BorderPatrol DAC SE digital to analogue converter BorderPatrol is a small company whose proprietor Gary Dews started out working with Audio Innovations (which became Audio Note UK), so you won’t be surprised to learn that its speciality is tube electronics. Gary was originally based near Brighton in the UK but moved to Maryland in the […]
It’s been a while since I lived with an MSB DAC, but I have very happy memories of those occasions when one was left in my care in the past. The company has always been at the leading edge of digital technology with several firsts to its name and some very ambitious products in its […]
Do you ever have one of those ‘am I imaging this?’ moments when listening to hi-fi? It happens to me sometimes, at which point I invite an innocent civilian to listen and tell me what they think. Usually it is my very patient wife who is nearest to hand, and so it was that she […]
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. […]
Turntable design has always been open to new ideas, the variety of approaches to the apparently straightforward process of measuring modulations in a groove is quite extraordinary. And one of the more left field approaches is that taken by American designer Bill Firebaugh, creator of the Well Tempered turntable, a design that’s been around since […]
It’s been more than 20 years since I last had the pleasure of unpacking a new piece of hi-fi kit for review. And a lot has changed during that time. For instance, even the actual act of unboxing seems to have become an entertainment itself, given the number of YouTube videos out there that have […]
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, […]
The analogue world figured out that the source is the most important part of the chain nearly fifty years ago when Ivor Tiefenbrun unleashed the Linn LP12, inarguably the best marketed turntable in the world ever. In the CD era the emphasis moved away from that philosophy with digital to analogue converters becoming the centre […]
When our esteemed editor asked if I would like to review the Naim Uniti Core as I have a UnitiServe with which to compare it, acceptance was inevitable. Other than Mu-so, all my experience with Naim has been from the Classic era, with a green logo and a black case. At one time I had two […]
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 […]
YBA. Am I the only one who thought Young British Artists? Tracy Emin and unmade beds, Damien Hirst and pickled sharks? Wrong answer. In the context of good music reproduction, YBA can only mean Yves-Bernard André, whose initials grace the brand he launched way back in 1981. Since then he has been dedicated to combining […]