Andrew Everard's blog

60 years of Marantz are all about the music

By Andrew Everard | Wed, 12 Jun 2013, 10:00am

Marantz is celebrating its 60th anniversary, and the story behind the founding of one of today's best-known hi-fi and home cinema companies is a familiar one: Saul B Marantz – music lover, amateur musician and photographer – started making hi-fi ...

A famous Naim for 40 years

By Andrew Everard | Thu, 6 Jun 2013, 1:44pm

One of Britain's best-known and most successful hi-fi companies has just hit the big Four-O.  It was 40 years ago this week that Julian Vereker founded Naim Audio, and today the company has sales of €17.5m, double-digit year-on-year ...

Hands-on with QNAP's new QTS 4.0 NAS operating system

By Andrew Everard | Thu, 23 May 2013, 1:06pm

QNAP's QTS 4.0 operating system, standard with its new models, is designed to make NAS set-up simple. Does it?  It's now nine months or so since I installed my 'new' music storage solution, in the form of a QNAP TS-412 four-bay Network ...

Why the Panasonic push for profitability will mean sayonara Sanyo

By Andrew Everard | Mon, 20 May 2013, 4:09pm

Well, the best you can say is 'It seemed like a good idea at the time': the news from Japan is that what was once one of the country's best-known names in consumer electronics, Sanyo, is set to disappear as parent company Panasonic restructures ...

Forget MP3, and let's move on

By Andrew Everard | Thu, 16 May 2013, 4:25pm

Storage is getting cheaper, and broadband faster – we really don't need the horrors of compressed music any more Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? The news that Linn MD Gilad Tiefenbrun (above) has suggested MP3 music files are living on ...

M2Tech HiFace DAC hands-on review

By Andrew Everard | Thu, 16 May 2013, 3:46pm

The M2Tech HiFace DAC is a little USB stick, is bright orange, sells for just €220, and yet is capable of handling the highest of hi-res music files you can buy. This I had to try…The booming DAC market shows no sign of slowing: just as CD player ...

Munich High End Show 2013: more horns, mega-amplifiers and stacks of streaming

By Andrew Everard | Wed, 15 May 2013, 8:45pm

The dust has settled after the annual High End Show, organised in Munich by Germany's High End Society – and while the weather was ropey, at least making it cooler in the glass-roofed halls, and it felt less crammed than in past years (even ...

'Then, just to prove the point, he throws the board on the floor…'

By Andrew Everard | Sat, 11 May 2013, 8:34am

Spent an hour or so with Sony's Eric Kingdon here at the High End Show, while he took me through the design of the new Sony STR-DN1040 receiver, on sale from next month.We've already reported on the two new models coming from Sony, but a chat ...

Why 4K isn't going to solve the big TV companies' problems

By Andrew Everard | Sat, 4 May 2013, 11:18am

So, 3D's done and dusted, right? No-one really wanted it much, no-one uses it much, Sky's even stopped making it a premium product and is now bundling it with its HD offering.Smart TV? Hmmm… Been there, done that: now just about every TV you buy ...

Arnold Wolf, 1927-2013: from JBL's monster Paragon to the best selling speaker of the 1970s

By Andrew Everard | Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 1:01pm

An early career as a radio actor doesn't seem the most obvious start for a speaker designer and the future boss of one of the world's biggest audio companies, but that was exactly the path taken by Arnold Wolf (above), who died last week at the ...