Australian HiFi May - June 2022

Dear reader, this will be my last Editor’s Lead-in, as I have retired from full-time employment and therefore stepped down from my position as being editor of Australian Hi-Fi, one that I have held for almost 45 years. I am enormously pleased to be able to say that the magazine will be left in very capable hands, as the new editor is none other than Becky Roberts, a long-time audiophile and a very experienced hi-fi journalist who has been writing news stories, articles and equipment reviews for the UK’s What Hi-Fi? magazine for almost nine years, during which time she attained the position of Hi-Fi and Audio editor. Her recent move from the UK to take up residence in Australia was an example of her perfect timing, as well as…

VELODYNE IMPACT X SUBWOOFERS Velodyne has announced what it says is an “all-new Impact X subwoofer series developed by an international team of experts in the U.S. and Germany”. There are two subwoofers in the range: the Impact X 10, which has a 254mm (10-inch) driver with a four-layer 51mm voice coil, and the Impact X 12, which has a 305mm (12-inch) driver, also with a four-layer 51mm voice coil. Both subwoofers are bass-refl ex cabinet designs with the port exiting underneath the cabinet, and both use Class-D amplifiers – the amp driving the X 10 has a rated output of 250 watts, while the output of the more powerful X 12 is 300 watts. Both new subwoofers include DSP circuitry that offers four different signal processing presets for different applications, adjustable…

Just in case you were wondering, there really is a man named Jeff Rowland, and he not only still owns the Jeff Rowland Design Group, but also, after nearly 50 years, he still works there almost every day. Indeed, he actually walks to work because his home is only around 500 metres from the factory in Colorado Springs, where Rowland says all Jeff Rowland products are made, almost in their entirety. Almost? “All of our products since the beginning have been produced in our own facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States, ” says Rowland. “All of the chassis manufacturing takes place there, and all of the products are machined from solid-build aluminium. Since the chassis work is heavy, it has to be produced locally, within a couple of miles of…

Readers interested in a full technical appraisal of the performance of the Jeff Rowland Continuum S2 Integrated Amplifier should continue on and read the LABORATORY TEST REPORT published on the following pages. Readers should note that the results mentioned in the report, tabulated in performance charts and/ or displayed using graphs and/or photographs should be construed as applying only to the specific sample tested. Newport Test Labs was unable to accurately establish the maximum continuous power output of the Jeff Rowland Continuum S2 because whenever the lab drove the amplifier close to its rated output, its built-in protection circuitry cut in and immediately reduced the volume, so the amplifier is able to deliver its rated output only on a shortterm basis — not continuously. This protection circuitry action is typical of professional…

JBL is a Samsung/Harman brand which is active, of course, across both the professional and hi-fi speaker markets, right down to little Bluetooth speakers, but right up to hi-fi speakers that sometimes have the full heft of that pro background, so that even their loving owners — I use JBL Studio Monitors in one of my own systems — might be pressed to describe them as ‘décor-friendly’. That makes the recent introduction of the HDI series a new direction for the company. The HDI range has been designed to be easier on the eye, less wide, with new finishes, and with cabinets where only their tops and bottoms have fl at surfaces. The HDI title, meanwhile, comes from the ‘High Defi nition Imaging’ waveguide technology and the associated high-frequency compression drivers…

Elac advertises its floorstanding Vela FS 407 loudspeakers as a bass reflex design, so everyone expects each cabinet to have a bass reflex port. You do, after all, need one for a bass reflex loudspeaker in order to harness the acoustic output from the rear of the bass driver(s) to reinforce and extend the deepest bass frequencies. And, if you look for that bass-reflex port on the FS 407, why there it is, right there on the rear panel. Simple. And yet not so simple, because there is another bass reflex port in the cabinet that’s so cunningly hidden away you might not realise it is there at all, and you almost certainly won’t know why it’s there, which is a mystery I want to get to the bottom of in…