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The end of Linn preamps means – well, the end of Linn preamps. That’s all.

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Company continues policy of integration by discontinuing its remaining preamplifiers, concentrating efforts on DSM player range, and claims it’s part of a bigger picture

Linn Akurate DSM front and back

Linn’s announcement that it’s to halt production of all its standalone preamplifiers, and concentrate efforts on the preamp functions built into its DSM players, should hardly come as a surprise. After all, with its Exakt and SPACE Optimisation technologies now being incorporated into these network music models, allowing them to be used straight into power amps or even active speakers, there’s no longer any real need for standalone preamps in the Linn range.

Then again, who outside the ranks of the Linn aficionados even knew the company still made preamplifiers, so great has been its concentration of late on integrated solutions? From the entry-level all the way through to the flagship Akurate line,

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Linn’s line-up is now built around a closed-loop way of thinking when it comes to playback and amplification – albeit with concessions to those not wanting to use the Scottish company’s speakers, in the form of a growing number of third-party models with which its SPACE Optimisation will work.

But let’s get this into some kind of perspective: this is a change for Linn, not the end of the preamp as a species, no more than the company’s much-reported 2009 decision to stop making CD players in favour of its DS streaming solution signalled the end of the silver disc, physical media or indeed the world as we know it.

You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, however: Linn’s press release says it ‘is again forecasting the demise of a long-term hi-fi stalwart by announcing that the company is to end production of all stand-alone pre-amps – having previously, accurately predicted the demise of the CD player back in 2009.’

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OK, so CD player sales have declined, as more people embrace streaming and local music storage, but if Linn’s 2009 prediction was an accurate one, it’s taking its time to come to pass: six years so far and counting, and I’m still receiving CD players to review, such as the model from French company Métronome – the emphatically-named Le Player (above) – I cover in the July issue of Hi-Fi News and Record Review, now on sale.

Still buying CDs
What’s more, from my perspective as Audio Editor of Gramophone, I still see plenty of interest in CD from the readership of that title: true, some classical music enthusiasts have embraced ripping, downloading and streaming, but many are still playing discs not as some kind of anachronistic hold-out against the inevitable, but because a collection of physical discs is what best suits their requirements.

CDs are readily available – is there really that much difference between an instant download and a CD dropped through your letterbox the day after you decide you want to buy it? –, reliable and a proven technology; for many users, computer music storage and streaming, be it over the Internet or via the home network, is still too prone to pitfalls.

And as I write this I’m just getting myself organized to go off and have another listen to the forthcoming Marantz SA-14SE/PM-14SE system (below), first seen at the Munich High End show a couple of weekends back – yes, a system based around a disc player, the SA-14SE handling both CDs and SACDs.

Marantz SA-14SE and PM-14SE

I’m not starting a campaign here: almost all of my music listening is now served up from a NAS and routed to one of a range of network players around the house, and having just bought a new car that’s the first I have ever owned without any means of playing either CDs or – back in the old days – cassettes, I now realise I never actually used the player provided in the vehicle it replaced.

But I still buy CDs – lots of them – and still receive just as many discs for review as ever I did.

So, just as the CD player is showing no sign of vanishing any time soon – although these days it may also function as a Blu-ray machine or a means of ripping discs to hard-drive storage –, so I think it’s also somewhat early to write off the idea of a standalone preamplifier, and by association even the idea of having a separate amplifier in your system.

Fishing for enthusiasts?
Hi-fi enthusiasts – and yes, there are still plenty of us out there, thank goodness! – share with those into fishing or railway modeling or whatever an enthusiasm for the technology of their hobby. The greatest pleasure is building the ideal system for our room, music and listening tastes using this player, that preamp, another power amplifier and of course carefully selected speakers – just as our fishing friends will carefully select rod, reel, line, bait and hook to suit the prevailing conditions.

We may be a shrinking minority in the great scheme of things, but we enthusiasts enjoy the hobby as well as the music, taking pleasure in the chase and then even more in the results. And given how many hi-fi companies now operate in what is a fairly niche sector, I’d argue that ignoring one’s core market is something to be done with caution, not a sense of swagger.

After all, enthusiasts and their spending power are what built up some of today’s well-known hi-fi names, and while there’s nothing wrong with these companies expanding their appeal and seeking new markets for their products, a long-term customer alienated now is likely to be one lost forever.

And right now, the specialist audio industry needs to put as much effort into keeping its current customer-base onside as it does into winning new buyers.

Written by Andrew Everard

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UPDATED: High-resolution audio – now with added fibre…

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My latest music-network upgrade is another run of fibre-optic cabling – and it’s made an amazing difference

Fibre optic network cable

UPDATE 08.06.15: More fibre, more sound!

Well, I’ve just introduced some more fibre optics into my audio system, and this time the sound really has taken a leap forward.

I took a bit of a kicking from the online ‘experts’ last year when I posted about having changed a long network run from Ethernet to fibre-optic cable (see below), simply because they didn’t understand why I’d done it. Lots of talk about how Ethernet was more than sufficient for the kind of run I’d needed, and how I’d wasted my money, but the point of it was never about speed, but isolation.

However, I’ve just got round to putting in another fibre-optic connection in place of copper cable, and this time there’s definitely been a boost in performance. Yes, stock up on rotten vegetables and wet sponges, folks – I’m going on record as saying this one really does sound better.

It’s hardly surprising given the length of cable run involved: after all, the fibre-optic link equipment chosen – the same TP-Link MC200M converters and a run of Lindy ‘cable’ – is certified for up to 0.55km. So how far did I need to cover with this latest upgrade? Ummm, two metres would have done it, but I went for a 3m length of fibre to be on the safe side, and as it was on special offer on the site where I bought the TP-Link converters.

The new connection is between my NAS drive for music – one of two I have dedicated purely to audio, each backing up the other – and the Naim NDS network audio player I use as a reference, and now provides complete electrical isolation between the two while still allowing Internet connectivity through for online radio and other streaming services.

So one TP-Link Media Converter sits downstream of the switch connecting the QNAP NAS to the Internet, and is then connected by fibre to the other MC200M just behind the Naim, where a five-port Netgear switch also gives me capacity to plug in other equipment on test.

Why this change? Well, I was inspired some recent work I’ve been doing on Melco’s Digital Media Library units: having been unimpressed by the cost/benefit balance of the £6000 N1Z model I reviewed some months back for Hi-Fi News & Record Review, I’ve recently been working on the rather more affordable – if still not exactly cheap – N1A for a forthcoming issue.

And while there’s a twist in the tale, for which you’ll have to buy the August issue of the magazine (got to keep wolf from door somehow!), the use of isolation in the Melco got me experimenting again, and at a cost of around £120 or so – the two TP-Links, the Lindy cable, another Netgear switch and linear power supplies in place of the nasty switch-mode plugtops supplied as standard with the new electronics – I now have a much cleaner connection from server to player.

So what’s changed? Well, it’s all about the clarity and substance of the sound: what was already very good indeed has become rather more magical and involving, and what’s more I can A/B simply by pulling the fibre cable and reinstating a lump of copper cable between the two whenever I want.

Expectation bias? Nah – to be honest, I had very little expectation, given that the Naim player already has optical isolation internally for just this reason, and I bought the new fibre kit purely as an experiment, fully confident there’d be little or no improvement.

To be frank, my thinking was that I could probably flog the extra equipment on if it did nothing significant, or at the very least what would I have lost? In the greater scheme of the total cost of the system, the outlay is pretty minimal. And anyway, I knew that whether it made a difference or not, there’d be some mileage in it for blog purposes, so the investment was one taken coolly, or even cynically.

It’s safe to say the change in the sound has taken me somewhat by surprise, and I’m now running through some more familiar recordings and hearing – no, not a veil lifting or instruments I never heard before or even an inkier, blacker acoustic backdrop, but rather just music that sounds more real, and makes me want to listen more. And that’s something with which it’s hard to argue.

Though I have a sneaking feeling many will…

Posted 25.08.2014: I’ve changed the wiring in my audio system, and it’s completely transformed its performance.

There, I said it – and already I hear a sound akin to a cavalry charge on cobbles, as keyboards clatter in denouncement of me as another of those ‘audiofool’ idiots, not to mention probably the paid mouthpiece of a manufacturer of overpriced bits of wire, a slave to advertising and quite possibly delusional.

After all, don’t I know that bits is bits, it’s all 1s and 0s, and if cables could make a difference then a better one could improve the words coming through (I wish!), or change the colours in a picture on the way to a printer?

Yup, been there, done that, read all the rants and the closed mind stuff – and yet still I decided to spend over £100 changing the cable between my NAS drives and one of my network players. And yes, it has made a radical difference to the performance, making music I couldn’t enjoy before completely listenable, and opening up new horizons.

Cool your caps locks and stow those screamers, people – give me a moment and I’ll explain…

The system
Regular readers will possibly be familiar with my set-up: two NAS units (both working now, thank you, after a few traumas a few weeks back and a silent prayer to the gods of back-up), feeding a Naim NDS in my main listening room, and an original NaimUniti – upgraded a few times along the way – on my desk in what used to be the dining room and is, for now, the place of work.

The NAS drives are cabled, via Netgear gigabit switches, direct to the NDS, and to an Onkyo TX-NR818 receiver and a Cambridge Audio Blu-ray player in the same room, with a couple of spare Ethernet ports available for reviewing purposes.

Meanwhile an old-model Apple AirPort Extreme acts as the wireless hub for the home, also feeding a Skype phone and a Hive heating control system, with a further AirPort used in repeater mode to ensure good coverage. Internet is via a VirginMedia Super Hub, running purely as a modem into the AirPort Extreme.

Wireless just doesn’t work
All well and good, except the desktop set-up – the NaimUniti and Mac Mini, connected to the network using Wi-Fi –  can be flaky at times: it’s pushing things to try to copy a bunch of files to the servers while streaming music from them, and sometimes it’s been a matter of watching the iPlayer or surfing websites, as trying both at the same time was risking snarl-ups.

Meanwhile, trying to play the increasing numbers of high-resolution music files I get sent by the classical labels has been a pain: 24-bit/96kHz or less was no problem, but 24-bit/192kHz, though well within the NaimUniti’s capabilities, meant endless buffering as the network struggled to cope.

Yes, an answer would have been to run an Ethernet cable around the house between router and the second room, as I wasn’t going to try Ethernet over mains again. Why? well, my subjective impression is that having the units plugged in introduces a slight haziness to the sound of the system, whatever is played – CD, radio, anything. What’s more, I was for a while plagued with odd hums I could only remove entirely by getting rid of the mains Ethernet equipment.

However I really wanted something even easier to hide than Ethernet, as the cable would need to cross a couple of doorways, and I’d had some problems with stuttering and dropouts with long Ethernet cables in the past, despite changing cables a couple of times. So I wanted to try something different.

Fibre is the solution
The answer was optical fibre networking, and any worries I had about the complexity and cost of taking this approach were quickly dispelled when I did some online research, and talked to a friend who’d been experimenting with fibre.

TP-Link MC200CMI’d need two little converter boxes – one connected at the router end, the other at the desk, to switch the network between copper wire Ethernet and fibre and back again – and a chunk of optical cable. Well, actually a chunk of two-core optical cable, as the system uses separate fibres for send and receive.

The cable itself is superthin, is flexible enough to go round corners easily, and is designed to withstand being trodden on occasionally under the carpet.

And it’s good for cable runs of at least half a kilometre, so the 20m max run I needed wasn’t going to be a problem. Total cost, converters and cable? Just a little over £100, plus an extra £20 for a five-port switch to use at the router end, as all the ports on the AirPort Extreme were full.

Whole lot, ordered online, delivered next day – and all I had to do was find some time to install it.

TP-LINK MC200CM connectionsSC connectorDid it this morning, and it’s really easy to set up.

You run an Ethernet cable from your router into one socket on the converter box, and a dual fibre-optic plug into the other (once the protectors for the cable ends are removed), plug in the mains adaptor, wait for all the lights to light, and you’re done.

Same at the other end, except downstream the converter connects into a five-port switch, enabling me to connect several components.

UPDATE: Since one or two people have already asked exactly what I used, here’s the invoice list:

Misco Fibre Network Order

The whole install must have taken us less than an hour, including some furniture-moving to allow the aqua blue cable to be run along the skirting-board under the edge of the carpet.

And as soon as it was all up and running, I did a few checks.

Superfast – at last
Yes, the NaimUniti will now play 24-bit/192kHz with no buffering at all, copying to and from the servers is now running at about ten times the speed I was getting before, and most amazing of all, I’m now getting all of my superfast broadband straight through to the desktop.

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125Mb/s is more than acceptable!

So as I said, it’s just a simple cable upgrade, and in the digital path, not the analogue one.

Yet it’s allowing me to enjoy music I previously found unlistenable (in that the Naim Uniti can now actually play it), made streaming music and video smoother (as in no drop-outs or glitches), and is generally making the whole set-up so much more usable.

What’s more, there’s a theoretical advantage, too, in that there is now galvanic isolation between the NaimUniti and the NAS units, router, cable modem and the like (ie there’s now no electrical connection whatsoever between it and them, only an optical one), and that can only be a good thing.

Come to think of it, my occasionally hummy subwoofer under the desk hasn’t got all buzzy once since I made the change – nah, can’t be….

So yes, agreed, it’s all digital, just data – but what a difference it makes when you get that data scurrying around the house really quickly! Even if – and I’ll say it again – that really wasn’t the point.

It’s the best improvement I’ve made to my system in ages.

Written by Andrew Everard

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Sevenoaks online magazine goes live

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First digital issue of Select now available – and it’s free

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Now online is the first issue of Select, the new digital magazine from Sevenoaks Sound & Vision, complete with articles from John Archer, Ken Kessler – and me!

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Covering everything from 4K to Wi-Fi, and from multiroom to Dolby Atmos, the 68-page magazine contains hints, tips, and the very best products you can buy in home cinema, hi-fi and beyond – plus a competition to win yourself an Arcam Solo Bar.

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And there’s more to it than meets the eye: click on the ‘blobs’ throughout the magazine to be transported to extra info, photo galleries and video content.

To susbcribe to Select online, just click here

Written by Andrew Everard

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REVIEW: AK Jr – Astell & Kern’s new kid on the block

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It may be designed as an entry-level addition to the acclaimed digital music player range, but this £399 machine is has serious intentions    

It says almost all you need to know that, while I was ogling Astell & Kern’s full AK500 system of player, power supply and amplifier at the Munich High End show, my wife – the estimable Hi-Fi Widow – was rather more taken with the brand-new AK Jr pocket digital music player, the latest addition to the company’s line-up. Astell&Kern AK Jr_frontand back2

It’s not just that ‘junior’ is compact, with its aluminium casework less than 1cm thick and tapering down to just 6.9mm, and affordable – at least in A&K terms – £399; what really grabs the attention is that, although this is the lowest-priced model in a range going all the way up to the wrong side of £2000, it’s both beautifully finished and feels coolly wonderful in the hand.

Despite weighing less than 100g, it feels substantial and precisely engineered


A delight to use
And having now had one in my hands for some days now – the first, I’m told, to escape the captivity of UK distributor Computers Unlimited – I can also report that the baby A&K is both a delight to use and sounds really rather amazing. Astell&Kern AK Jr_package

It arrives in a slimline package complete with USB cable and a couple of protective films to use over the display, and anyone who’s ever used any kind of digital music player will find little unfamiliar here: the Jr connects to a computer via that micro-USB lead supplied (with a particularly solid fit into the player’s socket), and comes as standard with 64GB of internal memory, expandable to double that with the use of a microSD card. Astell&Kern AK Jr_display

Operation is made simple by a large, clear 3.1in display with crisp graphics – I especially like the sliding cursor bar design to adjust screen brightness and the like – while the main physical controls are limited to power on/off on the top edge, track-skip and pause on the left, and a machined volume wheel set into the rear panel and just protruding to the right, like a vestigial version of the rather more prominent controls found further up the range.

As well as the cable connectivity, which can also be used to charge the player or use it with a computer as a portable USB DAC, the Jr also supports Bluetooth 4.0 for wireless connection to suitable speakers and the like. What’s more, a healthy output of just under 2V RMS when at its line-out setting, which fixes the volume from the headphone socket at its maximum, means it can be used straight into an amplifier or active speakers using a suitable 3.5mm stereo to RCA phonos cable.


All the way to DSD
Using a Wolfson WM8740 DAC, it will play just about any format you can throw at it, all the way up to 24-bit/192kHz, as well as DSD64 (using DSD to PCM conversion), so I’ve been trying it with a wide range of my usual ‘torture tracks’ and a lot of favourite music, from hard-hitting rock and electronica through to jazz and even an extended Wagnerfest the other morning, and I have to say I’ve come away very impressed. Astell&Kern AK Jr_volume

That hefty output power – at least by portable standards – means this little player has no problem driving even demanding headphones, so those of us accustomed to carting around a pocket headphone amplifier can probably lighten the load a bit by leaving it at home, while the sound quality on offer will probably render that go-everywhere DAC/amp just as redundant.

What’s more – and this is going to rile those who’ll have you believe that the iPhone into a pair of good headphones sounds so good you don’t need to bother with hi-fi any more – the AK Jr leaves Cupertino’s finest for dead when it comes to bass weight and conviction, midrange fluidity and openness, and treble sparkle and ambience.

Simple version? It just so sounds so much more real than your phone is ever going to – and that includes the particularly impressive Sony Xperia phones I’ve tried, which themselves put the iThings in the shade as a means of driving favourite in-ears or ear-muffs.

Astell&Kern AK Jr_leftedgeGood on the go
Battery life, even when used hard, is impressive: a 4hr charge gave me enough juice for a whole day’s listening at highish levels driving the kind of headphones you’d only use with a device like this if you’re either a) a head-fi fanatic or b) a fashion victim, and there was still power left showing on the display when I plugged it in ready for the next day’s use.

So unless you’re going to headbang all the way, the A&K Jr should be a pretty effective travelling companion, even for long-haul.

This is a remarkably well-sorted little player, requiring no allowances to be made for its compact size and (again, by A&K standards) affordable price. It looks and feels the business, being both stylish and seemingly built to last, is slim enough to fit in any pocket, and yet will drive big cans – or very high-quality in-ears – to a remarkable standard.

Junior by name, but very grown-up by nature, the precocious child of the Astell & Kern family is perhaps its most impressive offering to date. And now, I think, someone else is nagging to spend some time listening to it!

Written by Andrew Everard

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Now DSDs are becoming easier to play, where exactly do you get them?

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Online music vendors are waking up to the resurgence of interest in the single-bit hi-res format, but there is an alternative…

sony_ps3DSD was born as part of one of those inevitable consumer electronics format battles, as hardware and music companies sought to find the next step on from CD.

For the proponents of Super Audio CD (or SACD) and DVD-Audio, the stakes were high: not just the chance for them to sell a whole new set of hardware, but also the lucrative technology licences required by third-party manufacturers wanting to build their own players.

As it turned out, neither SACD nor DVD-Audio took the audio world by storm, as the mass-market seemed much more interested in compressing its music to cram it onto portable players, and higher-resolution audio remained a specialist interest.

However, there’s a new twist in what some may have thought a saga long ago told, finished and forgotten – the re-emergence of DSD as a format in the ‘computer audio’ arena.

In this article for Gramophone magazine, I look at sources of DSD downloads, and explain how to convert your SACDs into files you can play on the latest DACs and network audio devices…


UPDATED: Marantz celebrates 30 years of Special Editions with new SA-14 1SE and PM-14 1SE

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KI bannerUPDATED 01.07.15: Have been out in Eindhoven for a couple of days for a more detailed listen to the SA-14 1SE and PM-14 1SE, and can now confirm the price is rather lower than suggested in the early reports below. The products are set to go on sale in September, at £1799 apiece.


POSTED 04.06.15:
Marantz Brand Ambassador Ken Ishiwata has been demonstrating the forthcoming SA-141SE and PM-141SE SACD/CD player and amplifier here at the D+M Group European Dealer Conference in Monaco – and more details have emerged of the tuning work carried out to create the new models, which celebrate 30 years since the first Marantz ‘limited edition’ products.

Playing a mixture of CD-quality, hi-res PCM, DSD files and self-copied DSD rips from vinyl, Ishiwata today introduced the new products to an audience of European journalists and dealers from around the world.

Set to go on sale in a few months at a price of around £2000 each for player and amplifier, the combination not only plays discs but also allows the connection of a computer for direct playback of stored files.

Based on existing models, the new products feature a range of familiar Ishiwata tuning strategies, including a heavy 5mm thick lid for extra damping, high rigid feet and chassis damping, and copper caps on the power transistors in the amplifier.

Both products also feature the company’s Hyper Dynamic Amplifier Modules, or HDAMs, here in top-spec ‘-SA2’ form, along with customised components including toroidal transformers in both player and amp. The player also uses a Marantz-original SA-CD mechanism to optimise data read-out.

As to the rest of the changes, they’ll become clearer nearer to the launch of the two products: for now Marantz is saying only that they have ‘many other secret refinements for outstanding audio performance.’

Posted 14.05.15: Launched here at High End 2015 are the new Marantz SA-141SE SACD player and PM-141SE amplifier, being demonstrated at the show by Brand Ambassador Ken Ishiwata.

The two new products mark 30 years of Marantz Special Edition products, and will be in the shops in September, at £2000/€2500 apiece.

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Frankenspiel FS-X: in Single or Dual mode, it’s so much more than just a Bluetooth speaker system

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The market is awash with Bluetooth speakers of varying plastickiness, and it’s rare that a day goes by without me receiving at least one press release extolling the virtues of some new miracle said to be just the thing to get the party started/entertain the whole beach/play music while cycling/amaze your friends and win true love – you know the kind of thing.

Trouble is, with a very few exceptions, these speakers sound – well, horrible. With their flea-sized amplifiers, desperate attempts to squeeze something resembling bass from tiny drive units and ‘style over substance’ construction, most deliver a sound that’s better than playing music through your smartphone or tablet’s built-in speakers – which isn’t hard – but that’s about it.

Having had too many of these speakers through my hands of late (you’ll notice you haven’t seen many reviews of them on this site, which tells you a lot), my expectations are thus pretty low, which is why it was a pleasant surprise when I first encountered the Frankenspiel FS-X last year.

You can read what I made of it here, but the short version is that I was extremely impressed.

frankenspiel_logoSince then the Frankenspiel people have been rethinking the speaker, from power consumption to amplifier power to voicing, and the result is a completely revised FS-X, coming soon at prices expected to be around £75 for a single speaker, or £140 for a dual-mode stereo pair.

So you can either buy stereo all at once, or buy one now, then add another for stereo, or even pair up with a friend when you want to listen together – and two FS-Xs can be combined to make a stereo pair.

However, if you think all the company has done is allow two speakers to be used together to create stereo, think again – the past year has seen a fairly thorough overhaul of the entire design, with improvements in just about every area of its performance.

frankenspiel fs-x-dual high

More power, more bass, more running time
There’s been a huge increase in the power the little speaker delivers, upping the maximum sound pressure level on offer from the 93dB at 0.5m of the original to 110dB at 1m, and increasing the bass extension: the first model went down to 110Hz, but this one is said to be good for 50Hz. Yes, from a 9cm cube!

Also greatly improved is the battery life, though last year’s model was hardly power-hungry, giving 40 hrs of use with Bluetooth at a measured output of 69dB at 0.5m. This year the FS-X will play for 60 hours or more, at 70dB measured at 1m.

So, how’s using the new FS-X in stereo? Well, connection is just as easy as with a single speaker – you just have to power up the two within ten seconds of each other, and then one acts as the master/left speaker, feeding audio through to the righthand one, again by Bluetooth.
frankenspiel fs-x-dual low

Together they appear on your device as ‘FS-X Dual’, and that’s just about job done: a pair of FS-Xs sound just as amazing as a single one, but now in living stereo. There’s no need for toeing-in or precise positioning or bracing your neck in a clamp to keep your head still(!): thanks to the dispersion characteristics of those BMR drive units both the tonal balance and stereo imaging are maintained even when you’re well off axis.

That’s the technical way of saying you can put them just about anywhere you like and they’ll still sound great and give you a real sense of space and stereo solidity. And I’m not just talking what might seem like the obvious idea of parking them on a desk and using them to improve the sound from your computer – there’s much more to the FS-X than that.

There are trade-offs using it in dual mode: Bluetooth range is noticeably reduced, along with a marginal decrease in playtime, due to the fact that the left ‘master’ speaker is both receiving from the music-playing device and transmitting to the right speaker. But what you gain is a much more musical soundstage, as well as a doubling in volume (an extra 3 dB).


Two together, one to go

This novel approach offers interesting usage opportunities: two of you could get together with your speakers, or you could use two speakers for serious listening at home in enhanced dual mode stereo, then for on-the-go just grab a single speaker and pop it in your bag.

This almost incredible little system is more than up to the task of filling a decent-sized room with sound, and creating an entirely credible stereo image with excellent detail and clarity, not to mention having more than enough power to deliver the kind of sound levels you’d normally only expect from much larger speakers.

Play them loud, and you can revel in that superbly extended and tightly defined bass, underpinning a clear, natural midband with excellent intelligibility and crisp, detailed treble to deliver a real sense of space and ambience.

frankenspiel fs-x connections

Even better, there are no wires involved at all, so you really can place them anywhere you want – although each speaker has a USB power socket and also a 3.5mm analogue audio input should you want to use them wired or should the batteries run out. However, given the design and the fast charging, that’s not going to happen too often, however loud you play them.

Special speakers
Yes, these are very special little speakers, and when you add in the solidity of build, compact dimensions and simplicity of use, these are just about the perfect go-anywhere listening companion, with the all-up weight of less than 1kg for the pair making them easy to carry with you anywhere.

According to Frankenspiel, what the new FS-X system is spearheading is a whole range of products offering true hi-fi from seemingly impossibly small portable speakers – no less than that.

All of a sudden that lime-green plastic ‘turbobass’ Bluetooth speaker with the flashing disco effect lights looks a bit silly, doesn’t it?
Written by Andrew Everard

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Teufel takes the party on the road with Thundertruck

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‘Festival on wheels’ touring Germany, packing eight Rockster speakers, subwoofers and a dance floor!

teufel thundertruck side on

There’s nothing like making a big noise about your product, and German-based direct-sell speaker company Teufel is currently doing just that with its Thundertruck, a converted ex-military MAN eight-wheel packing eight of its Rockster Bluetooth speakers – and more.

teufel rocksterNow touring various venues in Germany, the Thundertruck is described as a ‘festival on wheels’, with the eight onboard Rocksters (left) – each weighing 30+kg and standing 76cm tall – backed up by two subwoofers.

Oh, and an onboard 13 sq m dance floor, four smoke machines, a lighting system using 30 LED units and two strobes, and two fridges (of course!)

It’s based on a 12.76 litre 320hp decommissioned military KAT I transport complete with eight-wheel drive – so handy for getting to tricky festival sites – and set up to start playing music as soon as it arrives, thanks to the ability of the Rockster speakers to run on their internal batteries, a 12V supply or mains.

teufel thundertruck head-on

teufel thundertruck 01

As Teufel puts it, ‘The size of the Rockster excluded the use of a sports car: after much deliberation we decided on something a bit more rugged and suited to the outdoor use we had envisioned.’

teufel thundertruck 02

Written by Andrew Everard

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Queen: Studio Collection LPs released in September – with a matching Rega turntable!

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18-disc set remastered from original master tapes and pressed on 180gm vinyl; limited edition ‘Queen by Rega’ turntable featuring band logo launched simultaneously

queen studio collection product shot WHITE

On the way in September is a complete collection of Queen’s 15 studio albums, restored, remastered and pressed on 180g vinyl – and to celebrate the event there’s a limited edition Queen by Rega turntable, complete with Freddie Mercury’s band logo on the platter.

Layout 1Released on 25th September, Queen: The Studio Collection is the result of a five-year project involving researching the original tapes to find the best versions of the tracks under the supervision of Queen’s production team.

Leading engineers were then asked to master sample tracks and – after double blind listening – celebrated (and Grammy-winning) engineer Bob Ludwig was chosen to re-master the whole project.

Due to the condition of the original tapes, new 24bit/96kHz masters were made, enabling speed errors, clicks and drop-outs to be corrected, and from these lacquers were made by Miles Showell of Abbey Road, cutting at half speed using a Neumann VMS lathe.

Pressed by German plant Optimal, the albums use 180gm coloured vinyl echoing the main colour of each album’s artwork. But this was done only after special coloured vinyl was developed, and tested against normal black vinyl to ensure the coloured material wasn’t in any way degrading the sound quality.

The 18-disc format allows the full running times of Queen’s last two albums, Innuendo and Made In Heaven, to be accommodated, as these were originally programmed for the longer running times available on CD. Each of these album gets its own two-disc set, while Queen II, originally released with ‘Side White’ and ‘Side Black’, comes on two appropriately coloured discs with a custom etching on the reverse of each.

As well as the £285 box-set, which will come with a 108-page hardback book, individual albums will be released on black vinyl.

queen rega TT

The Queen by Rega turntable is in gloss black, with the band logo – designed by Freddie Mercury – on the platter, and a ‘Queen by Rega’ logo on the front right corner of the plinth.

queen rega close-up

Selling for around £350, and in a limited edition, it uses the handbuilt RB101 tonearm plus a new low noise/vibration 24V motor, and comes fitted with the Rega Carbon Cartridge, with the company’s Bias 2 available as an option.

To mark the launch, the Universal Music website will each week publish the story of one of the 15 albums: the first installment, covering the band’s eponymous début album, is online now.

Written by Andrew Everard

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So it’s official: the law is ‘Not a NAS’

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The latest ruling in the on/off/on saga of whether or not we can rip our music will confuse more than it clarifies – and it looks like there will only be one winner…

First home taping was killing music, except it didn’t. Home_taping_is_killing_music

Copying music to tape, and later digital media, wasn’t allowed, but hardly anyone took any notice.

Then last October the Government decided we were allowed to make a copy of our own music for private use, so we could play it on new-fangled modern devices like the iPod (after all, only launched 13 years previously, in October 2001).

Was there widespread rejoicing in the street, exalting the wisdom of our legislators and their forward thinking? Umm no, just business as usual.

High Court Judgment TemplateNow, it appears we’re not allowed to copy our music again – at least not until a way is found to compensate the record companies and the like for this latest attempt at killing music. Which of course we’re not – others are managing that very nicely indeed, thank you, without any help from us.

You see, having first managed to get a levy put on blank cassette tapes in Germany in the 1960s, later extended to other countries and to recordable CDs, the music industry seems pretty confident it can pull off the same trick on the blank media of today.

So presumably that means hard drives, USB thumb drives, any memory card usable in a computer or portable device and so on? Looks like it, although of course any of those devices can be used for storing pictures, business presentations, that difficult first novel you’ve been working on for years, even this website – as well as music.

Could be a healthy revenue stream for the music industry, if it manages to get even a few pennies from the sale of just about anything able to store data.

Or are we going to be asked our intentions every time we buy any kind of storage, before the levy is either applied or waived?

sony premium sound cardOnly Sony is making it simple for the proponents of a new blank media levy with its ¥18,500 dedicated music storage ‘Premium Sound’ SDXC card (left), although given the price one might hope any extra charge could be absorbed fairly easily.

No – the upshot of all this looks likely to be a few pennies on any digital device able to store anything, meaning no-one will even notice (given that storage is now cheaper than it’s ever been). After all, it already works for them in other markets, so why not here?

Mind you, not sure how all that is going to work in an increasingly globalised market, where you can buy almost anything from almost anywhere – will suspicious-looking small packages from overseas levy-free countries be impounded at ports of entry, having been detected by specially-trained SD card sniffer dogs? Will there be dawn raids demanding suspected storage smugglers come out with hands up, kicking their SSDs in front of them?

However it works – assuming it does – only one thing’s for certain: the record companies and the like will get richer. In fact, they may have so much money coming in from such a storage levy that they’ll never again have to do anything messy like finding, supporting and promoting new artists, let alone releasing new music.

We could find ourselves in a world dominated by ‘safe bet’ music, back-catalogue compilations and winsome female vocal hits derived from meaningless but oh-so-artful corporate TV ads, in which anyone with anything new to say or play must struggle to be noticed or resort to self-funded releases.

Perish the thought we could ever find ourselves in that state!

Anyway, for now, if you’re wondering how you can listen to your music, it seems that the law is ‘Not a NAS’.

Honestly…

Written by Andrew Everard

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So, two years on…

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It’s two years since I set up this site, and it’s been non-stop fun

I’ve just been reminded by WordPress that it’s two years since I originally set up this site, with the first story being a review of Just Audio’s AHA-120 headphone amplifier.

310715.site first story

Over the past couple of years I’ve had great fun here writing reviews, blogs and blithers on all kinds of things to do with hi-fi and consumer electronics, just as I promised to do when I first wrote my ‘About Me‘ profile the day before the site went live, and I just wanted to thank everyone who’s supported this site, either by reading it or commenting or emailing me.

It’s always good to hear what you think of what I write – even those of you choosing to rant a bit – and I can only apologise for the fact there’s not as much posted here on a regular basis as I’d originally planned.

Y’see, having ‘moved on’ with the reassurance that ‘we’re sure you’ll find another job soon’ ringing in my ears, I have to report that I have. Well, not another job, but lots of them: writing for the very nice people at Hi-Fi Choice, Hi-Fi Critic and Hi-Fi News, still keeping Gramophone readers up to date with audio goings-on as well as offering the occasional briefing guide for Jazzwise on all things hi and fi.

And then there’s all kinds of writing about all kinds of things, all of which keeps one on the old toes and maintains the Mac at a nice cooking temperature most of the day (and some nights).

It’s a constant challenge, and something new every day with not a hint of the ‘Don’t blame it on the good times/Blame it on the Google’ production-line, which is great – but I’ll try to keep this site up to date as well as I can with content I find interesting.

I hope you’ll find at least some of it just as entertaining – and thanks again.

Oh and for those who keep asking, the picture at the top of the site was taken a few years back in one of the traditional ‘gassho’ villages up in the mountains of central Japan; here’s a video for the gassho geeks among you.

Written by Andrew Everard

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REVIEW: Network music and more – with a Gramofon. Or two. Or…

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The Gramofon is small, inexpensive, and can deliver music from your network or streaming services to wherever you have an audio system – simple as that

Gramofon with amp

Regular readers will know that I’m thoroughly sold on the benefits of wired networking for music: no, I’m not going to claim sonic benefits, but for stability and reliability, especially when streaming hi-res music, Wi-Fi just doesn’t hack it.

However, for the fun side of network music – for example the ability to access content wherever you are in the house – wireless has clear advantages, to which end I have various bits and pieces of multiroom systems scattered around the house.

If you’re starting from scratch, though, you may be on the hunt for ways of ‘wirelessing’ existing systems, or perhaps looking for a way to run a pair of affordable powered speakers in a kitchen, say, to give you music while you cook. And that’s just what the Gramofon is designed to do.

I have to say I viewed the initial press release with some amusement, as you might expect given that one of my gigs is as Audio Editor on Gramophone magazine.  I dropped the PR person an email requesting a review sample, as I thought a piece on Gramofon in Gramophone might be a bit of a wheeze – and then kind of forgot all about it.

Spool forward a month or two, and I received an email alert that a parcel was on its way to me from Madrid, sender unknown. Intriguing, but then I do tend to get sent CDs and the like all the time. However, when the package arrived, it contained two Gramofons.

Why Madrid? Well, that’s where parent company Fon, best-known for its Wi-Fi-sharing services, is based.

packshot

So what is a Gramofon? Well, it’s a little box just over three inches square and less than a couple of inches thick (or 8x8x4.3cm in new money), with a multicoloured ring of light surrounding a pushbutton on the top, and sockets for the supplied mains adapter, Ethernet and 3.5mm stereo analogue out on the rear. It also comes complete with a 3.5mm-to-two-RCAs cable, allowing it to be connected to audio equipment.

Complete streaming
What it does is allow you to access streaming services such as Spotify Connect, Internet radio and music stored locally (via UPnP/DLNA), using your existing Wi-Fi network and apps for iOS and Android tablets and smartphones. You can also stream music direct from your handheld device – using Wi-Fi rather than Bluetooth – and other services, including Tidal, are said to be on the way.

Gramofon app

Connection is achieved using a set-up app, which worked simply and effectively – you set the device running the app to connect directly to the Gramofon, then enter your network details – and with the integration of Qualcomm’s AllPlay technology you can connect multiple Gramofons, and then use them individually to access different content in different rooms.

Or you can combine them together, with individual or grouped volume control in Party mode, to provide that whole-house hi-fi thing.

The top-panel light ring provides status indication: solid red shows the unit is powered up, blinking to indicate ‘ready to set up’, with solid blue for internet connection, blinking if connection isn’t present. There’s also a yellow indicator for firmware updating.

Gramofon hileft greenlight

Green shows Spotify is playing, and light blue when network music is being played, while the indicator turns pink when the top-panel button is pressed, pausing the music.

All very neat, and even better is the price: a Gramofon will cost you just €59, which is a little over £40, delivered, from www.gramofon.com.

The unit uses the AK4430 DAC from AKM, which is capable of up to 192kHz/24-bit, but the Gramofon will only handle content at up to 96kHz/24-bit. The good news is it has no problem with 96/24 over Wi-Fi, provided you have a decent amount of signal on your network – and of course you can always revert to a wired connection if it struggles (though this is arguably defeating the whole point of the Gramofon!).

allplay jukeboxIn practical terms, I found it was perfectly possible to play everything from classical music to the likes of Rush in 96/24 over the Gramofon, although there was the very occasional drop-out when other devices in the house were hammering the Wi-Fi a bit and I was several rooms away from the router.

So how does it sound? Well. You’re probably expecting me to say ‘What d’you expect for £40?’, but while the sound was a little compressed when playing hi-res music into a highly revealing system – using my desktop NaimUniti/Neat Iota system I was able to flick between the Naim’s own streaming section and the Gramofon fed in through a line input – by the time I got down below CD quality things were much more level.

And of course there were striking differences when comparing my reference Naim NDS with the Gramofon through my ‘main room’ system, but then you could buy well over 300 Gramofons for the price of the NDS and its 555 PS power supply.

Certainly with music played via Spotify Connect there was much less in it between the little black box and the NaimUniti, while streaming radio from the BBC’s services revealed that the Gramofon was only marginally shut-in and hollow compared to the same content via the Naim, which is a pretty good result when you consider the price differential.

Bargain streaming solution
What’s more, bear in mind the difference in price between the Gramofon and most of the wireless multiroom solutions out there: a Sonos Connect to feed an existing audio system is going to cost you at least six times as much as the Gramofon, as will the likes of Denon’s HEOS Link and similar devices for other multiroom systems.

Or, to put another way, you could buy a Gramofon and a pair of little active or powered pro speakers from the likes of KRK, M-Audio or Mackie for around £150, and have a complete smartphone-controlled audio system in any room of the house. And that compares very favourably with even the most affordable packaged network-capable audio systems out there.

Compact, capable, simple and fun – for the money, it’s hard to argue with what the Gramofon offers.

Written by Andrew Everard

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New Bowers & Wilkins 800 Series Diamonds in air force blue – and why you can’t buy them

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Spotted during a tour of the Bowers & Wilkins factory the other day, a rather unique pair of the company’s new 800 Series Diamond speakers

D3 AFB lscape

Had a fascinating tour of the Bowers & Wilkins factory this week, as part of the launch event for the new 800 Series Diamond speakers: in preparation for the range, the factory has undergone considerable investment in both equipment and people – and is now dedicated purely to the manufacture of the 800 models.

Oh, and the odd pair of the company’s classic Nautilus speakers, a few of which are still handmade each month.

Bowers & Wilkins factory

The Worthing factory has actually been making the new ‘D3′ models since March, building up stocks for the company’s distribution centres worldwide: the speakers go on sale in October, with the flagship 800 D3 following next Spring, and apparently orders have already been taken accounting for the next 18 months’ production.

Bowers & Wilkins Continuum Drivers

Touring the plant, you become aware that this really is manufacturing from the ground up, from the assembly of drive units, including the new Continuum midrange driver (above) to the massive presses used to shape the cabinets of the new speakers from multiple leaves of wood, as seen below.

Bowers & Wilkins cabinet leaves

Hand-selected, they’re placed in the huge machines, one of which is seen below, then shaped in one action to form a complete cabinet shell. All the cabinets for the new range are made in Worthing, the company having brought woodworking back in house a while back.

Bowers & Wilkins factory press

The attention to detail is amazing: once colour has been applied to the cabinets – in either deep gloss black or what’s unofficially being called ‘frost white’ – or the lacquer to the rosenut wood-veneered models, they’re then sanded back by hand, using remarkably fine grits, before being hand-polished.

Bowers & Wilkins spray booth

Above is one of the massive Turbine heads (made from aluminium and used to house the new midrange driver) being painted, and below is the start of the cabinet polishing process.

polishing

Bowers & Wilkins final cosmetics

Final checking of both the operation of the speaker and its cosmetic finish is also done by hand before packing, as you can see above – and it was at this last stage of the process that I spotted these rather unique 800 Series Diamond speakers, in what can only be described as air force blue.

D3 AFB

Another colour option on the way? Not quite: this is the reference pair of the speakers, against which production samples are checked, and they’re finished in a unique shade for just that reason – so they don’t get packed up and shipped off to a customer by accident!

The 800 Series Diamond is a highly impressive new line-up, from the fundamental engineering to the industrial design and the meticulous build – not to mention the way they sound (at least on first impressions).

Below you can see the 803 D3s on the end of Rotel’s new RC-1580 preamp and a pair of RB-1590 power amps, being demonstrated in the company’s newly-completed main listening room by Senior Product Manager, all-round good guy and Bloke I Used To Work With Andy Kerr, who has seen the project through from start to where they are now.

demonstration

Read more about the launch range in my news blog for hificritic – and here’s a piece from Bowers & Wilkins offering the background history of the 800 Series from the start, along with a Behind the Scenes as Europe’s press got to meet the new 800 Series Diamond.

Written by Andrew Everard

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Naim adds Tidal to Mu-so and streaming products

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Hi-res streaming service rolling out from October 6th via online updates; free 90-day trial of Tidal’s premium Hi-Fi service included

naim tidal menu

Tidal is coming to Naim products from next week, with the hi-res streaming service being rolled out to both the Mu-so all-in one system and the company’s Uniti and ND- ranges via downloadable updates. And to allow Naim users to try the service, a free 90-day trial of Tidal’s premium Hi-Fi service will be made available through the Naim App.

An update for all of the company’s two-channel streaming products will be available from the Naim website from Tuesday, October 6th, along with update instructions, while Mu-so owners will be prompted to update using a wizard on the Naim App.

naim tidal sam smith

In addition, the update will bring added functionality to Mu-so: it will become fully multiroom-ready, allowing it to stream music in perfect synchronisation to other Mu-sos, Unitis or ND- series products in up to four rooms. Mu-so can now function as the ‘master’ streamer for such a system

Gapless playback will now be supported by Mu-so, as will Seek2Time searching through tracks played via UPnP, and alarm clock functionality. Mu-so will also now be able to access the hi-res HLS format BBC Radio stations.

The Uniti/ND- models will be updated using new v4.4 firmware: it’s compatible with 24bit/192kHz versions of the original NaimUniti, UnitiQute and early NDX models, along with the UnitiQute 2, NaimUniti 2, SuperUniti, NDS, later NDX models, ND5 XS, NAC-N 272 and NAC-N 172 XS.

The new firmware for Mu-so is Version 1.3, and a new version of the Naim App to support the Tidal functionality will also be available on October 6th: it’s Version 4.6 for iOS, and 1.6 for Android.

Written by Andrew Everard

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Bowers & Wilkins 803 D3: the Daleks have landed!

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When you’re dealing with speakers this big and heavy, a simple courier drop-off isn’t quite possible!

Bowers & Wilkins 800 Series Diamond 803 D3

So the delivery of the Bowers & Wilkins 800 Series Diamond speakers began with a false start: space had been cleared both for the 803 D3s and their massive boxes, and then – slightly anti-climactically – the hapless courier rocked up yesterday with a pair of the little 805 D3s instead. Well, I had queried the tracking data saying the speakers were in two packages of 15kg each…

palletAnyway, today the Daleks have landed – not in air force blue, but gloss black – and it was never going to be a simple drop-off. After the courier arrived to take the 805 D3s back, a large truck arrived, and ‘Got a pallet for you’.

I’d been expecting it, having seen the 803 D3s being packed at the factory the other week, but the reality proved even more daunting: a double-layer pallet, with a pair of tall boxes strapped in place, each containing 65.5kg of speaker wrapped in almost 20kg of packaging.

With some effort, I released them from the pallet, fortunately parked right by the front door, and – with bits pinging off the strapping left right and centre – dragged the two massive boxes one by one into the house.

And there they sit, waiting for me to summon the energy to unbox them and start listening.

plinth underside copy

Fortunately that’s (hopefully) going to be the easy bit, thanks to the castors built into the plinths and that clever box: it disassembles to leave the speakers sitting on a platform with a slot-in ramp, down which the speakers trundle onto the floor before being positioned.

I’m already excited to see and hear them in place, which is going to be a job for the weekend – I have a month to review them, and I’m looking forward to it.

I’ll keep you posted – meanwhile, here’s some background on the technology of the 800 Series Diamond
Written by Andrew Everard

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More double-DSD live stream concerts – and this time they’re open to all

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Two prize-winners’ concerts from the Fryderyk Chopin International Piano Competition to be streamed live and on demand

Following successful experiments earlier this year with live double-DSD-quality streaming of concerts, two more events are to be streamed tonight and tomorrow on the Prime Seat platform – and this time they’ll also be available in standard PCM sample rates from 44.1kHz to 192kHz.

Prime Seat Chopin Piano Competition

The streams are of the prize-winners’ concerts from the Fryderyk Chopin International Piano Competition, with the winners accompanied by the Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jacek Kaspszyk, and will come direct from Warsaw.

Two concerts will be streamed live this evening and tomorrow evening at 19.00 CEST (18.00 BST), and then the concerts will be available for ‘on-demand’ listening from Saturday October 24th.

The original broadcasts were only available to owners of a range of suitable DACs, including Korg’s DS-DAC-100, DS-DAC-100m and several Sony models: this time, using new Prime Seat software now available as a free download here, you can listen to them with a range of converters or amplifiers with digital inputs, using both PC and Mac computers.

I greatly enjoyed the original concerts, as I reported here, so am looking forward to hearing more concerts over the next few days.

For more on the live streaming project, see here.

Written by Andrew Everard

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Korg adds DSD DAC complete with A-to-D for recording LPs

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New Korg DS-DAC-10R offers DSD128 decoding/encoding, and has built-in phono stage for simple recording of vinyl to hi-res audio

Korg DS-DAC-10R

Just announced by Korg is the DS-DAC-10R, combing the functions of hi-res digital-to-analogue conversion and analogue-to-digital for recording to DSD. Selling for £439 when it hits the shops in January 2016, the new model even has a built-in phono stage, allowing a turntable to be connected directly to it, and the DSD output stored on a computer running the partnering AudioGate 4 software.

front with computer

The DS-DAC-10R supports the 5.6 MHz and 2.8 MHz DSD format—for playback and recording—as well as PCM formats up to 192 kHz/24-bit, and has a built-in phono equaliser compatible with the standard RIAA curve used when cutting records, as well as five other equalisation curves.

eq scaled 600px

As well as being stored on the computer, files can also be burned to DVD-R discs, and can be played on a variety of SACD players, or to recordable CD for playback in standard definition.

Under the lid, the DS-DAC-10R uses the same TI PCM4202 analogue to digital converter found in Korg’s MR-2000S 1-bit studio recorder, and the the Cirrus Logic CS4390 DAC also used in the MR-2000S as well as the company’s DS-DAC series, as used for the current Prime Seat ‘double-DSD’ live concert streaming.

Korg DS-DAC-10R

The new unit also has a prominent volume control and a front-panel headphone socket, enabling it to be used as a headphone amp, while to the rear there are line analogue outputs, a USB Type B connection for the computer, and switchable line/phono inputs complete with am earth terminal for record players.

Korg DS-DAC-10R

The DS-DAC-10R can also be used for playback with Korg’s iAudiogate app running on an iPhone, connecting via Apple’s USB camera connection kit.


REVIEW: AK Jr – Astell & Kern’s new kid on the block

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It may be designed as an entry-level addition to the acclaimed digital music player range, but this £399 machine is has serious intentions – and it’s now available in red, too!

AK Jr red

UPDATE: The sleek little Astell & Kern AK Jr. digital audio player is now available as a limited edition in red. Selling for the same price as the standard aluminium finish version – £399 – the limited edition comes in bright red with gold accents, and will be available exclusively through Amazon UK while stocks last. It certainly makes the entry-level Astell & Kern even more striking – and just in time for Christmas!

AK Jr red

AK Jr red

Posted 17.06.15: It says almost all you need to know that, while I was ogling Astell & Kern’s full AK500 system of player, power supply and amplifier at the Munich High End show, my wife – the estimable Hi-Fi Widow – was rather more taken with the brand-new AK Jr pocket digital music player, the latest addition to the company’s line-up. Astell&Kern AK Jr_frontand back2

It’s not just that ‘junior’ is compact, with its aluminium casework less than 1cm thick and tapering down to just 6.9mm, and affordable – at least in A&K terms – £399; what really grabs the attention is that, although this is the lowest-priced model in a range going all the way up to the wrong side of £2000, it’s both beautifully finished and feels coolly wonderful in the hand.

Despite weighing less than 100g, it feels substantial and precisely engineered


A delight to use
And having now had one in my hands for some days now – the first, I’m told, to escape the captivity of UK distributor Computers Unlimited – I can also report that the baby A&K is both a delight to use and sounds really rather amazing. Astell&Kern AK Jr_package

It arrives in a slimline package complete with USB cable and a couple of protective films to use over the display, and anyone who’s ever used any kind of digital music player will find little unfamiliar here: the Jr connects to a computer via that micro-USB lead supplied (with a particularly solid fit into the player’s socket), and comes as standard with 64GB of internal memory, expandable to double that with the use of a microSD card. Astell&Kern AK Jr_display

Operation is made simple by a large, clear 3.1in display with crisp graphics – I especially like the sliding cursor bar design to adjust screen brightness and the like – while the main physical controls are limited to power on/off on the top edge, track-skip and pause on the left, and a machined volume wheel set into the rear panel and just protruding to the right, like a vestigial version of the rather more prominent controls found further up the range.

As well as the cable connectivity, which can also be used to charge the player or use it with a computer as a portable USB DAC, the Jr also supports Bluetooth 4.0 for wireless connection to suitable speakers and the like. What’s more, a healthy output of just under 2V RMS when at its line-out setting, which fixes the volume from the headphone socket at its maximum, means it can be used straight into an amplifier or active speakers using a suitable 3.5mm stereo to RCA phonos cable.


All the way to DSD
Using a Wolfson WM8740 DAC, it will play just about any format you can throw at it, all the way up to 24-bit/192kHz, as well as DSD64 (using DSD to PCM conversion), so I’ve been trying it with a wide range of my usual ‘torture tracks’ and a lot of favourite music, from hard-hitting rock and electronica through to jazz and even an extended Wagnerfest the other morning, and I have to say I’ve come away very impressed. Astell&Kern AK Jr_volume

That hefty output power – at least by portable standards – means this little player has no problem driving even demanding headphones, so those of us accustomed to carting around a pocket headphone amplifier can probably lighten the load a bit by leaving it at home, while the sound quality on offer will probably render that go-everywhere DAC/amp just as redundant.

What’s more – and this is going to rile those who’ll have you believe that the iPhone into a pair of good headphones sounds so good you don’t need to bother with hi-fi any more – the AK Jr leaves Cupertino’s finest for dead when it comes to bass weight and conviction, midrange fluidity and openness, and treble sparkle and ambience.

Simple version? It just so sounds so much more real than your phone is ever going to – and that includes the particularly impressive Sony Xperia phones I’ve tried, which themselves put the iThings in the shade as a means of driving favourite in-ears or ear-muffs.

Astell&Kern AK Jr_leftedgeGood on the go
Battery life, even when used hard, is impressive: a 4hr charge gave me enough juice for a whole day’s listening at highish levels driving the kind of headphones you’d only use with a device like this if you’re either a) a head-fi fanatic or b) a fashion victim, and there was still power left showing on the display when I plugged it in ready for the next day’s use.

So unless you’re going to headbang all the way, the A&K Jr should be a pretty effective travelling companion, even for long-haul.

This is a remarkably well-sorted little player, requiring no allowances to be made for its compact size and (again, by A&K standards) affordable price. It looks and feels the business, being both stylish and seemingly built to last, is slim enough to fit in any pocket, and yet will drive big cans – or very high-quality in-ears – to a remarkable standard.

Junior by name, but very grown-up by nature, the precocious child of the Astell & Kern family is perhaps its most impressive offering to date. And now, I think, someone else is nagging to spend some time listening to it!

Written by Andrew Everard

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REVIEW: Astell & Kern AK 500 system

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No other system looks quite like the extraordinary Astell & Kern ‘stack’ – but if you’re expecting it to be style over substance, think again…

AK500 Series_07The Astell & Kern AK500N is unusual enough: a high-end CD ripping/storage/network player, all housed in a near-cube with styling apparently inspired by the Matterhorn, powered by internal batteries and with a flip-up touchscreen display set into its top panel.

Look at the pictures and it looks huge; get to grips with it and you realise it’s actually remarkably compact – it stands around 24cm tall, and that display is a little under 18cm diagonal – if reassuringly weighty, at about 11.4kg.

Not only is the AK500N a departure for a company best-known for its portable players, from the little AK Jr. all the way up to the flagship AK380, it’s also both ambitious and – let’s face it – decidedly odd: after all, home audio components don’t usually look like this, and I lost count of the number of times I was asked ‘What actually is it?’

Astell & Kern AK500 system

Now, as if the AK500N wasn’t strange enough, it’s been joined by the rest of the company’s AK500 system, comprising a matching power amplifier and high-capacity offboard power supply, complete with a stand onto which is mounted a wand with the sole purpose of providing some mood lighting to show off the sculptural design of the three products.

Astell & Kern AK500A and AK500P

The three stack together using mounts built into the base of each unit, and are locked in place using screws on the mounts, the finished result being a system small enough to sit on a table or substantial shelf, and yet clearly designed to challenge many a high-end network set-up.

It’s priced to match: the AK500N starts at £6999, complete with 1TB of internal SSD storage, and goes up to £8999 with 4TB onboard, while the AK500AP – the power amp and power supply, complete with AK LED stand, sells for £5999, allowing existing AK500N users to upgrade to the full stack system. Or you can buy the complete package at prices starting from £12,998 with the 1TB AK500N, and rising to £14,998 complete with the 4TB player/server.

See what I mean about serious intent?

So what’s going on here? Well, that’s a question I found myself asking the first time I encountered the AK500N, earlier this year: when it arrived for review I’d seen the pictures, read the press information, and yet still hadn’t quite got my head around what it was all about.

I think the unusual styling probably played its part, with that asymmetrical protrusion on the front echoing those rock formations mentioned in the A&K press information, but reminding me of a more conventional style that’d found itself on the end of a left hook, and until I spent some time with it I’d assumed it was an all-in-one ‘just add speakers’ system, rather than the source component it actually is.

AK500N

Take a look to the rear and the truth reveals itself fairly rapidly: the player has both fixed and variable-level analogue outputs, so it can be used into a conventional amplifier or preamp, or straight into a power amplifier, and also a choice of optical and electrical digital inputs and outputs, the latter on coaxial RCA, BNC and AES/EBU balanced socketry, as well as Ethernet, asynchronous USB Type B for data transfer from a computer and USB Type A host (for use with external storage), plus Wi-Fi.

AK500N

Meanwhile the side panel has a further USB Type A socket for external storage, plus audio outputs on 2.5mm, 3.5mm and 6.3mm sockets for headphones.

A control panel within the touchscreen menu system allows you to select the connections you want to use, while switching off those not in use to minimise interference.

The same thinking applies to the way the AK500N is powered: it comes with a mains power supply, but this is used to recharge the internal lithium-ion battery, and disconnects when the battery is charged. Indeed, once the battery is topped up, the mains adapter can be disconnected completely if required.

The battery, by the way, is designed to be easily replaceable when it reaches the end of its working life, and the same applies to the other internal components of the AK500N: the SSD storage devices are entirely standard, allowing future upgrades or replacements, while the disc drive is also an off-the-shelf model, and can be swapped out if required.

Modular design
This modular design means it’s easy to start with one of the smaller storage capacities and increase it later, and the AK500N also offers a choice of RAID configurations to allow the user to choose between maximum capacity and maximum data safety (although of course I’d always suggest a device such as this is used with an external back-up for optimal storage security).

The A&K will rip content from CDs to its internal storage and then both play those files itself and make them available to other UPnP/DLNA clients on the same network. A novel twist is that it can also upconvert files to DSD format, allowing them to be handled in optimal form by the AK500N’s native DSD digital-to-analogue conversion: this applies both to CD and high-resolution files, and also to 32-bit/384kHz WAV files and 24-bit/352.8kHz, should you have any music in those formats to hand!

The DSD audio engine here is a proprietary Astell & Kern design, not surprisingly derived from the company’s work on its high-end portable digital audio players, and like the other aspects of the design is aimed at minimising noise throughout the conversion and playback chain.

As well as playing content stored internally, the AK500N will also function as a network player/client for music on computers or NAS devices on the same network, and can also access Deezer streaming audio, and Internet radio via the vTuner platform. Those last two are new arrivals since first I looked at the unit, as is a much-improved AK connect control app, available for both Android and iOS smartphones and tablets – this makes using the AK500N much more intuitive, and provides the player with the interface it deserves.

AK500A

The AK500A power amplifier is a relatively chunky design, about half the height of the AK500N, and delivers 100W per channel from a balanced topology – again, all about minimising noise. It has no capacitors in the input section and DC feedback loop, in the interests of the most direct signal path, and isolates the input buffer, driver and output sections from the main audio amplifier to eliminate interference.

Optical sensing is used for the protection circuits, again to break any physical or electrical connections liable to give rise to interference. The amplifier has balanced inputs and hefty WBT combination terminals for speaker output, plus a Neutrik-type connection for the power input from the AK500P.

AK500P

The power supply itself is almost the definition of ‘generous’: it has a similar Neutrik output to feed the power amp and a four-pin locking socket to match that on the AK500N, and has a capacity of 1100W despite its compact dimensions – again, it’s about half the height of the power amp. Somewhat flying in the face of established audiophile thinking, which suggests linear power supplies are good, and switched-mode bad, the AK500P uses switched-mode, but of an aerospace grade, very high frequency design, and offering a very high refresh rate.

AK500 Series_14

Add in the stand/light pole, clamp the elements of the system together using the grub-screws and tool supplied in the box – along with all the connecting cables – and that’s about it.

AK500A and AK500P connections

Actually, ‘that’s about it’ hardly covers it: assembling this system and setting it up is enough to demonstrate that this is no ordinary stack system, but a beautifully-made – if definitely very unusual – audiophile set-up in miniature. There’s a feeling of quality about the three units to which the pictures really don’t do justice, and that’s helped significantly by the heft of the components, which gives the whole enterprise a welcome sense of solidity and craftsmanship entirely in line with the way the Astell & Kern portables feel in the hand.

I have to say I’m not too sold on that ‘light pole’ built into the stand, but the light it casts does definitely bring out the sculptural front panels of the three boxes in a way it’d be tricky to achieve with conventional room lighting, and there are different light modes to play with, controlled from the AK500N’s set-up screen.

It certainly makes a talking point of the system – as if a high-end audio set-up this small and so unusual-looking needed any more set-dressing – but while it’s fun in the short term, I’m not sure I’d want to use it all the time. I guess it’s a matter of personal taste.

What’s less divisive is the way the AK500N system sounds: having already been very impressed with the player alone when I used it as a source in my main system, I have to admit I was hoping the amplification – more of an unknown in the Astell & Kern repertoire beyond the headphone amps built into the portable players (which are very good, by the way) – wouldn’t let the side down.

Audiophile capabiity
It seems I really needn’t have worried: having run the set-up in for a few days with a pair of small speakers in a second room, I connected it with just a little trepidation to the big floorstanders I happen to be running at the moment – the Bowers & Wilkins 803 D3, which cost a little less than the entry-level A&K system package, at £12,500 a pair – tapped play, sat back, and…

The Astell & Kern system breezed it, not only powering the big floorstanders with no signs of stress whatsoever, but also controlling them beautifully, and to excellent effect – exactly as I hoped a near-£6000 power amplifier would be able to do.

OK, so the 803 D3s, for all their size and mass, aren’t exactly the most demanding of speakers in electrical terms, their maker quoting 90dB sensitivity and an 8ohm nominal impedance falling to a minimum of 3ohms, but for all the slightly comical looks of the little A&K stack sitting between the two hefty-looking floorstanders, this proved to be a set-up not just able to work in purely practical terms, but to do so in an entirely convincing fashion when it comes to music-making.

Confounding prejudice
Just as the AK500N itself confounds prejudice when you see and hear it in use, so the AK500N/A/P combination has the ability to re-align views on what ‘serious hi-fi’ should look like: this isn’t just a quirky set-up from a company known for its idiosyncratic personal players, but instead a system as striking in its capability as it is in its design.

That there’s also obvious pleasure to be had in the disconnect between the compactness of the package and the size of the sound it delivers simply adds to the experience, as it does when using one of Astell & Kern’s pocket players: there’s an enjoyment in being ‘in on the secret’, in discovering something unknown to all those audiophiles with their racks of visually mismatched, macho-looking hi-fi components.

However, the effect doesn’t wear off when the delight in the novelty of it all is dismissed, and the A&K system is fixed with the cold, hard stare of financial reality: even when looked at with the knowledge of what else the thick end of £13,000 could buy, this set-up makes perfect sense.

In fact, hide it away and drive it with its app on a mini-tablet, and this system sounds every bit what would be expected of a high end audiophile system of the ‘big box’ kind – though why one would ever want to conceal it escapes me, unless it was to provoke visitors into asking ‘Where’s the hi-fi?’, and then revealing this diminutive set-up.

AK500 Series_10

There’s so much to enjoy here: with the app now completely sorted, one can operate the system with the display panel folded down into the top-plate of the AK500N, enhancing the anonymous, monolithic look of an object really giving no hint as to what it is or does now the last tell-tale ‘hi-fi’ clues have been removed. What’s more, the app is now the equal of any in the business in terms of slickness and enjoyability, while at the same time giving access to all the major functions of the system.

But it’s the sound of the system to which one keeps returning, from the powerful, confident and effortlessly controlled bass right the way through to finest of detail in the midband and treble.

Driving the big Bowers & Wilkins speakers, which aren’t exactly backward in coming forward when a recording has plenty of information to deliver, the A&K gives a thrillingly open and explicit view into fine performances and engineering, while at the same time being able to reveal all the grit and impact of rather rougher recordings rather than attempting to smooth off the edges.

Beat the reviewer
I tried all the reviewer’s tricks to throw it off the scent, from barely listenable MP3 files and low-bitrate BBC local radio streams, all the way through to DSD and very high sample-rate DXD FLAC files, and in every case the A&K proved itself to be more than up to the task it was set. The grumbling electronic bass-lines of the latest Jean-Michel Jarre album had toothsome weight and slam, while the 80s pop of Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin, drawing on everything from 60s classics to XTC and Thomas Dolby has both the low-end power to excuse the prolific synths and a glorious view of Gaskin’s effortless vocals.

That last album was enough to have me off on an odyssey of 80s nostalgia, from Level 42 to Thompson Twins remixes, and believe you me there was some rough production going on back there – of which the Stewart/Gaskin set is emphatically not an example! And the ethereal quality of Gaskin’s voice also found me drifting to the rather disturbing Stay Awake compilation of Disney soundtrack covers from the same year, where the bleak darkness of the soundscapes sounded magnificent thanks to the A&K’s ability to get deep into a mix while at the same time communicating the music in captivating style, from a smoky rendition of Baby Mine by Bonnie Raitt and Was (Not Was) to Tom Waits giving it full-on bonkers on the dwarves’ marching song from Sleeping Beauty. Gloriously mad, yet immaculately produced, and the Astell & Kern/Bowers & Wilkins package (if you can think of it in those terms) simply nailed it.

Having recently spent an amazing evening seeing Courtney Pine playing tracks from his recent album Song (The Ballad Book) with pianist Zoë Rahman in a small, intimate jazz club, and marvelling at the percussive sounds and scintillating runs of notes he managed to extract from his weapon of choice, the bass clarinet, it was fascinating to come home and cue the album up on the A&K system in the cold light of day, and be just as carried away by the cool precision of Rahman’s piano and that great blasting then whispering then soaring and shrieking sound. This is a lovely recording, in 24-bit/44.1kHz, and the system delivers all the space and expression of the interplay between the two musicians.

Christmas comes early
OK, weirded out a bit there on the music choice, but it’s been an odd time of late, what with the nights drawing in and magazine schedules suggesting rather more Christmas music in heavy rotation than you’d get in a shopping mal. By the way, standouts through the A&K/B&W system have been the new Dunedin Consort Bach Magnificat and Christmas Cantata on Linn and the lovely Dancing Day set by New York’s Saint Thomas Choir of Men and Boys, conducted by the late John Scott, who died just days after this album went to press in August, and released in 24/96 on Resonus. The latter has a marvellously atmospheric reading of the Britten ‘Ceremony of Carols’, and playing it on the A&K proved totally immersive, from the opening processional right the way through the end of the piece, as did the Rutter cycle from which the album takes its title.

On a smaller scale, but just as dramatic, the glorious Fitzwilliam Quartet recording of Bruckner’ string quartet and quintet, in 24/192 on Linn Records, simply pours from the speakers in the best ‘stop reviewing and start listening’ way through the A&K/B&W, thanks to the winning mix of fluidity, insight and unrestrained dynamics, giving the performances that superb ‘reach out and you could touch the musicians’ combination of power and intimacy.

What’s more, the A&K system absolutely shines when you play DSD content through it, as I discovered with some recent downloads from the excellent NativeDSD site: the sheer bite and subtlety on offer from these (mailny classical) recordings is simply amazing, and the AK500 set-up really brings out those qualities.

So we’re coming up on two weeks with the A&K as the ‘house system’, and I have to say that I’ve enjoyed every moment of it, playing familiar music and new arrivals alike, and relishing the way it sounds so much bigger than it has any right to – although of course physical size has little bearing on scale of sound these days – and most of all just sounds right with almost everything I chose to play on it.

It does full-on orchestral music; it rocks; it brings out all the character in voices and solo instruments, and yes – gives that ‘listen in’ ability with just about any recording you summon up from your computer, network storage or its own internal drives.

No allowances required
On top of all that, it’s simple to use with the upgraded app, immensely flexible without sacrificing any of its audiophile credentials (thanks to features such as that ability to switch off unwanted inputs and outputs), and reveals more – both operationally and musically – the longer you spend with it. No allowances whatsoever need be made for the radical styling and compact dimensions, and get a very firm feeling it’ll never be a case of wondering whether the right choice has really been made when the novelty wears off, simply because I think it would be a very long time before that happened. If ever.

Yes, the A&K is undoubtedly unusual – I think I may have conveyed that impression by now! – but its performance is never in question, and sets this system well up there with ‘conventional’ high-end separates, not to mention showing a clean pair of heels to quite a few ‘roomful of boxes’ set-ups.

There’s the odd feature I’d like to see to make it perfect, notably an analogue input to enable the AK500N to be integrated with a home cinema system, but then that would fly in the face of the purist digital design here. That aside, and partnered with a suitable pair of speakers (hint: think a long way beyond what you’d expect to use with a system sitting in a footprint of less than a square foot!), this is a set-up to confound prejudices about ‘designer hi-fi’, and satisfy the most demanding user.

But then this isn’t designer hi-fi in the usual sense of the word, but rather superb hi-fi designed to attract the attention with its looks, not require excuses to be made.

In fact, I’ll even forgive it the lighting…

Specifications
System price from £12,998
AK500N inputs Digital on coax, optical, AES/EBU and BNC; networking on Ethernet and Wi-Fi; asynchronous USB on Type B socket; 2xISB Type A
AK500N outputs Digital on coax, optical, AES/EBU and BNC; fixed and variable level analogue out on XLRs/RCAs; 2.5mm, 3.5mm and 6.3mm headphone out
AK500N internal storage SSD, max 4TB
AK500A power output 100Wpc (into 8ohms)
Dimensions (full system with stand, HxWxD) 49.3×31.9×27.9cm
Weight (full system with stand) 27.3kg
www.astellnkern.com
www.unlimited.com

Written by Andrew Everard

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JUST PUBLISHED: new edition of Sevenoaks Sound & Vision Select magazine

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66 pages of products, advice, tips and information – and it’s free!

Sevenoaks Select

Now available is the second issue of Select, the free online magazine from Sevenoaks Sound & Vision.

Sevenoaks Select

Covering everything from headphones and wireless speakers to TVs, multiroom audio and high-end hi-fi, it’s packed with information, tips and advice on how to choose, buy and enjoy the latest equipment, from making the most of the music on your phone to setting up a whole-house sound system.

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What’s more, there’s lots of extra content to which you can click through from the magazine, and you could even win yourself an LG 55EG920V 55in 4K OLED TV.

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It’s written by the likes of John Archer, Ken Kessler – oh, and me – and you can sign up for a free subscription at ssav.com/select.

Written by Andrew Everard

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