Hi Fi News Jul-18

Why do we test all our review products in Hi-Fi News? And by ‘test’ I mean a rigorous and fully independent evaluation of technical and functional performance. While many web/blog sites and ‘consumer’ magazines stress why they don’t bother to test anything, the plain fact is that they cannot. Rigorous lab testing takes resource, time and – above all – experience to interpret the results. Our lab regime is not the audio test equivalent of microwave food, so many of our lab tests are not just about verifying a manufacturer’s basic specification – is the power output really 100W, and so on – but are uniquely investigative in nature. Simply put, almost every month your favourite hi-fi magazine discovers and reveals aspects of a product’s performance that you’ll never read about…

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…

MF SOLD One of the UK’s best known hi-fi brands, Musical Fidelity, has been sold to Audio Tuning Vertriebs GmbH, the company behind Pro-Ject. Founded in 1982 by Antony Michaelson, Musical Fidelity had an early hit with its The Preamp and went on to establish itself as a manufacturer of high-value audiophile products for those who, perhaps, admired costly US amplifiers but were on tight budgets. Heinz Lichtenegger, CEO of Audio Tuning Vertriebs, says it will expand the MF brand and ‘continue developing its design and heritage DNA’. www.audiotuning.com THORENS BOUGHT Renowned Swiss turntable brand, Thorens, has been acquired by Gunter Kuerten, former CEO of ELAC, and returned to Germany where it was based in the hi-fi heydays of the ’60s-’70s. Announcing the purchase Kuerten said, ‘I see my job [as] keeping the…

D’Agostino Relentless ‘I AM BEING ASKED FOR A BIGGER AMPLIFIER’ SAYS DESIGNER DAN D’AGOSTINO If you thought you’d already settled on what mega-system to order should you win the Euromillions lottery, Dan D’Agostino may just have upset your plans. His latest creation for Master Audio Systems is this behemoth: The Relentless Monoblock. Its US price of $250,000 per pair (yes, a quarter of a million dollars) is just the first of many remarkable specifications. Such as: a 5.5kW power supply, 0.6 farads (600,000μF) of reservoir capacitance, and ‘roughly’ (roughly?) 100 output devices – all per channel, of course. In concert these deliver a specified maximum output power of 1.5kW/8ohm, doubling to 3kW/4ohm and again to 6kW into 2ohm. Claimed to be ‘so powerful it can drive any speaker to its best possible…

Vinyl vendors galore amazing product launches… Munich’s High End Show has become, hands down, the biggest, best and most professional hi-fi gathering on the planet. What’s more, it has categorically replaced CES for the specialty audio trade, with 40 times as many exhibitors, while the public’s numbers keep soaring. Taking place from the 11th to the 13th of May, this year saw a flood of new turntables, cartridges, headphones and open-reel tapes and tape-decks, while – for the first time – Germany’s edition of the CanJam headphone show ran concurrently, and within walking distance of the MOC venue. Metaxas & Sins delivered prototypes of the Phonographic Permabulator No 1 turntable and (inset) the GQT Portable Recording Device No 1, based on the legendary Stellavox open-reels and tuned by Petronel of Audiophiles Clinic.…

I can’t swear to which year it was or exactly which product, but sometime in the early 1980s I found myself reviewing a Counterpoint valve preamp (the SA-7 perhaps?) which had a detented volume control, perhaps a stepped attenuator. I was bemused to discover in the course of the review that, with no signal playing, if you operated the volume control each step was accompanied by a clearly audible ‘ping’ from the loudspeakers, which became louder as the volume setting was advanced. I’d heard of valve microphony, of course – the tendency for thermionic valves (‘tubes’) to act like a microphone, generating a voltage output when subject to vibration – but never expected to experience such a graphic demonstration of it. Every time the volume control clicked through a detent a…