high end products that often use full […]
Last year I visited Ken Ishiwata at Marantz Europe’s HQ in Eindhoven, Holland. This is where he has built a substantial listening room in the basement of an office block, it’s one of the best I’ve encountered and not a bad place to show off the latest Marantz components that Ken had given the Special […]
2014 was a busy year of exciting new product releases and refreshes for Schiit Audio, and 2015 has seen no let up. Following the anticipated unveilings of Yggdrasil and Ragnarok, the company’s long-promised ‘cost no object’ statement DAC and amplifier, Jason Stoddard and Mike Moffat have been swift and sure-footed in bringing their recently dethroned […]
The Mojo is something of a radical move for Chord Electronics, the brand has long been associated with high end audio separates which tend to carry a high end price. The Hugo portable DAC/headphone amp brought the entry level down quite considerably but still kept it within the realm of dedicated enthusiasts, anyone else would […]
Just over a year ago Chord Co, cable mongers to the pace, rhythm and timing cognoscenti, introduced Tuned ARAY to its Sarum range of top ranking interconnects. I got fabulous results with this cable, it’s the first Chord Co cable that has really made an impression, and I have subsequently used Sarum Tuned ARAY analogue […]
Ayre is one of those companies that quietly gets on with producing innovative, well thought out and in my experience great sounding hardware. I have tried amplifiers and CD players in the past and always mourned their loss when the review period came to an end, so when the opportunity arose to listen to the […]
A former turntable manufacturer turned data storage giant has built an audio oriented NAS drive that gives streamers a real shot in the arm. Maki Electronics Laboratory Co was set up in 1975 to make high mass turntables with outboard motors and silk thread drives along with line level preamplifiers. No power amplifiers ever emerged […]
Can this Musical Fidelity integrated with onboard DAC sound as good as it looks? Réne closes his eyes and lets the music work its magic. When I was asked to pick a Musical Fidelity amplifier for a review I was attracted to the beautiful silver front and the quietly shining LEDs of the M3si, but […]
René didn’t like class D amplifiers but that has all changed now that he’s heard this remarkable pairing from NAD. High resolution, power and features, what’s not to like?Several years ago I considered New Acoustic Dimension, NAD for short, to be a high profile manufacturer specializing in mid-fi that also tried its hand in the […]
This is a DAC with a difference from a Dutch startup that seems to have considered all the options and produced a humdinger straight from the gate. Products from small new companies are often fraught with challenges as far as the consumer is concerned. Can I trust this (new) brand? Will it last? What if […]
I don’t know about you but Elipson’s spherical Planet loudspeakers are among the most attractive in the business, the timeless geometric design has been in production for decades and deservedly so. I guess it was inevitable that one day they would come to the conclusion that some matching electronics might not be such a bad […]
Like father, like son is certainly true for Paul and Scott McGowan of PS Audio. Scott developed his own amplifier under the name of his father’s company but financed it with crowd sourcing website Kickstarter. It’s a totally different amplifier to anything PS Audio has yet made, both in looks and technology. The Sprout is […]