Hi Fi News November 2017

Early September is not only the time when you’ll find me hosting the EISA Awards in Berlin, but it’s also the annual launchpad for all things ‘consumer electronic’ at the vast IFA Show. Ten years ago, IFA’s organisers expanded its concept to include domestic appliances, and while fridges, microwaves and security systems initially made uncomfortable bedfellows for the familiar halls of TVs, audio equipment and mobile technologies, this year felt, well, different. But why? Quite simply because more of our modern day utilities – from gadgets to high-end appliances – are becoming interconnected. And nothing says ‘connected’ more than a voiceactivated product. All this is made possible by ‘enabling technologies’ including Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana. Speak your mind and these networked devices can serve up a favourite film via…

B&O BeoLab 50 MIGHTY BEOLAB 90 IS DISTILLED INTO THE SLEEK, APP-CONTROLLED BEOLAB 50 When B&O celebrated its 90th birthday with the £54k BeoLab 90 loudspeaker [HFN Dec ’16] it made a very personal statement about the future of high-end speaker design. Each monumental 137kg polyhedron features 18 drive units and 18 Class D power amplifiers while custom internal DSP integrates the output of the drivers, allowing its directivity to be controlled over ‘narrow’, ‘wide’ and ‘omni’ soundfields to suit the assembled listeners. In addition, a proprietary ‘Active Room Compensation’ technology uses the same DSP, and external microphone, to optimise its bass performance in-room. One year on, B&O has trickled down the core of these technologies into a sleeker and arguably more aesthetically pleasing loudspeaker – the £22,930 BeoLab 50. Each of these…

The annual High End show has been held in Stockholm since the late 1990s and takes place in two hotels – the Sheraton and the nearby Lundqvist & Lindqvist. This year’s event saw extra space added next to the entrance to the Sheraton in the form of the Coor rooms, which made the show the largest to date. As well as a chance for Scandinavian manufacturers such as Hegel, Audiovector and Dynaudio to show their wares, keen local distributors ensured there was plenty to tempt from other international audio brands too. Finnish distributor Nippon Hifi showed these minimalist dipole speakers from PureAudioProject. A modular system with an open baffle, the Trio15 allows users to combine the two stock 15in OB-A15Neo drivers at the top and bottom with a third driver of…

For the last decade it has become increasingly de rigeur for musicians and bands to have their back catalogue not just remastered, but remixed for stereo and for 5.1 surround sound. This way of reselling the catalogue has been particularly popular with progressive rock groups such as Jethro Tull, Yes, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who all recorded classic albums on analogue tape. Earlier this year, perhaps the most famous album of all time, The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was given a 50th anniversary remix by Giles Martin, son of Sir George Martin who had mixed the original with engineer Geoff Emerick and The Beatles. DEFINITIVE DEBATE The review of the new vinyl edition of Sgt Pepper’s that appeared in the Sep ’17 issue of HFN highlighted the…

AUDIO FILE CD transport/outboard DAC Made by: Métronome Technologie, France Supplied by: Absolute Sounds Ltd Telephone: 0208 971 3909 Web: www.kalista.audio/en/collections; www.absolutesounds.com Prices: £35,000/£37,000 One glance at this CD transport and DAC combination, and that great Oscar Wilde aphorism, ‘I can resist anything except temptation’ springs to mind. There’s no beating about the bush – this is one of most visually arresting silver disc spinners the world has ever seen. Manufactured by French high-end specialist Métronome Technologie, this digital front-end looks and sounds like nothing else around. Kalista is – as supremo Jean Marie Clauzel tells me – the company’s cost-noobject brand. ‘Two years ago we decided to manage two brands. Métronome has classic design and high-end prices, whereas Kalista stands for absolutely exceptional high-end products…’ SCULPTURAL ART The DreamPlay CD transport (or ‘CD turntable’)…

Aside from the user-selectable triode tube output stage that we’ve seen in earlier Métronome DACs [HFN Dec ’13], this latest Kalista-branded DAC is the first we’ve seen to also include two separate converter options. According to Métronome, ‘DAC 1’ offers the ‘musical sound profile’ while ‘DAC 2’ is the ‘analytic sound profile’. In practice, the former is the AKM AK4395 DAC that’s been tried-andtested in a few generations of Métronome products – a 192kHz/24-bit DAC that includes a traditional linearphase FIR digital filter and offers a very flat response (subsequent analogue stages notwithstanding). This is illustrated by the black impulse and frequency response traces [inset Graph] where the Kalista DAC is flat to –0.1dB/20kHz, –0.8dB/45kHz and –2.7dB/90kHz with 44.1/48kHz, 96kHz and 192kHz files respectively. The new selection, ‘DAC 2’, is…