I heard a pair of the new Totem Sky monitors on a visit to a dealer, it was only a short listen but long enough to recognise the sheer quality and make me want to hear them at home. A couple of weeks later I picked them up and since then they have been making […]
I have long been a fan of the sculpted forms produced by the Neal Feay company, Resolution Audio’s beautiful Cantata first brought this Californian metal worker to my attention but it was Constellation Audio that showed just how finely they can machine aluminium, with creases that fade to nothing like a piece of silk. It […]
I remember the good old days when we had horn loaded Decca ribbons as supertweeters for Magnepan loudspeakers or even for Elipsons. They gave us space, speed and a more detailed sound. We couldn’t hear them like you can hear a normal tweeter but when you turned them off the sound seemed to collapse and […]
The most affordable amplifier in Rega’s armoury is not just prettier than its predecessor the Brio-R but it sounds more powerful to boot. But look at the specs and you’ll see that both are rated to produce 50 Watts, so what gives. A lot of small but significant changes, that’s what, and the fact that […]
Every streaming system needs a library, not the sort that furnishes a room but typically a hard drive where all your music is stored. You can get by on streaming services like Qobuz and Tidal if you want more music but there’s a monthly fee and a quality compromise. Most digital music libraries are stored […]
Back in 2015 I spent several highly enjoyable months with a Naim NAP 250 DR and the experience left me keen to hear what the next power amp up in the catalogue could do. That model is the NAP 300 DR, the two amplifiers don’t look that different on paper, the 250 is specced to […]
What's the connection between F1 racing cars and transmission line loudspeakers? Yes, you’ve got it, airflow. In an F1 car you want low wind resistance and equally low turbulence in the car’s wake because that causes drag. In a transmission line (TL) you want the air to be able to flow out of the end […]
Focusing now on digital ingenuity, German brand Lindemann launches a new range of compact electronics. Trevor Butler put the top-of-the-range DAC through its paces and liked what he heard…Lindemann is an audiophile brand created by Norbert Lindemann back in 1993 with a range of integrated amps and speakers. Later a CD player and phono stage […]
With 40 years of transformer design experience, Jonathan Billington has been manufacturing bespoke and award-winning transformer-based passive preamps under the Music First Audio brand since 2003. Hand-built in his Hastings workshop in East Sussex, his latest creation, the Classic Headphone Preamplifier, expands the functionality of the globally-revered Classic with the inclusion of an active headphone […]
Tom Evans is obsessed with noise, or rather he is obsessed with reducing it in his phono stages and amplifiers. So when he gets some new regulation chips in and upgrades his range of Groove phono stages a great deal of enthusiasm can be found to be emanating from Aberbargoed in south Wales. Tom is […]
2016 might have been a bad year for rock stars but it was a good one for audio equipment. We saw and heard a plethora of fabulous new components that made our systems sing and renewed our love of music. Rather than trying to find something worthy in a variety of categories we picked the […]
Melco shook up my reference system last year when they leant me an N1A music server with USB as well as a direct Ethernet output, a spinning disc hard drive with linear power supplies that meant I no longer needed a network switch in the system. Having both outputs from the one device means it’s […]