It can be all too easy to take things for granted I find, you can use something for years and fail to find anything to better it and still don’t climb to the top of the nearest tower and shout about it. But when the manufacturer makes a change to it, the option to right […]
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 […]
Vinyl record sales are at their highest since the eighties, the era when CD started to gain a foothold with its claims of perfect sound forever and the much vaunted but ultimately empty claim that they were immune to abuse. The irony is that the most mangled piece of vinyl can be played, it won’t […]
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, […]
A slightly belated Happy New Year to all of you! I hope you had a great end to 2018 and that 2019 delivers health and happiness, whatever the political climate outside your listening room. Over Christmas I was able to thoroughly run in two pairs of Tellurium Q Ultra Black cables prior to doing some […]
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 […]
When I reviewed Audio-Technica’s flagship open-back headphone in June last year, the ATH-ADX5000, I was mightily impressed by the Japanese audio giant’s achievement in raising the bar and creating a reference quality earspeaker that surpassed all of its previous feats. I was therefore delighted to be given the opportunity to spend considerable time with A-T’s statement […]
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 […]