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 […]
There are a few different ways to get music streaming into your life, you can hook up a laptop to a DAC or you can connect a hard drive and a streamer to your network. The former approach is popular because many of us have laptops, but these are compromised by the electrically noisy nature […]
Streaming music over your home network is a great way to enjoy a collection once it is ripped to any kind of storage device. For many of us this could be a (dedicated) computer, a hard drive, a NAS or a music server. Playback could be in one location only or in multiple rooms with […]
Every once in a while you stumble across a product that looks so appealing you need to have it at home. Such is the case with the DIMD PP10 tube amplifier from Latvia. Originally designed by a music lover and engineer for his wife who is a musician, and later refined and cased in an […]
Prism Sound’s reputation preceded it when it finally entered the domestic hi-fi business earlier in the year. The Cambridge based company has been making converters for the studio market since 1987 and its top pro DAC is a cult product amongst those in the know. PMC founder Peter Thomas has one in his main system […]
From the first digital to analogue converter ever made by Metrum Acoustics they have taken a different route to most manufacturers. The majority use conversion chips by Burr Brown, Philips, TI or Wolfson to name a few, Metrum selected an industrial DAC chip and claimed its high speed architecture improved the conversion. A lot of […]