UK Audio Show, Daventry 2023
The UK Audio show followed hot on the heels of the event at Ascot and the contrast could not have been bigger. Far from the glitz of the country’s most fashionable racecourse the Staverton Park Hotel proved a far more accessible and relaxed event. There was a real sense that hi-if enthusiasts are a community whether they be exhibitors or visitors, the atmosphere was friendly and the sounds were often very good. Which is never a given at such events. There was plenty of good stuff here but the following caught our ears and eyes.
Acoustic Energy
First shown as a prototype at the High End this spring the Acoustic Energy Corinium is now finished and available in more conventional finishes than the metallic British racing green shown here. It has new carbon fibre mid and bass drivers allied to a new soft dome tweeter. The latter is fixed to the aluminium front baffle which isolates it from the cone drivers which are fixed to the 50mm front baffle. Sounding excellent on the end of Naim 200 series electronics Corinium will cost £6,400 in standard finish or £7,000 as seen. For more information visit Acoustic Energy.
Bricasti
Bricasti were showing their new M19 SACD transport (£12,000), one of an rare selection of such devices it will output DSD (DoP) via both conventional digital outputs and a proprietary I2S output on an RJ45 socket for connection to Bricasti’s DACs such as the M1S2 seen here. The system powered by the Bricasti M20 preamp and M25 power amp via Art Emotion Diamond 8 speakers (£21,000) loudspeakers sounded excellent with a decent recording of a Beethoven piano piece.
Zinamp
Nick at Zinamp named his electronics after Zinfandel wine from California, which explains the bottle rack next to the system in his room. Nick does things differently, his latest SCA power amplifier has three inputs, a volume control and runs a circuit based on the Quad current dumping design. At the UK Audio Show he had built a pair of crossovers into an SSD integrated amp so that he could bi-amp a pair of active loudspeakers, that’s different.
Moor Amps
We saw the first pair of Moor Amps’ speakers at the Bristol show om February, for the UK Audio Show Tim and Anne presented the finished Ascalon-8 floorstanders with a price of £11,500. These differ from the majority because the port has been tuned down for a gentle roll-off which means that these decent size speakers work close to the wall, not something you will find with many rear ported designs that run an 8 inch bass driver. With birch ply cabinets and domes for both midrange and treble they sounded very promising.
Coppice
Solid wood speaker specialist Coppice Audio had their biggest model yet in the BG1 (£19,995) in action, these house a pair of 8 inch Beyma bass drivers in a 150 litre reflex cabinet, the mid/top being handled by a prototype Lowther full range unit. The cabinet is made of machined ash and Coppice intentionally mismatched this pair just to show the solid wood nature of the design, the crossover is external and solderless so that it can be fine tuned to suit different rooms and tastes. Smaller BG2 and BG3 versions are in the pipeline. For more information visit Coppice Audio.
Music First
Jonathan Billington brought along a Nagra tape recorder with a recording that he had made of actor Nicholas Donnelly (Dixon of Dock Green) doing a voice over for Music First, this sounded impressively realistic via a fairly modest system of Baby Reference V2 passive pre (£6,810) next to a Phono Amp 632 (£3,600) and a very down to earth Pro-ject turntable. The speakers are Graham LS 5/9 and a pair of Longdog Audio monoblock amps were under the table.
Kerr K200
Jes Kerr showed off his new K200 transmission line speakers in the Townshend Audio room. These are the first commercial product to feature a new Volt 10inch radial bass driver, this is combined with a 75mm midrange dome and a ‘True ribbon’ tweeter. The cabinet is built from 24mm Baltic ply and the asking price is £19,995, we hope to review a pair soon.
Pure Barry
Connecting Music’s Carlo Marengo decided to try and teach visitors some key phrases that he has learnt in Edinburgh where the company is based, each of these cards has a translation on the back as well as a Carlo’s idea about how the phrase relates to the products he distributes. ‘Keep the heid’ is a Scots variant on that overused aphorism: ‘keep calm and carry on’, while ‘pure Barry’ is apparently an expression of enthusiasm or approval. Carlo brings in Bricasti, Mastersound, Blumenhofer, Tiglon and Sparkos and he’s pure Barry about all of them. For more information visit Connecting Music.
Etude
Chris ‘Curvi’ Liauw showed some nicely finished piano black Etude 5s in between the new High Sensitivity Bipoles (EHSB) which were created to work with an SNA 2.3W single ended amplifier. These combine a compression driver tweeter with 16 BMR drivers in parallel series array and offer very high sensitivity, the room was too cramped/small to get these in shot but they are tall and white and sounded rather good.
Solid Sounds
The Solid Sounds Hex3 is made by Paul Knipe at the Spinning Room in Leeds. It’s a compact, open baffle three-way with a ribbon tweeter, SEAS midrange and substantial SB Acoustics 15 inch bass driver that has been designed for smaller rooms. The baffles are a constrained layer damped composite and the crossover elements are potted very neatly on a panel behind the framework that supports this speaker. Price is £4,750 per pair. For more information visit Solid Sounds.
Alphason
It was a pleasant surprise to see Alphason founder Mike Knowles at the National Audio Show, the last time we met must have been in the mid nineties. Mike has come back to audio and is building a refined version of the classic HR-100S tonearm that was originally launched in the ‘80s. It has a one piece titanium arm tube and headshell with a damping layer in the latter, this is the HR-200S. For this event Alphason showed HR-200S AZ which has azimuth adjustment built into the bearing housing. This costs £5,895 with manual VTA adjust or can be combined with a wired remote and digital readout so that VTA can be adjusted from your listening seat. The Alphason arms are available in 9, 10.5 and 12 inch variants and prices start at £4,795.
Alchris & CTC
The Classic Turntable Company (CTC) don’t merely refurbish Garrard turntables they make a whole range of parts including new metal chassis such as can be seen on this example set into a solid birch ply plinth and fitted with a Shindo platter. Price including the SME 3009 tonearm is £5,000 which seems competitive when you see what these turntables go for elsewhere. The CTC 301 was in the Alchris room which sounded really nice playing Greg Brown’s Slant Mind with a Yaqin CD player, Aavik U-380 amplifier and Alchris V200 loudspeakers at £4,200 (below).
Audio Detail
Mark Mainwearing-Wright designed the Lowther PX4 amp that we enjoyed at Ascot recently and had an Audio Detail PX 25 push-pull valve amp at the National Audio Show. The PX25 is a bigger triode valve than the PX4 and in many respects is the British equivalent of a 300B. This amplifier has adjustable feedback and interstage transformers plus a separate power supply (to the left), with a power output of 16 to 17 Watts the price is circa £18,000.
Clip Audio
Clip Audio have a new tonearm called Nine Wave that looks very similar to S shaped Alphason H100S but curves in the horizontal plane as well as the lateral. This is so that the pivot point is at the same height as the stylus tip, price is £1,500. It was fitted to Clip’s Dolomite turntable in a system that combined Super Natural Audio’s (SNA) valve electronics with Etude 5 loudspeakers.
Pure Audio Project
Pure Audio Project make unusually flexible open baffle loudspeaker systems in the US which are sold as fully finished modules for home assembly. The Duet 15 Prelude shown combines a proprietary Eminence 15inch bass driver with a Voxativ full range unit for $6,500 plus shipping, which given the price of such drivers is very competitive.
Sigma Acoustics
Matt ‘Rock Doc’ McNulty had a couple of colourfully refurbished Townshend Rock turntables at the show, this Rock 3 is about 30 years old and was sporting a new old stock Zeta arm. It was fronting a system with Italian Sigma Acoustics Monitor T10 speakers in 25th anniversary finish with White Gold internal wiring at £3,990. The electronics in this system were by EAM Lab with the C201 preamplifier (£2,700), 362 230W transistor power amp 9£4,000) and LC 106 power filter (£1,440).
Kestrel KT-200
Kestrel is a British company that incorporates the Talk Electronics OEM arm into their turntables. Their KT-200 is £900 including arm while the electronics below include the KMM-1 dedicated moving magnet phono stage with adjustable gain and loading for £700.
Edwards Audio have a new C4/P4 pre/power amp combo at £900 each, the P4 is a Class AB amplifier with around 75W output and will be available in stereo and monoblock forms. The P4 has an MM input for turntables and op-amp based internals.
Audio Wave CR-30X
Audio Wave come to the hi-fi market from the high end of the in-car world, which explains the slim form of their CR-30X Class A 50W power amplifiers. These are handmade right down to the components on the PCBs and the copper rod heat sinks, also available in higher power Class AB versions the CR-30X cost £32,000 per pair.
IAS Beaulieu 40R
The IAS Beaulieu was originally created in the late ‘70s by David Hall (above) and Alan Willis and launched at the High Fidelity 80 Spring exhibition at the Cunard hotel in 1980, it has now been revived by Carl Beckwith who has created the Beaulieu 40R with the help of David Hall. With a highly specced crossover in the stand and a 10inch Volt bass driver allied to a SEAS midrange and Accuton ceramic tweeter this is a distinctive design with a distinctive £40,000 price.
Ultrafide
MC2 is the latest pro audio company to visit the domestic audio world. Their electronics brand Ultrafide has built a Class D U500DC power amplifier (£4,500) with in-house power modules and a mahoosive power supply. This was designed by ex Klark Teknik engineer Alex Cooper and offers 300W into eight Ohms. We like the ‘pure’ or ‘vintage’ sound switch on the back panel which adds a little third harmonic distortion for a warmer Class AB type sound in the latter setting. The U4 preamplifier has an MM/MC phono stage with variable loading and gain and a good quality headphone amp (£4,500). They sounded rather good with the Quested speakers (below).
Zeiler
We first encountered Zeiler’s solidly machined valve amplifiers at this year’s High End show. At the UK Audio Show they were to be found in the Symphony Distribution room driving a pair of Tannoy Kensington GR speakers with 10inch pepperpot coaxial drivers. The Zeiler PR-10 preamplifier has a CNC milled enclosure with balanced and single ended inputs while the PA-01 is a 10W single ended power amp running KT150 output valves, they are priced at £30,000 apiece as you might expect of Swiss manufacture of this quality.
Quested
Roger Quested is a studio engineer from the glory days of analogue recording, now he has built Olympic series monitors so that we can enjoy the same sound that he heard at the time. The Quested OLY-208 (£14,400) runs a pair of 8 inch bass drivers alongside a 3 inch soft dome midrange and is available in more demure finishes but we rather like the look and sound of these.
Pre-audio
The Pre-audio DE-1800N is a Polish turntable with a parallel tracking airbearing tonearm and the option of a BLDC low voltage motor, it’s being brought to the UK by G-Point Audio and costs £5,400 with the fancy motor.
Jason Kennedy