GrailSB_white_diag

Never promise to lend me a fine piece of audio equipment, because I won’t let it lie. Van den Hul didn’t get a moments peace while I waited for their Grail SB phono preamplifier with a matching cartridge. It turned up in a big suitcase that was much heavier than expected. Inside I found the […]

20

In an attempt to foil my fellow reviewers and audio loving friends I got my hands on one of the very first pairs of PMC twenty.26 loudspeakers that came to the Netherlands. This model was introduced to mainland Europe at the High End Show 2014 in Munich and is the latest member of the twenty […]

aero-6-floorstanders-and-aero-5-main

When I discovered that the Cambridge Audio Aero speakers were equipped with a BMR driver my interest was more than usually piqued. This type of driver is a pretty rare beast, you can find it in Naim’s Ovator speakers and on one other speaker that I know of, so the fact that Cambridge have put […]


omni-wood

Hanging loudspeakers on a wire from the ceiling is nothing new. Neither is the use of reflectors under or above driver cones to create an omnidirectional sound pattern.  But a combination of both techniques in one design is different. NACSound is the only company offering these sorts of speakers. Originally based in Italy, now stationed […]

qm60-main

‘Man suffers most from the suffering he fears’. That quote came to mind when I left the Dutch distributor for Guru loudspeakers.  I had promised the editor a review of the largest Gurus, a brand that I only knew from hi-fi shows here and abroad. I never got excited about the performance at the shows, […]

5star-scala-2

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 […]


SATURN-R-LID-OPEN

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 […]

QNKTC AB-1.2

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 […]

anteloppe-ocx_bf

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 […]


Metrum-Octave-2-front

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 […]

both

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 […]

A_NF-DAC_01

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 […]