Australian HiFi

taylor swift vs. charles dickens

Sometimes editorials take on a life of their own. I was recently at a lunch when the topic of sound came up and one of the diners mentioned that his son had given him a sound system for his birthday. ‘I couldn’t get it to work,’ he said. ‘And when he told me I had to use my phone to operate it, I had to tell him that since I had trouble using it to make phone calls, my chances of operating my new system with it were going to be very slim.’ At which point another guest chimed in to say that his 70s-vintage system had given up the ghost and that when he visited a hi-fi store to investigate his options, they’d showed him only phone-operated systems. ‘I…

australian hifi

Editor: Greg Borrowman hifi@nextmedia.com.au Art Director: Kristian Hagen Managing Editor: Jez Ford Photography: Oliver Delprado Contributors: Carolyn Cannon, Lesley Swan, Jutta Dziwnik, Nada Grkinic, Steve Holding, Madeleine Ella, John Shand, Jez Ford, Karyn Brown, Val Barbour, Whendi Walkley, Tina White. Advertising Sales: Lewis Preece 0434 439 032 Advertising Liaison: Diane Preece dpreece@nextmedia.com.au Divisional Manager & National Sales Manager: Jim Preece 0400 808 900 Production Manager: Peter Ryman Circulation Director: Carole Jones Executive Chairman: David Gardiner Managing Director: Hamish Bayliss…

soundbites

HEDD NOW IN OZ HEDD (Heinz Electrodynamic Designs) equipment has become available in Australia for the first time. It’s distributed by Addicted to Audio (A2A), a Melbourne-based distributor that has retail stores in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, HEDD is a family business founded 30 years ago by industry veteran Klaus Heinz. HEDD manufactures state-of-the-art professional studio monitors as well as home loudspeaker systems and, most recently, headphones. ‘Our speaker designs are 100 per cent analogue, yet they incorporate some of the key advantages of digital signal optimisation using our HEDD Lineariser and also provide digital connectivity,’ said Heinz. ‘A modular system of input cards called the HEDD Bridge enables each of our Series One loudspeakers to handle digital audio protocols such as Dante (Audio-over-IP).’ Heinz first came to…

the hi–fi headlines

Every so often a product come along that challenges your expectations from your system. We recently installed the Trinnov Amethyst stereo pre-amplifier into our high-end room. Firstly the important bit – as you would expect this is a very good sounding preamplifier, certainly doing justice to the magnificent Halcro mono-block power amps we connected it to. And now for the magic. We have always considered our high-end room to be a pretty good sounding space. One of the things that the Trinnov does is calibrates and adjusts the output to suit the room. The difference is extraordinary! I can only imagine what it can do to a poor-sounding room. Switch between the processed and non-processed signal and the non-processed (which up until now we thought was pretty special) just sounds…

dali oberon 1 loudspeakers

This new Dali Oberon 1 has the distinction of being the lowest-priced Dali loudspeaker ever to use Dali’s patented soft magnetic compound (SMC) technology, which the company claims ‘drastically reduces non-linear magnetic distortion’. It also has the distinction of being one of the smallest speakers Dali has ever made, this Danish company being rather better known for its larger bookshelf models and its much larger floor-standing models. THE EQUIPMENT The Dali Oberon 1 is two-way bass reflex design with a 29mm soft-dome h.f. driver, a 133mm bass/midrange driver and a rear-firing bass reflex port. The h.f. driver (which is used in all five models in the Oberon range, about which more later) was reportedly designed and engineered specifically for this new range. It’s a 29mm ultra-lightweight soft-dome tweeter, made by Dali itself in…

laboratory test report

Newport Test Labs measured the overall frequency response of the Dali Oberon 1 as being 70Hz to 32kHz ±3.5dB, which is an excellent result, particularly so at high frequencies, where the tweeter’s response extends far beyond the 26kHz specified by Dali. The low-frequency down-point measured by Newport Test Labs is not quite the 51Hz specified by Dali, but Dali’s measurement may include boundary assistance. The difference between the specification and the measurement result in musical terms is a mere six notes (G1# to C2#). The in-room frequency response (without boundary assistance) measured by Newport Test Labs is shown in Graph 1 (note the upper graphing limit of 20kHz). You can see the response is superbly smooth, extending from 70Hz to 20kHz ±3dB. Across the upper bass, midrange and the high-frequency regions the…