Hi Fi News Apr-18

Visitors who took their seats at our Hi-Fi Show Live, and the Symmetry suite in particular, may remember a pair of door-sized, door-shaped loudspeakers looming over them. Those lucky listeners should also recall the uniformly captivating sound that filled this generous space – an experience that has ensured Magnepan’s largest single-panel loudspeaker has been invited back three years running. So the Magneplanar 20.7 is not hot off the presses – indeed Magnepan has just started demo’ing its multi-panel 30.7 model in the US – but it has still not been subject to what we might describe as an ‘indepth technical review’. Until now, on p42. I must admit to some personal interest here because I used a pair of Magneplanars, complete with full length treble ribbon, for many years back in the…

BARRY FOX Investigative journalist supreme, Barry is the first with news of the latest developments in hi-fi and music technologies JOHN BAMFORD JB brings huge industry experience, a penchant for massive speakers and a love of hi-res audio in all its diverse guises KEN KESSLER is a long-serving contributor, luxury goods writer and champion for the renaissance in valves and ‘vintage hi-fi’ KEITH HOWARD has written about hi-fi for 40 years, and edited Hi-Fi Answers for nine. KH performs our speaker and headphone lab tests STEVE HARRIS Former Editor of this very title from 1986 through to 2005. A lifetime in audio and a love of jazz makes Steve a goldmine ANDREW EVERARD has reviewed hi-fi for over 30 years and is still effortlessly enthusiastic about new technology, kit and discovering new music STEVE SUTHERLAND worked…

Kii-ller sounds COMPACT KII THREE ACTIVE/DSP LOUDSPEAKER With DSP-governed drive units on no fewer than four faces of its exquisitely-contoured cabinet, the THREE loudspeaker from Kii Audio is a fully active design equipped with dedicated Ncore Class D power amplifiers. The designer of the game-changing Hypex and Ncore amplifiers, Bruno Putzeys, is also the CTO of Kii Audio. The THREE loudspeaker is designed to operate in ‘any space and regardless of room position’, employing ‘Active Wave Focusing Filters’ to produce a coherent (time-aligned) acoustical output from the combination of its front-facing 1in tweeter and 5in midrange plus single side-firing and dual rear-firing 6.5in woofers. Its 16-position (free/wall/corner) boundary compensation adapts the Kii THREE to its position in the room while a 14-position ‘Contour’ control fine-tunes the system’s frequency response to taste. Supplied with…

Over the last weekend in February the Bristol Hi-Fi Show threw open its doors once again to long queues of music lovers waiting to hear components collected from across the world’s continents. Now in its 31st year, the show is both the largest and longest-running dealer-run event in the UK, tempting visitors not just with fine sounds and aspirational kit but the opportunity to bag a bargain or two among the discounted products on offer. Whether it was valves and vinyl, digital front-ends and streaming products, or loudspeakers priced to suit all pockets, there was something to tempt the ears of everyone. The show also played host to a number of new names introducing products to the UK market for the first time. Resplendent in a very glossy white finish were ELAC’s…

Few sensory attributes are more precious to music lovers than good hearing, yet as many as 5% of the world’s population have profound hearing loss. In industrialised countries such as the United States, 20% of adults have some degree of hearing loss. The US market of some 48,000,000 people with hearing difficulty explains the frequent adverts on US television for devices such as the Miracle Ear hearing aid. Hearing loss can be genetic, accidental, a by-product of ototoxic medications, or a normal part of ageing, but the overwhelming majority of it is the result of lifestyle activities and environmental factors that damage delicate hair cells, which in humans do not regenerate. A DIFFERENT DRUM Over the years, Australian cognitive researcher Dr Doug Mahar and I have collaborated on a number of HFN articles…

AUDIO FILE Preamp & stereo power amplifier. Rated at 300W/8ohm Made by: D’Agostino LLC, Connecticut, USA Supplied by: Absolute Sounds Ltd Telephone: 0208 971 3909 Web: www.dagostinoinc.com; www.absolutesounds.com Price (pre/power): £24,998/£24,998 The Progression Stereo amplifier is built around a dual-wound 1400VA toroidal transformer coupled to 400,000μF of power supply storage capacitance that feeds no fewer than 48 power transistors – 24 per channel. On paper this is said to generate 300W/8ohm, doubling into 4ohm [see PM’s Lab Report p37]. And it’s yours for roughly half the price of a pair of the company’s Progression Monoblocks [HFN Jun ’17]. Unsurprisingly, such monumental output power generates a good deal of heat that requires dissipation. As in the Momentum models, CEO Dan D’Agostino’s solution is a series of venturi-style circular ‘chimneys’ found either side of the amp. These are milled from…