Sound + Image January - February 2021

It has been a strange 2020 for the hi-fi industry, as for everyone. While all shows and launch events were necessarily shut down, hi-fi and home entertainment have not had a bad year; indeed many retailers and distributors are telling me that they’ve sold more kit than for many many years gone by. The reason is fairly obvious — everyone is concentrating on their home life, because they’ve been stuck at home. Isn’t money tight? For some, certainly, but for others there’s been the removal of holiday expenditure, not to mention the possibility of irresponsible splash-out spending thanks to various ongoing assistance payments and that highly dubious ability for Australians to yank out thousands of dollars from their Super and let their retirement income go hang. Not that I’ll be calling…

It has been a strange 2020 for the hi-fi industry, as for everyone. While all shows and launch events were necessarily shut down, hi-fi and home entertainment have not had a bad year; indeed many retailers and distributors are telling me that they’ve sold more kit than for many many years gone by. The reason is fairly obvious — everyone is concentrating on their home life, because they’ve been stuck at home. Isn’t money tight? For some, certainly, but for others there’s been the removal of holiday expenditure, not to mention the possibility of irresponsible splash-out spending thanks to various ongoing assistance payments and that highly dubious ability for Australians to yank out thousands of dollars from their Super and let their retirement income go hang. Not that I’ll be…

Bowers & Wilkins Australia has done very well in this year’s Sound+Image Awards — four gongs in all, including two for its wireless Formation series of products. This shows how the quality of product seems to have been unaffected by two changes of ownership in four years (see panel), the latest of which brings it back together under the Sound United umbrella with its former electronics brand partner, Classé Audio. This has enabled the Australian arm of Bowers & Wilkins to bring Classé back to Australia, making available the company’s third-gen Delta range of amplifiers first announced at CES in 2019, and launched at the following Munich High End show. There are three models: a preamplifier plus a choice of stereo or monoblock power amplifiers, all designed by Classé in Montreal…

Bowers & Wilkins Australia’s announcement of a ‘new’ range of electronics from Canada’s Classé Audio is what UK magazine Private Eye would call a ‘reverse ferret’ move. If you had been sleeping quietly since 2017, then this release might be no surprise — Bowers & Wilkins had owned and distributed Classé Audio from 2001, and for years the Canadian power amplifiers were the standard recommended products to drive the legendary B&W 800 Series loudspeakers. But in fact both companies have been through a whirlwind of relationship changes in the last three years, travelling very different paths before ending up back together again. We should note that we are great fans of Classé electronics here at Sound+Image; one of our references is the company’s Sigma 2200i, which incorporated HDMI inputs in a…

Bowers & Wilkins Australia has done very well in this year’s Sound+Image Awards — four gongs in all, including two for its wireless Formation series of products. This shows how the quality of product seems to have been unaffected by two changes of ownership in four years (see panel), the latest of which brings it back together under the Sound United umbrella with its former electronics brand partner, Classé Audio. This has enabled the Australian arm of Bowers & Wilkins to bring Classé back to Australia, making available the company’s third-gen Delta range of amplifiers first announced at CES in 2019, and launched at the following Munich High End show. There are three models: a preamplifier plus a choice of stereo or monoblock power amplifiers, all designed by Classé in…

HANDS ON with Austere ‘Clean & Protect’ We’re not usually much for recommending cleaning systems, whether fluids which claim to improve cable connections (as opposed to simply cleaning them), or cleaners for TV screens, for which dedicated solutions seem a bit of overkill when a dry microcloth is usually enough to remove dust and bits of dirt, although occasionally we’ll spray on some of the stuff the optician gives us for use on spectacles. But when we did that recently on a shiny Samsung TV screen, the dog-shaken chunks of dirt we were endeavouring to remove simply smeared all over the surface rather unpleasantly (first image). Then we remembered that distributor Audio Active had recently sent a sample of its Austere III Series ‘Clean & Protect’ package, which contains a two-sided microcloth and…