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22 Articles

THE HI–FI HEADLINES

It’s been a busy month at Len Wallis Audio. Firstly we were honoured to receive a ‘Cinema Design Gold Award’ from Sound+Image magazine for one of the dedicated Home Theatres we completed this year. This was a very special project. It is a 13.4.6 Atmos theatre featuring the highest number of Meridian Active speakers used in a domestic theatre anywhere in the world. This project also picked up a Silver award at the CE Pro awards earlier this year in the US. Plus, we have just seen the return of a legend to Len Wallis Audio – we are stocking Technics turntables again, after a hiatus of a few decades. This has been a long time coming, but Technics were obviously content to take their time to get it right,…

THE HI–FI HEADLINES

EPSON EH-TW7100

There are such things as native 4K UHD projectors, which have the full 4K’s worth of pixels on a single chip. But these remain expensive, and are often physically large. In the sub-$5000 AV projector market, pixel-shifting is the way to go if you want to achieve UHD resolution. Which brings us to the new Epson EH-TW7100 with its 4K Pro-UHD feature, complete with a dedicated 4K Pixel-Shift processor. EQUIPMENT The Epson EH-TW7100 projector is an attractive and curvy design in white. That means it’s well suited to blending in with most ceilings when mounted thereon, upside-down, though is less suited to darkened dedicated theatre rooms where you’d want everything to be black. So this is more one of those intermediate designs, bringing some features from semi-portable models into the…

EPSON EH-TW7100

HISENSE LASER TV

A recent survey in Europe found that four out of five people think a big TV picture makes viewing more enjoyable. And frankly we can’t imagine what the fifth person is thinking — of course it does, and screen size is high on everyone’s wish-list when they’re looking for a new telly. But clearly there’s a transportation problem with big TVs. How would you even get a 100-inch TV into your home? The more common solution for a picture of such a size has long been to have a projector. But a projector isn’t a TV. It doesn’t have speakers (at least, any worth mentioning) or a TV tuner or many of the other usability features of a TV. And it usually has problems with ambient light which leaves it…

HISENSE LASER TV

BOWERS & WILKINS FORMATION BAR

Once upon a time when you’d think of Bowers & Wilkins loudspeakers, you’d think of tradition, of leather armchairs in English clubs, of Queen and country. And of solid loudspeakers, engineered to produce fine sound. All that’s still the case with many of the company’s loudspeakers, but occasionally it goes radical. It did that with the Nautilus loudspeakers. It did that with the Zeppelin. And now it’s doing it again with the Formation series. EQUIPMENT B&W Formation is a fully networked active speaker system that works as high end stereo (particularly with the Formation Duo speakers), as a multiroom speaker system, or as a home theatre system. Here we’re looking at a home theatre configuration, consisting of the Formation Bar at the front of the room, a pair of Formation…

BOWERS & WILKINS FORMATION BAR

Krix is well-known to Australian music lovers for the many fine loudspeakers for the home it has produced over its 45 years. And many would know that only a few years after opening, Krix started making loudspeakers for cinemas. It still does both. Clearly the Krix MX-5 modular speaker system is aimed at the home — ‘For small to mid-size rooms’ says Krix — but in many ways it is a merging of those two lines of speakers into something quite special. EQUIPMENT How to approach this unusual system? First, let’s take a bird’s eye view. The MX-5 isn’t a full surround system. It’s the front half. It consists of a left front speaker, a centre front speaker, a right front speaker and two subwoofers. Krix, of course, has many…

We had a moment during the unboxing of Yamaha’s YAS-209, turning the soundbar around between our hands, feeling its weight, seeing how the blue-black fabric wraps right around to meet the sturdy base at the back, leaving a top lozenge of surface, lightly textured and studded with nine indicator lights at the front, next to touch icons. We liked it immediately, and even more so when we placed it in front of our TV and found it so very low, 62mm, that we could actually use our TV remote without having to aim it down from a raised position, arm up like a Roman emperor thumbs-downing his displeasure towards the TV’s half-hidden IR sensor. Here we had clearance. A good start. We had a different sort of moment, though, when…

JBL LINK PORTABLE & MUSIC

Regular readers will have seen us reviewing a chain of JBL Link units since this range of voice-controlled speakers first arrived — indeed several have won Sound+Image awards for their combination of sound quality and value at the price. The Link range has included sizeable table-top speakers, and the screen-equipped Link View, but perhaps the most successful have been the Link 10 and Link 20, smaller speakers which take the successful formula of JBL’s Flip Bluetooth speaker (an extraordinary 20 million of those sold to date) and add Wi-Fi, enabling Google Assistant and Chromecast inside, in addition to Bluetooth. Further still, they are waterproofed to IPX7, which means immersion (in fresh water) to a metre depth for up to 30 minutes. This is the area on which JBL has focused…

JBL LINK PORTABLE & MUSIC

NAIM NAIT XS 3 + NDX 2

You know it when you hear it — PRaT, as high-end audio reviewers call it, or Pace, Rhythm and Timing, attributes that you might think are inherent in the music, rather than the equipment through which it is played. But then you hear it. Freshly plugged up, the Naim XS 3 was used for work before play, before run-in even, to assess and reduce a list of songs with the word ‘Like’ in the title (long story). And while it often takes some time to appreciate a new amplifier in our system, Naim’s XS 3 slotted in and made us feel right at home, punching out hits from its first delivery. An early surprise from or ‘Like’ list was Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit; indeed we were about to hit…

NAIM NAIT XS 3 + NDX 2

AUDIO-TECHNICA AT-LPW40WN

It’s a great time to buy a turntable, with record companies continuing to ramp up the release of recordings new and old on vinyl, the second-hand LP market thriving through record fairs, and regular new turntable releases as well — when only a decade ago it was thought that the models still available might be the last vinyl spinners ever designed. Audio-Technica, of course, had long since diversified into headphones, microphones and other equipment, but never abandoned the black stuff, and also has the merit of nearly 60 years experience in cartridge manufacture — it was founded for that purpose in 1962 by Hideo Matsushita, cousin to the founding family of what is now Panasonic (and Technics), and remains a Japanese company of great renown. So dominant is it in…

AUDIO-TECHNICA AT-LPW40WN

MERIDIAN 210 STREAMER

Meridian’s 200 Series is something different in the world of wireless multiroom audio. Many companies have had a go at the market defined first by Sonos, delivering their own ecosystems of wireless speakers, soundbars and streaming electronics, and most follow a similar formula. Meridian, a company which operates at the highest levels of hi-fi, has done things rather differently. For starters it has gone small. While high-end Meridian components routinely tip the scales over 20kg, the 210 Streamer reviewed here weighs 660 grams, a ‘half-width’ component which is only 4.2cm high. It joins the rest of Meridian’s 200 Series, a set of compact yet capable multiroom-equipped units that can deliver a whole house of audio, and are designed to do so while being hidden away, controlled via an app on…

MERIDIAN 210 STREAMER

PRO-JECT AUDIO X1

When the compact disc was introduced in the early 1980s, nearly everyone in the world said it was the end of the vinyl era. The CD was smaller, played for longer, was more robust and, according to co-inventors Philips and Sony, would deliver “perfect sound forever” — hoorah! Turntables disappeared from hi-fi stores and started appearing at garage sales throughout the suburbs. Australian record companies shut down their local LP pressing plants. By the end of the 1980s, more than 400 million CDs were being manufactured every year. Meanwhile, in faraway Austria, Heinz Lichtenegger was designing his first turntable, and in 1991 established a company to build it — Pro-Ject. Seemingly against all the odds, Lichtenegger’s Pro-Ject P1 turntable went on to become a success story for the fledgling company.…

PRO-JECT AUDIO X1

AUDIO-TECHNICA AT-OC9X RANGE

What’s the most important part of a turntable? Vinyl fans debate every aspect of turntable design. Should the plinth be heavy, or light and rigid? Should arms be long or short, straight or S-shaped? What material makes the best platter? Even the mat on the platter gets vigorous debate — rubber, or felt, or cork, or no mat at all? Yet all these are peripheral to the parts of the turntable which generate the electrical signal which will be amplified into music. The rest is just a supporting system for the vinyl and the components which actually make the sound — the stylus, cartridge, tonearm and signal cables. These receive no power at all, and generate very delicate signals which require thousand-fold amplification prior to that of your main amplifier.…

AUDIO-TECHNICA AT-OC9X RANGE

The Cyrus One amplifier design has had quite the evolution. The very first Cyrus One was launched in 1984, but the friendly yet purposeful re-design pictured here arrived a few years back, as an entirely analogue amplifier. Then a version with digital inputs was added: the Cyrus One HD. Now we have this new Cyrus One Cast which, as its name suggests, adds Chromecast to the mix, along with Apple’s AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth, so making this latest amplifier an easily-selectable end-point for streaming music services, and transforming it into a smart amplifier to which you could, at a minimum, just add speakers if all you want is a high-quality streaming playback system. To make this even easier, the One Cast can be controlled by any of the three main…

We are happy to bet that one of the reasons you’re reading this review is because you’ve never heard of an ‘ampli-tuner.’ Neither had we, but there it was, written on the side of the box. Which was weird because written on the top of the box was ‘Network Audio Receiver’. But before you say ‘I don’t want a multi-channel receiver’, we need to point out that Marantz’s NR1200 is not a multichannel receiver… it only has two channels: left and right. Yep. It’s a true stereo receiver that can receive broadcast FM and DAB+ radio stations. It can also play internet radio stations, and connect to your TV via HDMI so it can improve the sound of whatever you’re watching. It’s also a network player, able to play content…

The McIntosh MA252 integrated amplifier is the first ‘hybrid’ integrated amplifier that this world-famous American company has ever built. That’s an important statement given that McIntosh has been building amplifiers for 60 years. So the McIntosh MA252 has been 60 years coming… was it worth the wait? EQUIPMENT But first, what is a hybrid integrated amplifier? Basically it’s a component where one of the two amplifying stages uses valves — or ‘tubes’ as our US friends like to call them — to amplify the audio signal, while the other amplifier stage uses transistors. Any integrated amplifier has two amplifying stages — the ‘pre’ and ‘power’ stages — so there are two ways to build a hybrid audio amplifier. One way is to use valves for the ‘pre’ section and transistors…

If you’re looking at buying a simple hi-fi system, smart amplifiers can make that job a whole lot easier. Smart amplifiers are boxes which stream music in addition to providing power — so that they can be used as an easy just-add-speakers system solution. An amplifier’s traditional roles are the switching of inputs, the control of volume level and, of course, the power to drive speakers. A smart amplifier adds to these a streaming data connection to the home network and internet. And through this a smart amplifier gains near-infinite possibilities — software control, playback of local music from the network, access to the whole world of internet radio and online music services, some paid, some free. When we did a group test of smart amplifiers in Sound+Image magazine during…

AUDIOSOLUTIONS OVERTURE O202B

The Overture O202B is this small Lithuanian company’s entry-level offering, and it’s an unusual speaker, to say the least, mostly because of design decisions made by founder and lead design engineer Gediminas Gaidelis. EQUIPMENT Indeed you only need look at the exterior of the AudioSolutions Overture O202B to know that it’s built like no other loudspeaker, because there are visible ‘joins’ at all the cabinet wall intersections. This is because the various panels, according to Gaidelis, slide into each other, then lock in, creating what he calls a ‘self-locking cabinet’. “Such a concept exhibits great stability and once assembled, becomes monolithic,” he says. This unusual cabinet construction method also enables AudioSolutions to offer an unprecedented range of 13 cabinet colour options — ice white, cream white, textured white, red, high-gloss…

AUDIOSOLUTIONS OVERTURE O202B

CHARIO CONSTELLATION II DELPHINUS

Some manufacturers are a little vague about the rooms in which they think their loudspeakers will perform at their best and the amplifier power most suited to their capabilities. Not Italian manufacturer Chario. For its Constellation II Delphinus model, it specifies: “The size of the ideal listening environment should not be less than 9 square metres and not more than 20 square metres. A carpeted floor in front of the speakers is recommended. The minimum power amplification suggested to fully exploit the characteristics of the speaker is 30W per channel into 4 ohms.” It then goes on to suggest that you can use “amplifiers rated at up to 70W per channel into 4 ohms” but specifies this as ‘average power’ rather than ‘rated’. That’s pretty specific, except for one thing,…

CHARIO CONSTELLATION II DELPHINUS

Radically different. Those are the words which come to mind when I consider the Genelec 8331A active loudspeakers. In large part that’s because these are not designed primarily for the home. They are studio monitor speakers. Genelec is a Finnish firm specialising in this market. EQUIPMENT Now studio monitors from a company prominent in the field, as Genelec is, have one major advantage over consumer high-fidelity speakers: they are designed to be accurate. Sure, so are many hi-fi speakers, but how do you know they haven’t been ‘voiced’ by a designer with idiosyncratic tastes? Recording professionals know what they want, and won’t pay money for something that sounds too far outside of the mainstream. And let’s face it, if you’re listening using studio monitors, you’re getting sound very close to…

Klipsch has been in the loudspeaker business since 1946, when founder Paul Wilbur Klipsch developed his famous ‘Klipschorn’, which took advantage of horn-loading technology to improve both low and high-frequency performance while at the same time using it to increase dispersion and reduce distortion. Horn-loading a loudspeaker can do all this so, not surprisingly, it’s been a part of Klipsch’s technological ‘DNA’ ever since. EQUIPMENT On the Klipsch RP-600, horn-loading is used to improve the performance of the company’s proprietary 25mm diameter titanium-diaphragm ‘LTS’ (Linear Suspension Travel) tweeter. The horn geometry is also Klipsch’s own ‘Hybrid Cross-Section Tractrix’. The word ‘Tractrix’ is just a description of the geometry of the horn’s curve: another word for it is an equitangential curve, and this curve shape was first used in a loudspeaker…

Q ACOUSTICS 3050i

In an old land like the United Kingdom, full of famous, longstanding loudspeaker brands, you’d think that it’d be hard for a newcomer to find any space. But Q Acoustics managed it, starting up only a decade and a half ago, and since receiving accolade upon accolade, as well as widespread consumer acceptance. It has carefully targeted the mid-priced, high quality segment (it was filling a perceived vacuum left by Mission loudspeakers when it first emerged), and has delivered both high-quality stereo speakers and complete sets of models able to be used in home cinema configurations. Here we have the ‘i’ upgrading of the 3000 series, its second-from-the-top range. This Q Acoustics 3050i is the largest speaker from that series, its only floorstander. EQUIPMENT So, yes, these are stereo floorstanding…

Q ACOUSTICS 3050i

Aussie company Richter Audio says its Wizard speakers, now in their sixth generation — or should that be incarnation, seeing as they’re wizards? — hold the record for being the world’s best-selling Australian-designed loudspeakers. Given the number of years the ‘Wizard’ has been available, it’s a claim we can well believe. In which case we would also add that they’re likely also Australia’s best-known loudspeakers, because anyone who owns a pair of good-quality speakers will have heard of the ‘Wizards’… even if they don’t own a pair themselves. EQUIPMENT Not surprisingly, the design of the ‘Wizard’ has changed dramatically over the nearly 34 years it has been available. Over the decades the cabinet has changed in height, in width, in depth, in shape, and in internal volume… plus the exterior…

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