As soon as anyone removes the grey Nextel coated cover of the Aqua (Acoustic Quality) La Scala Mk II DAC he or she will see that they mean serious business in Italy. Where a lot of converters today consist of one or two boards with highly integrated SMD components, Aqua has chosen to use seven […]
The phrase is game changer. This not a CD player as we know it, with the possible exception of the £6,000 Rega Isis nothing I have heard in digital audio delivers resolution and musicality in such convincing and entertaining fashion as the Saturn-R. Ever since streaming came along I have pretty much given up on […]
Quantization Noise Killed The Cat, an odd name for a DAC but this is no ordinary converter. Made in Norway for both the music lover and the hands on audio enthusiast the AB-1.2 is an asynchronous USB DAC in a compact box with a micro USB connector, RCA phono outputs and a light on the […]
Without a clock signal generated somewhere in your CD player, streaming device, D/A converter or digital video player you would not be able to get any sound or picture out of the box. Most clocks are very simple devices that generate a waveform from a quartz oscillator with some simple parts to get the clock […]
The original Metrum Octave was a rather special DAC. It came in two boxes, had minimal features and sounded remarkable, in fact truly superb and competed with products at twice its £729 Price. It had only one shortcoming and that was the absence of a USB input, largely because it was developed before this input […]
Some names do pop up every once in a while, one of them is Dan Wright, owner and founder of ModWright Instruments in the USA. I came across his products at a friend’s place in Munich last year and recently again when visiting a dealer in Holland. The dealer lent me the LS 100 preamplifier […]
In a world changing from CD to download as the primary music source a digital to analogue converter is as easy to buy as a CD player (probably easier, Ed.). In any price range you can think of from less than £50 up to astronomical figures. At the same time a lot of integrated amplifiers […]
In this second part of my review of Ethernet cables (see part 1 here), I am continuing my research into differences between various types of AudioQuest Ethernet cable. This time the most expensive ones are compared to the best of the cheaper types assessed earlier. For this second test I have changed the set-up of […]
Exposure makes four ranges of electronics but the MCX series stands apart from the rest for a number of reasons. For a start it’s the most expensive and to follow it’s made in England, two facts that are inextricably linked these days. It is also very distinctive, the CD player, preamplifier and monoblock power amps […]
Every once and a while someone is kind enough to loan me a McIntosh product, this time it was the Dutch distributor New Transtec that brought a D100 digital preamplifier to play with. I have been in love with McIntosh since the 70’s although I’ve never bought a single piece because it might finish my […]
Some things will never change and we have little need to alter them. An instrument played in 1977, the year Dudley Harwood started his loudspeaker company, will sound the same in 2013 given the same room and the same conditions. So, if we were able to reproduce the instrument plausibly on a Harbeth loudspeaker then, […]
I used Focal loudspeakers in my own system for the 15 years up to 2010. Over that time different cone materials from Focal have all made their mark; first impregnated paper with a polyglass coating, later yellow Kevlar was in use and finally the W-cone in the Electra and Utopia series showed up. The W-cone […]