In terms of the sheer number of winners, stereo amplifiers isn't the biggest category in our yearly What Hi-Fi? Awards rundown, but it remains one of our most important.

A good stereo amp will always be the beating heart of any self-respecting hi-fi set-up, with some of the finest audio manufacturers around showcasing their best work when tasked with crafting the best amplifiers they can muster.

This year's list hasn't moved much, with only one new entry joining the party. That hasn't been due to a shortage of competition, and instead points to just how exceptional the returning winners are at their respective price points.

From sub-£500 titans to high-cost heavyweights, you're not short on quality if you seek something sensational to power your home system.

A budget Rotel and Arcam at the double

It's getting harder and harder to picture our list of the best stereo amplifiers without the Rotel A8.

Returning to bag its third What Hi-Fi? Award on the trot, the A8 remains a fantastic, fuss-free amplifier that won't come close to breaking the bank. It isn't the most lavishly built product in the world, and a lack of digital inputs might be a dealbreaker for some, but if you want the best sound you can get for under £500, the Rotel is still our pick of the bunch.

For those willing to spend a little more, Arcam has the so-called 'middle ground' of our Awards lineup nicely sewn up. The British brand's Arcam A5+ and Arcam A15+ both return for their second respective wins, with both amplifiers first arriving on our rundown last year after making subtle yet tangible tweaks to the original A5 and A15 models.

The A5+ remains the one to pick if you want class-leading insight at around the £500-£1000 mark, while the A15+ takes its smaller brother's essential character and builds on it superbly. If you're willing to break the £1000 barrier, it holds firm as our winner of the 'Best stereo amplifier between £1000-£2000' tranche.

Cyrus and Rotel lead the high-end charge

For those with cash to burn and friends to impress, let's turn our attention to the best that Cyrus and Rotel have to offer.

The Cyrus 40 AMP returns for its second consecutive win as our favourite choice between £2000-£3500, delighting us with its clean, detailed and musical sound wrapped up in a stylish, feature-laden package.

Competition at this level is fierce, coming from the likes of Rega, Naim and Arcam, but the Cyrus is so good that we wouldn't discount another Product of the Year win in 2027.

For our more premium option, it's the Rotel Michi Prestige X430. The Prestige X430 is a superbly rounded integrated amplifier that should sound at home in a wide range of systems, boasting a clean, controlled presentation anchored by an articulate bass reproduction and complemented by a very decent phono stage and DAC circuit.

Rather fittingly, then, Rotel tops and tails our list of the best amps, holding position as our best budget option alongside the Michi X430's 'best over £3500' option.

While our list of 2026 Award-winning stereo amplifiers hasn't changed a huge amount on the surface, there's been no shortage of competitors duking it out behind the scenes.

Just as the Michi Prestige X430 confounded its Rega and Naim rivals, so have Arcam and Cyrus's excellent flagbearers held off various challenges from the likes of Marantz, Quad, Cambridge Audio, Yamaha, Musical Fidelity and, of course, Rotel.

We'd equate the stereo amplifier category to that classic analogy of a swimming swan or duck: graceful above the surface, but a lot of scrappy turmoil going on underneath. And, as ever, only the sharpest swimmers with the coolest heads rise to the very top.

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Check out our list of the best stereo amplifiers

KEF has cemented its position as the dominant manufacturer of active speaker systems in our 2026 What Hi-Fi? Awards. Its stylish all-in-one designs pack streaming smarts, amplification and wireless capability into a pair of stereo speakers, while delivering a level of sound quality that rivals the very best hi-fi separates alternatives.

It is a formula that has proven irresistible to our judges this year.

The highlight is undoubtedly the new premium KEF LS Luxe (£3500 / $4000 / AU$6375), which nabs the 'Best speaker system over £3000' trophy. This standmount package refines the company’s well-proven formula by adding a larger Uni-Q driver array (where the tweeter sits in the throat of the mid/bass unit) and a pebble-shaped cabinet made of BMC (Bulk Moulding Compound) rather than MDF.

Compared to the well-established LS50 Wireless II (£2250 / $2499 / AU$4295), the serial winner in the next price band down, the LS Luxe’s larger Uni-Q array (16.5cm vs 13cm) results in improved dynamics, higher volume capability and deeper bass.

Add in the newer model’s greater internal volume and better-damped enclosure, and the benefits are obvious, from the increased clarity to the crisper stereo imaging.

If your budget doesn't extend that far, we can highly recommend the third of KEF’s Award winners, the LSX II LT (£899 / $999 / AU$1695). These smaller speakers will fit nicely into more modest spaces while retaining much of the well-rounded character we so love from their pricier siblings.

Triangle’s excellent AIO Twin (£599 / $899 / AU$1799) completes our quartet of speaker systems. These are a fine alternative to the KEF LSX II LT, delivering a front-footed and entertaining sound for a more wallet-friendly price, and takes another win in the 'Best speaker system under £750' category.

Our expanding music systems category also includes ‘just-add-speakers’ solutions. We are pleased to report that the quality of such products continues to rise. The main attraction for such systems used to be convenience and a lack of clutter, but in recent years manufacturers have really pushed hard on sound quality.

Listen to the Roksan Caspian 4G Streaming Pre-Amplifier/Power Amplifier (£6500 / $8250 / AU$13,198) combination, and you would be hard-pressed to find a traditional streamer/amplifier alternative that performs better. It is beautifully made too, and is the first pre/power two-box system we've given an Award to, and it wins the new 'Best hi-fi system over £5000' category.

Well-established class leaders such as the Technics SA-C600 (£749 / $1299 / AU$1849), the Ruark Audio R610 (£1199 / $1899 / AU$2299), the NAD C 3050 (with MDC2 BluOS-D module) (£1749 / $2449 / AU$3799) and Arcam's SA35 (£2999 / $3299 / AU$6495) all hold on to their Awards at their price bands for another year – making this one of the biggest and most varied categories of the year.

We have to give Denon’s D-M41DAB microsystem(£399 / $630 / AU$1139) a special mention too. This little budget micro comes with excellent speakers and has been our go-to entry-level system recommendation for almost a decade now.

While streaming isn’t built-in, it does feature a CD player, radio and Bluetooth. Build quality is also high. Nothing we’ve come across in all this time has made us question our affection for this modest but surprisingly capable package. It remains a great buy.

NAD took home the overall systems Product of the Year win last year, but will it hold on to that crown for another year with such strong competition for 2026? All the 2026 Product of the Year winners for each category, along with some special Awards, will be revealed at the What Hi-Fi? Awards ceremony on 12th November, so check back online next week to find out.

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Pro-Ject has announced its latest addition to the brand's established 'Debut' family of turntables, the Debut Carbon The Original.

The Original has been designed to retain the pared-back aesthetic of the often-excellent Debut range, featuring a CNC-machined MDF plinth to achieve what Pro-Ject describes as an "understated design" with a "substantial foundation".

The new deck comes equipped with a Pick it S2 Moving Magnet cartridge attached to an 8.6-inch carbon tonearm. The tonearm’s tube and headshell are crafted together as one piece, a configuration that Pro-Ject touts as "creating a direct, stable connection to the cartridge".

A low-friction aluminium bearing block supports more accurate tonearm tracking, aided by an adaptive anti-skating mechanism for more accurate vinyl playback. A TPE-damped counterweight is also included, designed to reduce arm and cartridge resonances "by up to 50 per cent".

The deck's heavy steel platter sits on an ABS sub-platter reinforced by glass fibre, driven by a precision belt and aluminium pulley. Capable of playing at 33 and 45RPM speeds via a manual speed change, Pro-Ject's new turntable is powered by an AC synchronous motor in pursuit of "a clean, controlled signal" and a stable, quiet operation.

In the box, the new turntable comes equipped with a Connect it Phono E RCA cable alongside a detachable acrylic dust cover and a felt mat.

The Pro-Ject Debut Carbon The Original is available this November in three finishes – High Gloss Black, Satin Black or Real Wood Walnut – and is priced at £499 / €599 / $649.

That price sees the Debut range return to its affordable roots, with The Original acting as a more wallet-friendly alternative to the Award-winning Debut Evo 2 (£599 / $699 / AU$1299) and the recently reviewed Debut Reference 10 (£999 / $1499 / AU$2349).

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[PRE-ROLL. Video call with Halcro's Peter Foster, Lance Hewitt, and Mike Kirkham. Inset Jez Ford for Australian Hi-Fi.]

AUSTRALIAN HI-FI (Jez): Good to see you all. All three together. Do you actually all live in the same house?

MIKE KIRKHAM (laughs): Yeah, you know, business hasn’t been good, so we’ve had to economise. Actually, I was just taking photos you’ll find useful. Lance has turned up with archives and clippings. I’ve never seen some of this, the design magazines and so on. I’ve taken photos to send you.

AHF: Fantastic. So in terms of the history, what are you keen to focus on? Primarily the modern Halcro, or the whole thing?

MK: I reckon the whole thing; it’s an interesting story, and sub-stories around the whole Minelab thing. For example at one point Minelab, while they still owned Halcro, donated a significant number of mine detectors to the Cambodian government after the Khmer Rouge pulled out. It probably resulted in saving tens of thousands of children’s lives.

AHF: So Minelab came first, yes? The Minelab detectors basically built the cash pot that made Halcro possible.

LANCE HEWITT: Well, gold prospecting was where the money came from. We made detectors that outperformed any other gold-prospecting detector on the market. So people would have to buy them if they wanted to get the gold. And the more people who have the detectors, gold becomes harder to find, so the technology improved and improved. And that’s where Minelab’s core business was, and then we went onto [commercial] mine detection afterwards, because it’s obviously a translatable technology.

Welcome, then, to a history of Halcro, the Australian company famous for creating “the best amplifier ever!”

We arranged an interview with modern Halcro’s three principals: Peter Foster, Lance Hewitt, and Mike Kirkham. We had a rough timeline to talk through, filling in stories as we went. But it soon emerged things might not be quite so linear...

And this was not unexpected, partly since Halcro’s prime mover, Mr Bruce Halcro Candy himself, was not on the call. Mr Candy doesn’t do calls. Indeed, somewhat incredibly, two of the three main players at Halcro have never met him, despite Candy still contributing to the modern company. He communicates only with Lance. And Lance might not the man to fill in all the Candy gaps.

AHF: So right at the beginning we’ve got Bruce Candy messing with amplifiers by the time he was 12 or 13 years old. He was born in Durban, South Africa, in 1952, so he was doing that in South Africa?

LANCE HEWITT: Yeah, I think so. I’m not quite sure when he came to Australia in terms of dates, but he definitely spent, you know, his formative years in South Africa.

AHF: And then he went to Cambridge.

LH: Yeah… to be honest, I’ve forgotten about all that....

MIKE KIRKHAM: He’s about 15 minutes away and he’s still designing products for us, but I’ve never met him. I saw some pictures of him today and before that I don’t think I even knew what he looked like. The only person he communicates with in the company is Lance, because they go back a long way. He still comes
up with amazing designs or ideas on pieces of paper and passes them to Lance and says, ‘here, go and build this’.

AHF: But wasn’t Bruce Candy living at the end of your road?

MK: And it’s not even a big road. It turns into a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and it’s just bizarre that we happened to find an old shed that we turned into a warehouse manufacturing space, and it turned out to be at the end of the street where the first amplifiers were made.

Bruce Halcro Candy

Reclusive as he may be, there are certain Bruce Candy legends which can’t be
omitted from any Halcro story – such as Candy famously telling Stereophile’s Jon Iverson in 2001 that “I can hear up to 23kHz in one ear and 21kHz in the other. And when I was younger, I could hear much higher frequencies than these.”

Perhaps as a result of these superpowers, he says he was “teased mercilessly” for sticking with valve amplifiers against the industry’s shift to transistors because he found that “transistor sound was ghastly; very harsh.”

Various reports add details. Candy was the son of a teacher and a university lecturer, and he took a science degree at Natal University, then an M.Sc., before earning PhDs in physics and applied mathematics in the UK, and subsequently teaching at universities in the UK, then France, and finally Australia in 1980, where he worked on microwave radar and satellite communications while teaching at a university.

Then his career took an unexpected turn. Because the one thing on which everyone agrees is that Candy is a genius in two particular regards. Firstly he has great ideas. But secondly he knows how to deliver those ideas in the real world.

And the great idea which came to him in Australia was a novel and highly effective method of metal detection. This led to the company Minelab and a wildly successful line in metal detectors right up to the present day. (If you watch the addictive Newfoundland treasure-hunting series The Curse of Oak Island, their star detectorist Gary Drayton has his ultimate go-to waterproof detector for high-resolution target discrimination and everyday artifact hunting… and it’s a Minelab CTX 3030.)

Minelab

Was Bruce Candy himself a detectorist or a gold hunter? Lance Hewitt thinks not.

“I don’t think he ever went out in the field, prospecting himself,” he says. “It was more the technical challenge, a technical issue, something to be solved. Bruce’s way of going about things is to go back to first principles, and then come up with his solutions. Smartest guy I’ve ever met.”

Candy’s ideas and circuits for metal detecting were becoming recognised as so effective that they were making rival products simply redundant. Its first release was in 1984, the Goldseekers 15000, with circuitry tailored to cancel out the heavy ground noise of Australian mineralised ground, and with a specific frequency tailored for gold. It worked brilliantly.

Lance joined Minelab after leaving the army, in 1986, although the original version of Minelab went under, returning in 1987 with the GT 16000, the world’s first automatic ground-tracking metal detector, meaning the machine adjusted on the fly to changing soil conditions. In 1989 there was the Eureka Dual Ace, the world’s first twin-frequency detector, so you could flip a switch to distinguish between big gold deposits and smaller nuggets.

Then in 1996, perhaps Candy’s most significant breakthrough in detecting: multi-period sensing (MPS), extending the depth of detection, even in highly mineralised soil. It was MPS which really launched Minelab globally, leading to subsidiaries in the USA and Ireland, and new work for governments and militaries, including detectors which were able to find the firing pins even on buried plastic landmines, leading to the removal of more than 500,000 unexploded landmines in Cambodia.

By the turn of the millennium, Candy could claim that 26 countries had bought Adelaide-made Minelab detectors, and that Minelab was the only brand purchased by the United Nations for the previous three years.

THREE EXTRAORDINARY TECHNOLOGIES

“There was a guy from the Philippines who had some money, wanted to invest in some technologies,” explains Lance.

Bruce Candy was not short of ideas. Look up his patents, for example, and there are two which relate to an early method for line detection in tennis; his ‘Tennis Electronic Lines’ system used balls with embedded metallic particules to trigger thin coils buried beneath the tennis court lines; this idea predated Hawk-Eye by a decade or more.

But to the Philippines investor, Candy offered up three other ideas. The first of these was a high-powered ultrasonic cleaning method for which Candy had made a patent application in 1993, granted in 1996. This described “an apparatus and method for ultrasonic cleaning in which a transducer in a liquid bath is driven by electronic circuitry causing rapid change of frequency to limit development of high concentration for any significant period of time.”

Previous ultrasonic cleaners had used pulses of specific fixed frequencies to create the cavitation bubbles within a liquid that did the cleaning of anything immersed in it; such bubbles collapse very suddenly and powerfully, the energy pulsing through the liquid to achieve the cleaning result. But Candy noted that fixed frequencies created standing waves, and a better cleaning effect for any given power input was achieved by using continuous wave-swept frequency modulation instead.

“Back when the Formula One Grand Prix was in Adelaide, we were approached by Williams, I think it was, to find a way of cleaning their radiator; that was one application for it,” remembers Lance.

There were many more: Candy’s patent has since been cited by examiners of 78 other applications covering marine anti-fouling, ophthalmic drug delivery, fluid management in surgery, and even modern medical ultrasonic blades.

Candy’s other two ideas offered up to the original Philippines investor play more directly into the future of the amplifier company to come. First there was a switched-mode power supply, another patent granted in 1996, using two servo loops to improve the efficiency of switch-mode regulators when used with a linear regulator; Candy’s solution reduced the high noise content of the switch-mode regulator without the inherent inefficiencies of the linear regulator.

The remarkable result seemed something which the team would easily be able to offer for sale or for licence to other power supply manufacturers.

“But no one wanted them,” Lance says, still sounding both surprised and slightly miffed. “It was an ego thing, like ‘we didn’t invent it, so we don’t want it’. Instead that switched mode power supply design ended up being the fundamental basis of the power supply used in the dm58 and dm68.”

The third of the original Extraordinary Technologies was the audio amplifier itself. While Candy had his early preference for valves, notably KT88s and EL34s, his idea here was to build a “solid-state amplifier that supersedes valve amplifiers” by using MOS-FETs and ways to reduce noise, gleaned from his experience in microwave communications and detectors.

“I just came up with the designs while riding my bicycle,” Candy later told a local reporter, adding that his interest in audio came from his grandfather who was in charge of the Royal Navy’s radio system for World War I. (The same article dubbed him the “Nutty Professor” of Basket Range, his rural town in the Adelaide Hills.)

“We made one amplifier,” says Lance. “It went to the Philippines, and I’ve never seen it again. But that was sort of the beginning of the dm58. We built prototypes of everything, ready to take them round, but then the guy from the Philippines lost interest for some reason we never really understood. So that all fell in a heap.”

Lance returned to work at Minelab, but “over the years we chatted about things, as you do, and it turned out he had found another source of capital to fund the amplifier. And I was, ‘Come on, let’s go do that’. Minelab was annoying me at the time; I felt I needed to do something else, so I went off and did that. I don’t know how much of an influence I had on him, but I certainly badgered him about it.”

The new money was coming from David Pope, who saw the potential in the technology. A new company was founded: Extraordinary Technology (Hi-Fi) Pty Ltd, trading as Halcro.

Development 1996-1999

According to Lance, the idea was to get the amplifier up and going, and then “to look at one of Bruce’s other brain waves, try to commercialise that. But we never got past the amplifier, really.”

While the Extraordinary team worked on the circuits, for industrial design they turned to Tony Kearney and Max Dickison in a company called Design Makers — the ‘dm’ of the early Halcro amps. In the very first issue of Melbourne-based design magazine Curve in 2002, Tony and Max described their first encounter with Halcro.

“We sat quietly,” they remembered, “as we were introduced to three plastic milk crates, each wired to the next and all crammed with assorted electronic components. Bruce calmly looked us in the eye and announced, ‘You are looking at the world’s most advanced amplifier’. ”

Lance remembers going to Las Vegas on a research trip with Max from ‘DM’.

“Before they did anything, we spent three days running around CES looking
at what everybody else was doing, mainly the things that we didn’t want to do,” he says. “We wanted something that didn’t look like any other amplifier, we didn’t want anybody to see any of the screws that hold it together, and a few other things. We wanted it to take up minimum floor space, so that’s why it went vertical.”

And is the ‘H’ shape a specific echo of the Halcro name?

“No, just an accident,” he says. “It was all driven by Bruce’s instructions that this must be close to that, but very, very far away from this! It was really hard to
meet all his design requirements. So it’s definitely form follows function.”

As for the secrets within the circuitry, Bruce Candy was, from the very outset, shy about providing too much detail, a habit which has been firmly adopted by the current team. Our request to describe Halcro’s power amplification in as much detail as possible brought only a response of “We make quiet things louder”, along with mention of Arthur C. Clark’s ‘third law’ that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

When pushed, Lance described it as reasonably “highly-biased AB, but other than that, there’s a dozen different things in there that nobody else pays attention to. There are some very complex concepts, and there are some very simple concepts, and it’s really the sum of the parts delivering more than each of them individually. We can’t say too much because some of the things will lead you to other interpretations which might give away too much.”

But before the legendary dm58 and dm68 were revealed to the world, there was a false start: the dm44, which was given an outing at CES Las Vegas in 1999.

“The amp first went to CES as the ‘dm44’," confirms Lance. “I think that was the first time anybody outside of the company had actually seen or heard it. I remember building the prototypes to go to CES that first time, and they had to leave on New Year’s Day or some such deadline, and then the night before we managed to blow one of them up. I ended up having the amps in the back of my car, driving them to the airport five minutes before the plane took off, that sort of thing.”

But there was another problem with the new amplifier: its name.

“We discovered that the number 44 is considered very unlucky in some cultures,” remembers Lance.

He’s not wrong; in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean, the word for the number four sounds almost identical to the word for death. High-rise buildings, hotels, and hospitals routinely skip any floor containing a 4.

“This led to the amp being renamed as the dm58,” says Lance. “Bruce then upped the power a bit and added the fourth input to make the dm68 shortly afterwards. Two models are better than one from a marketing perspective, so power and other adjustments were made to create the second one.”

After a four-year development period, the amplifiers were finally ready for the bright lights of Vegas.

“There were quite a few revisions along the way,” remembers Lance. “It takes a while to get something that good!”

CES Las Vegas 2001

With the amplifiers renamed and their development complete, next came the big Las Vegas launch at CES 2001, the brand’s first notable foray into the wider audiophile consciousness.

Design Makers had certainly made the dm58 and dm68 "different to everything else" on the outside. But the amplifiers were also different on the inside. In conversation with Jon Iverson of Stereophile, Candy himself said that “there is not even a small bit of the Halcro circuitry that is at all similar to the conventional low-distortion high-quality circuits... I don’t think any designer would guess that the parts list, if seen in isolation, was of an amplifier.”

Such parts reportedly included an 18GHz-bandwidth transistor for a microwave circuit, as noted by Isao Shibazaki in his report on the dm68 following 2001’s Tokyo International Audio Show. Shibazaki made as close a description of the amplification as anyone has managed, noting that while minor-loop negative feedback is applied, overall negative feedback is not applied. He notes the output stage as having six MOSFET pairs in parallel at the output stage, confirmed as running in “Class-AB close to Class-A model without complementary turn-off operation”.

In a later dm38 review by John Atkinson, Candy confirmed that key to the design is distortion-cancelling circuitry which ‘floats’ up and down with the output stage. Even though the output-stage voltage rails are conventionally high, this rail-tracking circuitry ‘sees’ only around 10V, allowing the use of very wide-bandwidth small-signal devices in the error-cancelling circuitry.

“This is all classical microwave stuff,” Candy explained to Atkinson back then, although Atkinson seemed largely as non-plussed as we remain today (see our ‘best guess’ panel below).

The reaction at the show was excellent, yet also controversial, especially the claims that Halcro was making for its amplifiers’ performance. In an article after the show headlined “Australia’s Halcro Has Some Explaining To Do”, Iverson wrote that “What has raised the eyebrows of the audio community is a bold claim that it is ‘the only amplifier in the world to challenge a theoretical limit’. That limit is the specification for harmonic and IM distortion, which the company claims to have virtually eliminated via its circuitry, whose design is a closely-guarded secret. Halcro says that its dm 68 “produces less than 25 parts per billion harmonic distortion at 1kHz, and the worst result is about 600 parts per billion at 20kHz at full power, a frequency where most amplifiers exhibit very poor behaviour.”

Such great claims coupled with secrecy as to how things are achieved inevitably represented a red flag to reviewers, so it would be the subsequent reviews and measurements that might make or break public opinion on these upstart Australian amplifiers.

And this is perhaps the most famous part of the Halcro story — the dm58 review by Paul Bolin, with measurements by John Atkinson, appeared in the October 2002 issue of the US-based Stereophile, along with a front cover proclaiming it as ‘The Best Amplifier Ever’. Even by modern reviewing standards, the reviewing comments were impossibly positive.

“The revolution has arrived,” wrote Bolin. “My reaction… utter disbelief… dynamic performance that mere mortal amps cannot manage… transcendently neutral… detail retrieval bordered on the supernatural…”

Even more astounding were John Atkinson’s measurements, which confirmed Halcro’s controversial claims.

“Halcro’s dm58 offers astonishing measured performance for an amplifier,” he concluded, having noted that “THD+noise percentage at 157W into 8 ohms… is 0.0006% or less across most of the band, rising very slightly above 10kHz. I can’t
swear to the accuracy of this figure, however; even at this high power, the Halcro’s intrinsic distortion level appears to be of the same order as the output of the Audio Precision System One signal generator!”

In other words, exactly as Candy had claimed, Halcro had the only amplifier in the world to challenge theoretical limits.

The forward path

For those who know only the dm58, dm68 and successor amplifiers, the breadth of Halcro’s full range may surprise. Even when reporting that first Las Vegas launch, Iverson had mentioned that new products for 2001 would include a dm38 stereo amp and a dm33 three-channel amplifier, with a six-channel amplifier to follow, “in a more conventional case”.

Indeed there were soon two Halcro ‘divisions’: Halcro Reference for the amplifiers, and Halcro Logic, under which were launched a series of multi-channel amplifiers: a two-channel mc20, three-channel mc30, 5-channel mc50, 7-channel mc70... but also a video processor and a DVD player.

AUSTRALIAN HI-FI: So after Vegas, you’re putting more products together as original Halcro. What was the goal of the company when you’re getting into video processing and multi-channel amps, beyond just hi-fi?

LANCE HEWITT: We were making the power amps, and then the pre-amp was next, I think [the dm8 & dm10 preamps appeared in 2002]. But someone did a marketing report, or they saw a marketing report, saying home theatre is the big booming market for audio. So if we get 1% of this million-dollar market, we’ll all be rich — that was the thought, to go where the market was supposed to be expanding. That was where the Class-D Lyrus module came in, and the video processor, the Logic SSP, designed for us by a company in Finland — when they work, they’re fantastic — and eventually the DVD player.

MIKE KIRKHAM: That was an SACD player that also did DVDs, the EC 800. We’ve still got a few for sale, and people love them; they were a beautifully-made product. It was a Swiss-made SACD transport…

LH: It was German. Well, I think so. It’s a German-modified transport.

MK: And a really good-sounding player even by today’s standards.

AHF: When you say you’re still selling a few, have you still got stores of this stuff?

MK: We’ve still got a few bits and pieces lying around. When we bought the company, we inherited a lot of stock, and we funded the first couple of years of our existence selling especially the pallet-loads of those multichannel amps. Those were based around Halcro’s own proprietary Class-D, we call it Lyrus. Audiophiles love them. It was an early Class D that doesn’t sound like anyone else’s; it’s not bandwidth limited, is that right?

LH: Well it is a bit, they all are. It’s more linear than any other Class-D.

MK: It’s quite a musical sound. In the early reports in Stereophile of the Lyrus amps, I think Art Dudley described it as the closest he’d heard to a tube amplifier from a solid-state, and that’s just because the distortion was vanishingly low on it.

In that 2006 mc20 review, Dudley also usefully details Lyrus as achieving low
distortion through a distortion cancellation method called ‘carrier-symmetry modulation’, a circuit that actively modulates the carrier wave and corrects its symmetry during amplification. A relevant Candy patent filed in 2004 describes this correction as altering the slopes of the triangular-wave carrier reference signal, the peaks of which track any difference in potential between power supply rails which supply the output switching stage. (A separate patent describes the switching semi-conductors being connected to at least a first power supply voltage node and a second power supply node, with distortion reduction also achieved by damping between these nodes using, for example, a low-inductance damping snubber circuit with a first resistor in series with a second capacitor connected via a low inductance path between the power supplies.) Such are perhaps some of the secrets of Lyrus…

In the same year Halcro’s Reference division replaced the dm58 and dm68 with the new flagship dm78 and dm88.

But then in 2008, Minelab was purchased by Codan, a South Australian communications company, then best known for HF radio. Codan’s first major product in the 1960s had been an HF radio transceiver for the outback School of the Air network, while it had moved into military technologies after its ASX listing in 2003. Minelab and Candy’s expertise were a perfect fit for Codan.

But an audio company was not. Codan announced that Halcro (aka Extraordinary Technology) was not part of the acquisition.

AUSTRALIAN Hi-FI: When Minelab was sold, did Halcro just stop dead? That must have been very disappointing.

LANCE HEWITT: It was a bit. Codan saw the profit in the metal detection aspect of Minelab, because it was going gangbusters. But they didn’t see any need for the audio part, the Halcro business. So it just got put to sleep; they just turned it off. We did try on our own for a little while; we tried along with some ex-Minelab lab management, that lasted about a year, but it just didn’t work. Then the business closed and all the stuff was put in storage. For a year or two Philip Guttentag [co-founder and CEO of Vivid Audio in Durban, South Africa] looked at buying the company; we made a few amplifiers in my shed, but eventually Halcro was basically orphaned. It all just sat in a warehouse.

A meeting at Wolfie's

Then comes the second legendary moment: the rebirth of Halcro through a chance conversation in a record shop.

Before retelling this famous anecdote, however, Mike Kirkham wanted to point out a continuity to Halcro which is rarely acknowledged. While production and development may have been mothballed, all of its customers were still being supported continuously — by Lance.

““Lance had the keys to the warehouse,” says Mike, “and any customer or email that came in went straight to Lance.”

Lance was working for a radio equipment company called RFI, doing PCB design and CAD work for them, but if any Halcro needed fixing, Lance was ready.

“No one was left in the lurch,” he says. So every Halcro customer has had continuous support since purchase.

The record store of legend was Wolfie’s Records, in Sterling, in the Adelaide Hills, set up by one Wolfgang Schiblhut, flipping an old butcher’s shop into a record store with some hi-fi on the side. Wolfie’s Records is still going, now relocated to Norwood.

“I’d be there on a Saturday morning because he sold a little bit of Magenta Audio’s tube amps in there, and I’m a massive record collector too, so I’d buy records and started helping him out behind the counter,” remembers Mike. “And one day Wolfie introduced me to Lance…”

“And the reason for that,” interrupts Lance, “is that Wolfie had asked me to fix a couple of things in the gear he had – I knew him because I used to coach his son at soccer. Adelaide’s a very small town!”

“So Wolfie introduced me to Lance,” continues Mike, “and told me that he worked for Halcro. And I said ‘seriously? what’s happening with Halcro?’, because obviously I knew the brand very well. And then Lance said it was all sitting down in a warehouse in Port Adelaide, and did I want to buy it? I rang Peter, I think, on that day; Peter’s very good at honing in on stuff like that and doing deals.”

Peter Foster was already part of Magenta Audio with Mike Kirkham, the pair having started it together in 2010, before which he had also been part owner of Mike’s previous business the Electric Room. That was “the first online pro audio retailer”, Mike says, launched in 2005.

“‘Peter helped me with that as well, mainly because those were the days when it took two days to write code for a checkout, stuff like that. The business went very well for a few years, then everyone came online and it became a race to the bottom, so I said, let’s go back to our main love, hi-fi. And that’s when Magenta Audio started, initially, as a retailer in Adelaide, then I heard about PS Audio and put my hand up to be a distributor. And that very quickly built Magenta; it was a good brand to land at the time.”

PETER FOSTER: Since we’d started Magenta, I’d been back and forward to the US anyway, into Silicon Valley four, five, six times a year, so I took those opportunities to make side visits to PS Audio, for example, and I’d help establish those long-term relationships with suppliers.

“At the time of the Wolfie’s meeting, I was running my own electronics company; we made test and measurement equipment for laboratories — started off building fibre-optic test gear, then expanded into more general electronic test and measurement business. And I was in the process of scaling out of that business, looking for something ‘next’. Halcro came up around 9 to 12 months before I was due to exit. It just seemed the natural thing to do; I’ve pulled apart and rebuilt every amplifier I’ve ever owned, so Halcro just seemed to be the next part of that hobby puzzle for me. “

AUSTRALIAN HI-FI: But you didn’t just roll this into Magenta, you started Longwood Audio as a separate company. Who were you actually buying the Halcro stuff from? Was it still Minelab?

PF: No, from Extraordinary Technologies. When Minelab closed Halcro, they were still separate businesses, so they had closed the door of Extraordinary Technologies. Lance introduced me to the guy who was notionally the CEO of the shell company, and he told me it was worth millions of dollars, and I told him it wasn’t, and eventually we came to a number more to our benefit than his. We bought all the assets, everything that was in the warehouse, all the IP, all the tooling, all the jigs, and all the old stock, some of which was still in America, and we had shipped back to us.

AHF: Was that a big weekend, moving everything out of the warehouse?

PF: It was more than a weekend!

MIKE KIRKHAM: Plus we got a call from some storage company in the US saying ‘you owe us all this money, we’ve been storing your gear’. So we paid the bill, had it all sent in a container; we had no idea what we had until we opened it.

LH: A lot of it wasn’t even our stuff...

MK: It was like cooking stuff, as well. And then we got a call from Paddy in Ireland who used to do servicing for us. He goes, ‘When are you going to collect all your Halcro stuff that was part of Halcro Europe?’ We didn’t know there was any Halcro Europe! So we had all that shipped over as well.

PF: For quite a few years, we called it the gift that kept giving. It meant that we could fund everything up to Eclipse, because we hadn’t released any new products. And it took us seven years to develop Eclipse.

Relaunching Halcro – with a loudspeaker?

AUSTRALIAN HI-FI: What took the time there? You were tweaking up the dm88 as a starting point?

PETER FOSTER: It was part-time work, and we had a bit of a diversion where we developed an electrostatic loudspeaker, which took us an inordinate amount of time, a lot of resources, and in some ways, it’s a little bit of a folly. But a stunning loudspeaker. At the time, you know, loudspeakers weren’t stratospheric prices like they are now, and we couldn’t see how it was going to be practical, because it was very expensive to make, and very large, very heavy. But those things are par for the course now.

MIKE KIRKHAM: So, what happened is Magenta was distributing a product called Soltanus Acoustics out of Serbia. And I’m not a big fan of electrostatics, but these sounded phenomenal, and so we contacted them, and they said that we could build you something significantly bigger than this, and using your power supply technology, this could be quite special.

PF: We set up a spin-off, which had some of the technology in it, and we funded that for a bit to the point where we got this loudspeaker developed, and then, you know, the size and the cost meant that we really needed to focus back on the core business of amplifiers. We might bring it back at some point, but we needed to focus on what the market knew us for, rather than coming back with what would appear to be a disjoint.

MK: Halcro’s coming back to the market building amplifiers, here’s what we did with a loudspeaker. But it was really to grab attention. We had it in the foyer at one of the Melbourne shows. Not with the intention of releasing the loudspeaker then, but that we may do it at some point.

Building new amplifiers

AUSTRALIAN Hi-FI: So back on the amplifiers, how hard was that to redefine Halcro with the Eclipse? What problems did you have?

MIKE KIRKHAM: It’s a complete reinvention, really. Every circuit’s been upgraded and quite a few of the circuits have changed. Everything got inspected, put under the microscope and we can change this, upgrade that. And so, you know, while the underlying topology is similar, it is actually quite a dramatic shift, and that’s something I think we have been very good at educating the market about. I mean, I love the dm88 and I love the early amps, but there’s an expressive musicality now to the Eclipse, a vitality to the sound now that wasn’t there before, and that’s partly that every element was looked into in great detail, and partly the input stage.

LANCE HEWITT: Bruce provided a new input stage circuit, though it didn’t work, the first one, so there was a bit of time going through that, working out why, and then coming out with the ultimate design that we had.

MK: So Lance used to wheel it over to my place, as I have the listening room here, and he’d say, ‘I made this change’, and I’d go, ‘yeah, you know, still not doing it for me, it still sounds like an 88’. But when he had worked on this input stage with Bruce, he wheeled the thing over and it was just mindbogglingly good. It was so musically expressive. I think I rang him up at 10 o’clock at night, then I rang Peter at 11, saying you’ve got to hear this. This is a big, big shift.

LH: It was a completely new topology. And what was learnt developing that
input stage has found its way into the pre-amp. So the Equinox pre-amp is based on the new circuit that went into the Eclipse.

AHF: The US was a big market for OG Halcro; are you attempting to rebuild that?

PETER FOSTER: It was historically the biggest market for Halcro, but we haven’t really reached the US market with the new products yet. Europe has actually been a big, big market for us, and Asia is really opening up and waking up to the product.

MK: One of the reasons for the US, in fact probably all markets, is that a lot of people have said customers don’t want to buy a power amp, they want a power amp and a matching preamp, which we now have in the Equinox, which is getting fantastic reviews; it’s an outstanding pre-amp. Lance has done an amazing job on that, and the word’s getting out there about it.

PF: And we’ve had early commitments on the integrated, so I think when we do get to the point of showing the integrated publicly, we’re going to have a reasonably strong order book at that point.

A new integrated...

AUSTRALIAN HI-FI: You mention the new integrated, what can you tell us about that? Is it the same form of amplification as used in the power amps?

MIKE KIRKHAM: It’s almost the audio stage of an Eclipse.

PETER FOSTER: It’s not. It’s similar to Eclipse, a similar structure.

MK: It’s some of the same proprietary design of the Eclipse, with a scaled down version of an Equinox, probably with a different type of power supply, we’re still experimenting with that. But we’re close to drawing a line under the electronics and should be close to drawing a line under the look as well.

PF: Always notoriously our difficult component [the others laugh].

MK: That’s been our problem all along. The electronics, relatively simple. You know, the hard bit is simple for us. And the ‘easy’ bit of building the box is the hard bit. Because we can’t agree on what it should look like.

LANCE HEWITT: You have no idea how hard the finish is; the painting, for example, is stupidly difficult. Just the finish.

MK: The Eclipse chassis was completely changed from the dm Halcros, that made a difference, in getting rid of the ‘ring’.

PF: And one of the things that I think we’re finding out, our approach to the industrial design, it’s beautiful in its own right. Let’s evolve the design. Let’s make it more robust. Let’s, you know, improve resonances in the chassis and all of those things, but let’s bring what is a dated design and make it modern and fresh.

So the next generation of amplifiers are going to be moving down the design language of the Equinox. The Equinox was always designed to be a bridge between the Halcro design language of the past, with that ellipse cut through the top, but also bridging with where we go next. And I think where we go next is going to be quite interesting. We’re going for an understated classic yet progressive, a departure from that classic pillar structure in the past. That product will still be there, but where we’re going is something more conventional in footprint.

MK: I’m really loving the look of the new amp. That’s where we get it right. We are absolute perfectionists. We want it to look incredible, to be distinguishable and iconic. We want it to sound phenomenal, which it does ­— I can testify to that because I’ve been living with a prototype now for quite some time.

AHF: Does Lance still come with a milk crate full of stuff and say ‘I’ve got this far’?

LH: It’s not quite a milk crate any more! We’ve got some metalwork to put it in. But yeah, I put together the circuit and obviously I measure it, then, yes, it’s ‘listen to this, see what you think’...

PF: So the integrated amplifier is coming, and we expect it to be right at the pinnacle of amplifiers. It’s going to be at a more affordable price range than our current products...

MK: Our goal is to be able to have a working version to launch at next Axpona next April. Whether that happens or not.. but that’s what we’re aiming for.

And there's more...

The new integrated is clearly top of mind. But before that, Halcro has something for existing customers — a newly available upgrade, which will be known as Orbit.

“This is an evolution of the DMs developed from the breakthrough precision input stage at the heart of the Eclipse preamplifier,” explains Mike Kirkham. “This breakthrough circuit architecture lies at the heart of what makes Eclipse so special, and DM owners can now upgrade their amplifiers with this core Eclipse technology, delivering greater precision and improved spatial realism, an even closer connection to the original musical performance – while preserving the legendary Halcro character."

So upgraded original ‘dm’ amps, and a new integrated on the way. But what of the Lyrus Class-D module? Lyrus has never really seen the light of day for modern Halcro, although it is used in Kyron Audio’s top flagship system. For Halcro, it’s remarkable to keep such a technology sitting in a back pocket indefinitely.

Lance does admit that, “We had a few replacement multichannel products sort of half-designed. But we never finished one, I think mainly because we couldn’t decide on how it looked...”

A two-channel Lyrus integrated amplifier might now be more likely than a return to multichannel. And there’s always that giant electrostatic speaker which might yet re-emerge from Halcro’s back room.

But not in any particular rush.

“We’ve done it all at our own pace,” says Mike Kirkham. “Initially Halcro was taken on as a little bit of a hobby, so that was the decision that Peter and I made very early on. It’s been a slow build...”

For many of us, the music format we first listened to when we were young still has a nostalgic hold on us.

Whether it was the cassette tape and its easily tangled spool, the shiny and futuristic CD disc, the good ol' vinyl record, or even the wondrous little MiniDisc – physical music formats give us a tangible and emotional connection that streaming still can't quite match. (And of course, once you buy a piece of physical media, it's yours to own forever.)

We might be in a nostalgic mood with What Hi-Fi? turning 50 years old this year, but we have also been enjoying a resurgence and appreciation for physical music – from the vinyl revival of the past decade to the more recent uptick in CD sales.

It's made us wonder: what is your favourite physical music format of the past few decades?

Is it the very first format you listened to – say, tape or vinyl – or did the advent of CDs and perhaps even SACDs take over in your estimation? Is it to do with convenience and price, or does sound quality reign supreme in your choice of physical music format?

Do you still mourn the loss of the MiniDisc, or even have a collection of DVD-Audio discs from its brief moment in the sun? Does anyone still favour (and have) reel-to-reel tapes over all else?

Or do you simply buy a mix of formats, depending on your whims?

We aren't trying to start a format war here; we want this to be a celebration of the various physical formats on which we enjoy listening to music.

We simply want to know which physical music format is your preference and why – and we'd love to hear your thoughts and stories connected to it.

For instance, despite my recent infatuation with all things vinyl and turntable-related, the cassette tape was my first music format.

And even though I may still get a nostalgic thrill from using a pencil to wind up the tape, it's CDs and their little booklets with lyrics, anecdotes and sometimes hidden messages from the artist that remain near and dear to my heart. That's the format that I listened to and collected throughout my teens into adulthood.

So let us know your favourite physical music format choice(s) – you can wax lyrical all about it in the comments below, on our forum or on our social media channels.

We'll put them all together in a follow-up article at the end of the month, so you can see your fellow readers' picks!

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It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that a love of music and hi-fi tend to go hand in hand.

After all, one of the reasons we get into hi-fi and usually never stop tinkering with our systems is a borderline neurotic desire to make the music we love sound as good as possible.

It’s also why, whether it’s the best prog rock album of all time or your favourite acoustic track, whenever we ask about music, we know we’re going to get some strong responses from you, our discerning readers.

But what we didn’t expect when we asked which album you use to break in a new turntable, at the start of October, was the sheer volume and variety of responses you then fired back.

In fact, within minutes of the article going live, your answers came in rapid fire.

“Without doubt: St Germain, Tourist. Very few albums ever had that kind of dynamic sound," wrote on-site commentator Dibo, kicking off the proceedings.

“Dire Straits and Telegraph Road. Always,” Facebook follower Paul Hadgett then quickly followed up on Facebook.

“Shine On You Crazy Diamond, off Pink Floyd’s Delicate Sound Of Thunder live album,” commenter Kaz Urbanski added.

From there, it all went off the rails, with everything from expected hi-fi staples, including Mike Oldfield and Neil Young, to booming metal from Iron Maiden and Tool being suggested.

And everyone’s right

And as the suggestions continued, we started to notice a wonderful trend. Specifically, you were all being very nice about the whole thing and acknowledging a simple truth: there is no right answer.

Some pointed out the best record is the one you feel like listening to at the time. This was nicely summed up by Facebook follower Edwin van Rooijen, who argued, “If I don’t feel joy, then something is wrong.”

This was followed up by Facebook follower James Beaumont, who told us, “I just pick what I fancy at the time. Maybe some Pixies or Neil Young or anything that appeals.”

Others took an alternative route, arguing the one they use is the one they know best. They included DrJimC, who commented, “I just bought a Rega P6 RS and played Electric Ladyland, because it was the last album I played on my Nottingham Analogue. Good test.”

And then G Money, who took things back even further, revealed his go-to is That's The Way Of The World by Earth, Wind & Fire due to its connection to his first proper system, telling us:

“It was the first record I played after I got my first serious ‘stereo’, Yamaha CR-800, Dual 1257; it just jumped out of those speakers.”

Our hot take

Some albums are recorded better than others. Listen to Black Flag, and you’ll see what we mean – great band, terrible audio production, and I say that as a die-hard fan.

That’s why the What Hi-Fi? team has favourite recordings and albums we use when testing hi-fi. But, being brutally honest, we’re paid to do that, and we 100 per cent agree that, ultimately, the answer for people listening from home is “whatever makes you happy”.

Music is there to be enjoyed, and though strict audiophilia can be a rigid stance, focused on brutal transparency above all else, for most of us, it’s about enjoying the music we love – and there’s no reason to get snippy about people’s personal tastes. Different strokes and all that…

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Philips has introduced its latest portable radio, the TAR3500. The durable new model touts a blend of "reliable technology, sustainable design and intuitive usability" for adventurers, campers, explorers and, say it quietly, anyone worried that their power might go out.

The Philips TAR3500 is equipped with a 5.7cm full-range driver driven by 3 watts of power in its compact form. It features AM and FM radio tuners, with an extendable 550mm antenna promising clear and strong reception even in remote areas.

Philips's portable radio promises around 60 hours of playtime on a single charge via its built-in battery, and can even be used to recharge small devices such as phones via its USB-A power bank. The radio can be charged via standard USB-C, as well as solar, AAA batteries or even a good old-fashioned hand crank.

The new radio is equipped with an easy-to-read LED display and an "intuitive" user interface, offering auto digital tuning and 20 station presets for what Philips describes as "stress-free operation".

A IP55-rated housing provides reliable protection against dust and water ingress, so it should be able to cope if the weather turns nasty. If things get really tough, the TAR3500 includes an orange SOS button that activates a loud emergency siren, as well as a flashing light signal and an ultrasonic dog whistle. A built-in carry strap further adds to its portable credentials.

The TAR3500 is equipped with a built-in flashlight and a reading light for squeezing some nighttime novels into your camping trip, while a 3.5 mm headphone jack is on hand if you don't want to disturb your fellow ramblers as they snooze.

The Philips TAR3500 is available now, priced at £50 / $69.

Philips isn't alone in offering these features in a portable radio, as Roberts also recently launched the solar-powered SolarDAB 99 (£150) which we put through its paces on an overnight camping trip a few months ago.

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Shanling is moving upmarket with its latest network music player. Whereas the SM1.3 streamer from two years ago cost £1199 / $1999, the upgraded model is heading for a more premium rung up the ladder.

The new Shanling SM1.3R HD is priced at a more premium £1799 / $1699, meaning it has to beat a formidable rival in the shape of the current Award-winning Arcam ST25.

Similar to its predecessor, the SM1.3R HD is a network streamer, DAC and headphone amplifier with extensive streaming and file support, with the new version sporting a larger display and Shanling's own discrete R2R digital conversion technology instead of the previous AKM DAC chip.

Shanling's in-house developed R2R (resistor-to-resistor) DAC architecture draws on the same tech used in its flagship SCD3.3 SACD player, which has 212 ultra-precision resistors with a claimed "0.01% accuracy" and promises to deliver a sound that's "natural and analogue-like."

The unit uses twin toroidal transformers for its linear power supply, with separate supplies going to the digital and analogue sections. Shanling says this offers a stable, clean delivery of power across its audio circuits, and that this arrangement complements the "precision of its resistor-based conversion system."

The DAC supports hi-res files up to 32-bit/768kHz and DSD512, although this maximum resolution is natively achieved via the USB port only. For other digital connections, the native hi-res support maxes out at 24-bit/192kHz PCM.

Digital connections include coaxial, optical and DAC inputs to plug in a laptop, CD player or USB media hard drives, and you can connect the streamer to your hi-fi system thanks to RCA line-level and balanced XLR outputs.

The Shanling also offers digital outputs so you can bypass its internal DAC and use your own, while a dedicated headphone amplifier section with a 6.3mm jack and selectable gain is available for wired listening.

On the network streaming side, it features extensive support for popular music apps such as Tidal and Qobuz (and their Connect versions), as well as built-in access for Apple Music, Amazon Music and Spotify. The unit is Roon Ready, features DLNA and AirPlay 2, and you can stream music over your home network thanks to dual-band Wi-Fi 6 and wired Ethernet.

You can even store your hi-res digital music files on the SM1.3R HD itself thanks to an internal storage of 64GB and an M.2 SSD slot for larger libraries.

There is support for Bluetooth streaming as well, with higher-quality codecs such as LDAC, aptX HD and aptX Adaptive available.

Elsewhere, the streamer's aluminium casework sports the same design as before, albeit with a larger 5.98-inch screen of 2560 x 1440-pixel resolution to better show off album artwork and menus. The Shanling runs on an Android platform, with app access alongside on-unit button controls.

The Shanling SM1.3R HD is available now in black and silver finishes, costing £1799 / $1699.

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JBL's Classic Series has long paid homage to the brand's speakers from the 1970s, and now it has a new flagship.

The L150 Classic is a three-way floorstanding design that combines classic styling with modern acoustics to deliver "the scale, dynamics, and realism sought by serious music listeners," according to JBL.

With its walnut veneer, the design might be as 70s as a kipper tie and flared trousers, but inside we're promised modern drivers, crossover design and acoustic tuning.

Key to the design is a large 15-inch Pure Pulp Differential Drive woofer, which JBL claims allows for plenty of dynamic headroom and bass authority.

The woofer is joined by a 6.5-inch polymer-coated Pure Pulp midrange driver and a 1-inch titanium dome tweeter that's mated to an advanced waveguide and acoustic lens to produce "an enhanced soundstage". Crossover points of 310Hz and 1.8kHz have been chosen to bring the three drivers together to create a coherent sound.

But it's not just the drivers that have been designed for optimum sound quality.

The angled profile and sloped front baffle of each cabinet direct sound towards the listener, while the vented, bass-reflex enclosure with dual front ports extends low-frequency response to 33Hz.

You can also customise the sound to your room setup using the front panel high- and low-frequency attenuators.

Aesthetically, they're very much in keeping with the Classic Series, with the foam grilles sporting the same Quadrex design as other models in the range like the L100 and L82.

The JBL L150 Classic will go on sale in 2027 for $9999 (around £7500 / AU$14,000) per pair.

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Musical Fidelity has expanded its 'B-Line' of hi-fi separates with its new CD player, the B1xcd.

Following up on the B1xi integrated amplifier we reviewed late last year, the new CD player aims to bring Musical Fidelity's "high-end philosophy to a more accessible price".

The B1xcd uses the new 'BlueTiger CD-88' servo as the brains of the operation, designed to offer advanced error correction to achieve "perfect CD playback at all times".

The CD player uses a tray loader mechanism, employing a low-vibration mounting which, alongside a robust metal cover, aims to "dramatically reduce jitter and extraneous noise".

At the heart of new spinner is an ESS9018Q2M Sabre DAC chip, which contributes to the player's "warm, natural, and engaging presentation", says Musical Fidelity.

The B1xcd is equipped with analogue RCA outputs, while coaxial and optical digital outputs mean it can be used as a CD transport by connecting to an outboard DAC.

The B1xcd is constructed using premium materials, including an aluminium front panel and an all-metal chassis. Musical Fidelity teases "effortless" operation thanks to the B1xcd's front-mounted metal controls and a large LCD display. A remote control is also provided in the box.

The Musical Fidelity B1xcd is available now, priced at a competitive £549 / $799. The new contender sits between two current Award-winners, the Marantz CD 70 (£499 / $750 ) and the Arcam CD5 (£699 / $699), so it will have to work hard if it wants to deliver similarly superb sound-per-pound performance.

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If radios could talk, we are fairly sure they would make great use of the phrase “back in my day”. Indeed, times used to be simpler for the humble wireless radio. In the not too distant past, it only had to cope with two wireless bands, FM and AM. Talk about having it easy.

Since those days of yore, of course, the radio landscape has shifted, with DAB, Bluetooth and wi-fi streaming expanding the traditionally expected feature set of modern portable radios.

Founded in 2002, Pure entered the picture at a time when the wheels of change were beginning to roll into motion. Nonetheless, as the pace has picked up, the company has kept up, producing a variety of internet radios in recent years.

But sometimes it is good to go back to basics. Indeed, many brands, such as Roberts and Ruark Audio have recently produced great portable radios that stick to their guns with DAB+, FM and Bluetooth listening options. Pure’s latest radio, the Bloom, does just that, but comes up against steep competition from the current What Hi-Fi? Award-winner for the best radio under £100, the Roberts Revival Petite 2.

Facing an Award winner is no small challenge for a new product, so we look forward to seeing what this radio has in store.

Price

At a price of £120 / $140 / AU$190, the Bloom lands towards the middle of Pure’s Bluetooth-equipped radio offering. The radio’s main rival at this price is the five-star Roberts Revival Petite 2, which currently costs £100 / $120 / AU$196. The two radios are similarly equipped and while they have a clear size difference, we can’t help but wonder what that small additional expense is going to provide.

Build

The Bloom is a modestly sized radio, just a little bit smaller than a compact two-slice toaster, at 12.8 x 19 x 7.8cm (hwd). Weighing just 1kg and featuring a synthetic leather strap, it is eminently portable, but it is just as well-suited for home use, and will fit seamlessly into living spaces, thanks to its understated, classy design.

The radio’s plastic casing feels robust and has an IPX5 rating for water resistance, which will come as good news to anyone hoping to get out of the house and make the most of its portability. Its matte finish also avoids collecting fingerprints remarkably well.

The Bloom is available in three colourways of Sage, Sand and Black. We have test samples of both the Sage and Sand finishes, which are pleasingly subtle and look good wherever we place the radio. A woven plastic grating protects the radio’s frontal 63mm full-range driver and looks convincingly cloth-like.

Looking at the radio face on, you’ll see a 37mm colour display, which despite its petite dimensions, keeps text at a decent size and looks crisp and clear. During radio playback, the screen displays the selected station, time, signal strength and battery level. While streaming from Bluetooth, the source device and track title are shown.

The screen’s brightness can be adjusted, but in its default setting it is bright enough to be clearly readable in a well-lit room.

To the screen’s right, there are five assignable preset buttons (for both DAB+ and FM) and a ‘+’ button, which accesses the full list of 40 preset slots. Notably, 40 presets are available for both FM and DAB+, which is more than we can ever imagine ourselves using.

The front of the radio also houses buttons for Bluetooth, Home menu access, and skipping tracks/cycling radio stations. There is also a nicely sized volume dial, which doubles as a control for the menu screen once it is selected.

When streaming via Bluetooth, clicking the dial will pause the song that is playing and skipping forwards / backwards on the radio will also control the source device. We enjoy this feature because, paired with the on-screen display, it allows us to spend time away from our mobile devices.

On the back of the radio, a passive bass radiator, etched with a floral emblem, dominates most of the rear panel. The remaining space houses a small bracket for the telescopic antenna and a thick silicone flap, which protects the USB-C charging port and a recessed factory-reset button.

Features

The Bloom supports DAB, DAB+, FM and Bluetooth playback, which offers plenty of listening options from thousands of radio stations as well as any streaming services from your smartphone or laptop.

It doesn’t include any options for wired listening. The lack of a headphone output is a little disappointing, given that cheaper rivals such as the Roberts Revival Petite 2 include a 3.5mm stereo headphone output.

The Pure pairs easily with our iPhone via Bluetooth 5.3, and, once connected, keeps up a stable connection throughout testing. Only the standard SBC Bluetooth codec is supported here, but we wouldn’t usually expect high-res codecs at this price.

Clicking the radio’s ‘Home’ button opens the main menu, where users can select their sound source. Settings are also accessible via the main menu, and include an equaliser, sleep timer, time/date settings, screen brightness, automatic safety alert set-up, factory reset and details about the software version. There’s a fairly wide array of languages available, too, which is a nice, inclusive touch.

The built-in equaliser includes three default settings: ‘Dynamic’ is intended for outdoor and cross-room listening and seems to add an extra kick to bass and high frequencies, ‘Comfort’ rolls off high frequencies and processes sound for a more relaxed, close-range-listening-friendly presentation, while ‘Neutral’ aims to deliver music as faithfully as possible to the source material. For everyday listening, we opt for the ‘Neutral’ setting as it provides the most balanced sound.

A ‘Custom’ equalisation option can also be configured using a three-band EQ. It isn’t uncommon for radios of this sort to include treble and bass controls, but a midrange control is a nice touch, adding that extra portion of tonal adaptability.

When it comes to battery life, the Bloom falls slightly behind cheaper competitors, with just 16 hours available on a full charge. The rival Roberts lasts for a claimed 20 hours.

During testing, when we play the radio for long periods, we find ourselves needing to recharge the radio every two days. Given that users will often leave radios playing in the background, we would have liked a slightly longer battery life.

When the battery runs out completely, the Bloom recharges in approximately five-and-a-half hours via a USB-C port on the back panel.

Sound

Sonically, the Pure Bloom radio has plenty of virtues, with a balanced sound that is also capable of shining a light on musical subtleties. Of course, sound quality depends on the strength of your signal, but once a strong signal is secured, the radio maintains a solid performance across DAB+ and FM stations. Streaming via Bluetooth adds an extra touch of clarity, letting the Bloom’s dinky driver shine to the best of its ability.

Relative to its size, the unit delivers a decently weighty low-end but, crucially, it manages to keep bass well under control. The radio’s midrange is a particular highlight, rendering voices with a natural, even-handed sound that occupies centre-stage without becoming overly dominant. Song vocals sound detailed and expressive, while radio presenters come across with ample clarity and personality.

In terms of absolute clarity, however, we feel that this radio could do a little more. Listening to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor via Bluetooth, the orchestral arrangement is warm and fairly expressive, but we find that rivals such as the Roberts Revival Petite 2 offer a more impactful performance with an enhanced sense of drama and air. While listening to music with dense high-mid frequencies, the Bloom also sometimes struggles to keep up, and can start to sound a touch coarse.

Dynamically, this radio tracks subtle shifts in volume with a reasonable degree of precision. Across genres, from jangling pop songs to ambient electronic soundtracks, the Bloom lets dynamics flow with ease. Rhythms, too, are clear and compelling. Listening to New Muscles by Mary In The Junkyard, the strong central beat remains powerful, and we find ourselves carried along by the music.

When we crank the volume up, the Bloom does well to hang on to a sense of composure up to all but its very highest volumes, where the sound becomes a little too boisterous. At low volumes, the radio retains its sonic character, delivering a full-bodied and rich sound.

Verdict

The Pure Bloom is a reasonably priced and well-equipped portable radio. With an entertaining sound and a healthy set of features, this handsome little unit will be just as at home on a picnic blanket as on a bedside table.

While it misses out on a class-leading sonic performance, we think that anyone looking for an affordable and capable portable radio should pay close attention to the Bloom.

Review published: 27th October 2026

SCORES

• Sound 4
• Build 5
• Features 4

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As far as years go, 2016 was a tough one for music. In the space of just 12 months, music fans bade farewell to David Bowie, Prince, George Michael, Keith Emerson and Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, the Eagles’ Glenn Frey, A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg, country music pioneer Merle Haggard, and many others. For almost every conceivable taste in music, there was someone to grieve that year.

While the losses mounted, the October arrival of Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker seemed like a much needed reprieve. Although the album wasn’t exactly easy listening – with subjects of mortality and spiritual enquiry sprinkled throughout – for devotees, no matter how dark the godfather of gloom would make it, a new Cohen album was cause for celebration.

Just 17 days after the album’s release, however, Cohen, too, would join the list of lost legends.

This November, it will have been a decade since Cohen passed away. So, to commemorate pop’s poet laureate, we have compiled a selection of our favourite tracks from across his discography that we use when testing hi-fi and audio products.

• Listen to the Leonard Cohen playlist on Tidal

The Hills (Thanks For The Dance, 2019)

The Hills is taken from Cohen’s posthumously released album, Thanks For The Dance, which was produced by the singer’s son, Adam Cohen, with engineering/mixing assistance from Michael Chaves (John Mayer, Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithful). Family collaborations can turn in mixed results, but in this case, the father-son dynamic produced some of Cohen’s most pristinely produced tracks that deserve to be heard on a capable hi-fi system.

As is typical of his later recordings, Cohen’s unfathomably deep vocal holds centre stage with a surplus of texture and expression, while pillowy backing vocals and a minimal bass and drum groove hold the verses together. When the chorus eventually arrives, in a blossom of brass and forthright backing vocals, it is unusually triumphant by Cohen’s standards. Rarely one to overdo an arrangement, however, the song soon slides back down to its sparse groove.

Traveling Light (You Want It Darker, 2016)

You Want It Darker embodies the sombre, minimalist style that would come to define Cohen’s later releases. Traveling Light, however, gives a nod to Cohen’s early years on the Greek island of Hydra, by way of a Greek Bazouki in its instrumental backdrop and backing vocals from Greek singer-songwriter Athena Andreadis.

Lyrically, Traveling Light hints at the pared-back lifestyle that Cohen once lived, while simultaneously alluding to the physical losses associated with death: “I’m not alone, I’ve met a few, traveling light like we used to do… I’m traveling light.” On the instrumental side of things, a Rhodes piano, subtle electronic additions and a steady, floor tom-driven drum beat push the song forward with a simple, blues-infused arrangement.

The Future (The Future, 1992)

Both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1992 Los Angeles riots took place during the writing and recording of The Future, and the album seems to reflect that political turbulence. The album’s title track epitomises the tone, in a dark and often prophetic meditation on societal overwhelm and collapse.

Lines such as “The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul” leave little ambiguity about the singer’s bleak vision of the world. Yet, beneath this desolate outlook lies a persistent faith in love, which Cohen ultimately presents as “the only engine of survival”.

Like many of the songs that Cohen released through the ’80s and early ’90s, this track has a more produced, artificial sound than his earlier folk recordings, but textural intricacies in the arrangement make for entertaining listening on a capable audio system.

Paper Thin Hotel (Death Of A Ladies’ Man, 1977)

Paper Thin Hotel appears on Leonard Cohen’s 1977 album Death of a Ladies’ Man, which he co-wrote with famed record producer Phil Spector. Aside from his later murder conviction, Spector is best known for his ‘wall of sound’ production technique, which uses dense, large scale arrangements, instrumental doubling and heaps of reverb to create a larger-than-life ensemble (see Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys or Be My Baby by The Ronettes).

Here, Spector keeps things a little simpler. Nonetheless, the surreal, shimmering quality of this song does much to convey the torment of its protagonist as he listens to his lover cheating on him through the walls of a hotel. What’s more, all that high-frequency detail is sure to give your tweeters the workout they’ve been putting off for too long.

Is This What You Wanted (New Skin For The Old Ceremony, 1974)

Until New Skin For The Old Ceremony, Cohen had typically been a lone wolf. A guitar, some sparse backing instrumentation, his bass-baritone vocal, and that was generally it. Though many of the album’s songs followed that winning formula, Is This What You Wanted boldly went where no Cohen song had gone before, into the realm of the fully-fledged band.

With sharp staccato snare hits and hard-panned percussion, this song will highlight your system’s rhythmic acuity and transient response. The snares should sound crisp and clear, while the overall rhythm should drive the choruses forward despite being relatively sparse, overall.

A Singer Must Die (New Skin For The Old Ceremony, 1974)

While some of New Skin For The Old Ceremony’s songs see Cohen spreading his musical wings, this album also contains some of his finest and most stylistically typical work. A Singer Must Die is one such song, with simple, fingerpicked chords, sombrely romantic lyrics and gently building banks of strings and woodwind, which provide an earthy sense of depth and texture.

A Singer Must Die explores the responsibility of the artist through a metaphorically dense court hearing in which the protagonist is scrutinised by the “keepers of truth” and the “guardians of beauty”. The song has a pitiful, self-effacing quality, with lines such as “your vision is right, my vision is wrong, I’m sorry for smudging the air with my song” setting the lyrical tone. What a joy it is to smudge the air with this one.

Avalanche (Songs Of Love And Hate, 1971)

Avalanche started life as a poem called I Stepped Into An Avalanche, which featured in Cohen’s 1966 collection, Parasites Of Heaven. It figures, then, that the song has gone on to become one of the singer’s most revered lyrical works, earning the affection of songwriters and musicians alike for its ambiguity and inscrutability. Among its admirers is Nick Cave, for whom we have also compiled a top-ten list of test tracks.

In classic Cohen fashion, the song centres around fingerstyle acoustic guitar and undulating, dramatic strings. Beyond the foreboding vocal, the strings do much of the heavy lifting in terms of setting the atmosphere. To get the most out of this track, we suggest listening on a system with a sensitive dynamic response, which will shine a light on the slow, creeping arrangement.

Sing Another Song, Boys (Songs Of Love And Hate, 1971)

Sing Another Song Boys was recorded at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970, and is the sole live recording on Songs Of Love And Hate. Compared with the rest of the album, the live recorded sound is rich and pleasingly shambolic, featuring a plucky acoustic guitar, a broad, warm piano and an organ.

There are all sorts of recording imperfections here: when the piano is played vigorously, it begins to distort, and Cohen’s vocal, which rises to a chanting wail by the end of the song, is less detailed than you will encounter elsewhere on the album.

The overall ensemble, however, remains vivacious and impassioned, full of the adrenaline and commitment that live performances entail. Like many live recordings, this song will come to life on systems that can take the rough with the smooth.

Famous Blue Raincoat (Songs Of Love And Hate, 1971)

Famous Blue Raincoat is arguably one of Cohen’s most widely loved compositions. Structured as a letter written at “four in the morning, the end of December”, the song tells the story of a love triangle between Cohen himself, a woman called Jane and another person who he refers to as “my brother, my killer”.

The principal reason this song succeeds is that it so vividly evokes a dark and lonely December morning. Lamenting backing vocals are distantly reverberant and the track’s dynamic shifts are subtle but crucial to the overall journey of the piece. To get the most out of Famous Blue Raincoat, you will need a quiet, preferably candlelit room, a rainy night and a hi-fi system with a healthy dose of dynamics.

The Partisan (Songs From A Room, 1969)

The Partisan tells the tale of a French resistance fighter as he tries to evade detection by the German army. This track was Cohen’s first commercial recording of a song written by somebody else and features on his second album, Songs From A Room.

The original, La Complainte De Partisan, was composed in 1943 by Russian-born French singer-songwriter and guitarist Anna Marly, with lyrics written by French Resistance leader, Emmanuel d’Atier de La Vigerie. Cohen’s version shares many of the original’s features, with a haunting, bare-bones arrangement and ghostly backing vocals. Unlike the original recording, which is entirely in French, Cohen’s rendition alternates between French and English.

Overall, this is a nicely balanced, simple arrangement, which should give your system’s midrange an opportunity to shine with Cohen’s voice.

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Despite obvious modernisation, there is something reassuringly familiar about Audio Research’s new LS-2/S-200 pre/power pairing. Their styling may be cleaner and less workmanlike than previous efforts, but this amplifier combination still has an appealing, no-nonsense aura that we can’t help but love.

Despite the hefty combined price, this two-box combination is still only an early rung in the company’s amplification ladder. Having experienced some of the brand’s more premium offerings, we can confirm that performance standards continue to rise with price.

Features

As standard, the LS-2 preamp (£8298 / $9950 / AU$16995) is a line-level unit with a generous six inputs, two of which are balanced XLR. Its output connectivity also includes balanced and single-ended options. Headphones? You’ll have to buy a dedicated amp for that.

In the past, such a focused design would have been perfectly acceptable, but the high-end market expects more now, and Audio Research is happy to oblige.

The company offers add-on modules to increase the LS-2’s functionality. There is a phono board (£1000 / $1000 / AU$1595) that is compatible with both moving magnet and moving coil cartridges. It offers a choice of 42 or 62dB of gain, and adjustable MC loading from 50-1000 ohms, so should be happy with all but the most extreme of cartridges on the market.

Digital is very much on the menu, with a DAC module (£1000 / £1000 / AU$1995) that offers USB Type B, coaxial and optical connectivity. The LS-2 can accommodate both the digital and phono modules together. Unfortunately, neither was fitted to our review sample, but given the company’s heritage, it would be surprising if they weren’t at least competitive in terms of performance.

Oddly, one of the single-ended analogue inputs becomes inactive when a module is fitted. If both the DAC and phono stage are both installed, then two analogue inputs get taken out of action.

Design

Audio Research’s formidable reputation is built on valve-powered amplification, so it comes as no surprise to find a pair of 6H30 dual-triodes at the heart of the LS-2 zero-feedback, Class A circuit. These valves have a decent service life of around 4000 hours before needing replacement.

However, there is a twist. While the preamp’s single-ended RCA outputs are directly driven by the valves, the balanced XLR outs are fed through a solid-state J-FET buffer to provide the desired low output impedance. Interestingly, the original Audio Research LS-2 preamp from 1991 was a proper valve/solid-state hybrid design that combined a single ECC88 valve with FET devices.

The solid-state S-200 (£12,798 / $12,950 / AU$24,995) is a brute of a stereo power amplifier. It is a dual-mono design right from the single mains input, using dedicated toroidal transformers for each channel to feed the fully balanced Class A/B amplification circuits.

The power output is prodigious, with Audio Research claiming 200 watts per channel into 8 ohms and double that as impedance halves. That is enough grunt to drive any price-compatible speaker to high levels, even in large rooms.

The S-200’s connectivity mirrors the balanced XLR and single-ended RCA found on the preamp, with a small back-panel toggle switch to select the desired option.

Build & compatibility

Both of these units feel solid and well made. Fit and finish is up to a good standard, though below the immaculate levels we experienced with the similarly-priced Yamaha C5000/M5000 pairing we reviewed recently. The two rotary control dials on the front feel durable enough but don’t operate with the precision we noted from the range-topping Yamaha rival.

Even so, take a look inside either Audio Research product, and the neat internal layout and obvious care in assembly are impressive. These products are clearly built to last decades.

They are nice to use too. We are surprised to find that the LS-2’s large LCD display is in fact a touchscreen, which makes going through the various set-up menus a breeze. In the sub-menus, you will also find a counter that keeps track of usage, which takes the guesswork out of deciding when to replace the valves. This is a thoughtful touch.

The supplied remote is a simple metal handset, but it is nice to hold and intuitive to use.

These Audio Research products prove easy to get up and running. Those unfamiliar with valve-powered components may find the initial installation of the two 6H30s a little intimidating, but it is a simple process that takes just a few minutes.

Audio Research even provides the required Allen key to remove the LS-2’s lid. From there, the valves, which are clearly labelled, are simply pushed into place. If you are worried about the installation, we are sure the selling dealer will be happy to do the job.

The transistor-based S-200 power amp needs no such procedure, and is as simple to connect as any other design.

At this level there should be no shortcuts when it comes to system matching. Our sources are Naim’s range-topping ND 555/555 PS DR music streamer and a current-generation MacBook Pro running Audirvana music software feeding a Chord Hugo TT2 DAC.

As for speakers, PMC’s monster MB2 SE are used extensively alongside our usual ATC SCM50 monitors. Sonus Faber’s new Olympica III G3 floorstanders are also pressed into service (review coming soon).

Our comparison amplifiers are the aforementioned Yamaha C-5000/M-5000 combination, our reference Burmester 088/911 Mk III and PMC’s Cor integrated. Recent experience with Rega’s Mercury/Solis combination helps to form our opinion too.

Sound

The use of valves in the preamp may lead people to expect an easy-going, lush presentation, but that’s not how things turn out. Audio Research has never done things that way. The company’s valve products tend to focus on neutrality and resolution, rivalling solid-state alternatives in those respects. The benefits of valves only really show up in the lucidity and naturalness of the presentation, and that’s the case here with the LS-2.

This is an impressive preamplifier. It sounds clean, clear and beautifully balanced, particularly through its single-ended RCA output. We are less smitten with the performance using the balanced XLR connection, where some of the preamp’s finesse is traded for a slightly bolder and less subtle approach.

Partnered with the S-200 (connected single-ended) there is much to like about the overall performance. Given the monster power output, it will come as no surprise to find that this Audio Research pairing delivers a sound with plenty of scale and authority.

As we play Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2, we can’t help but admire the muscularity of the presentation and the amplifier’s ability to play loud while retaining an enviable degree of composure. As volume levels head northward, the lack of obvious stress and harshness is deeply impressive.

We have no complaints about tonality, with the various orchestral sections coming through with pleasing natural balance, plenty of body and rich texturing. The line between high-frequency bite and refinement is negotiated with skill.

Given the dual mono nature of the power amplifier, we aren’t surprised to find the LS-2/S-200 pairing renders a wide and stable stereo image characterised by a sharp focus and precise positioning, laterally, at least.

The depth perspective was shallower than we expected. The shortfall isn’t massive, but given our experience with other Audio Research amplifiers, it is still something of a surprise.

The LS-2/S-200’s authority works well with other types of music too. We enjoy the dark and brooding nature of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, particularly the way this two-box amplifier punches out Angel’s intricate and rumbling bassline with such conviction.

There is plenty to praise when it comes to outright clarity. Vocals are easy to follow, and rendered with natural warmth and body intact. Scale is convincing, and it is easy to track individual instrumental strands even when the recording gets busy. Overall, the sense of organisation and control is as good as we have heard at this level.

However, we want more. For all its neutrality and power, we feel this pairing could do with more finesse in the way it handles low-level dynamics and complex rhythms. It doesn’t sound quite as articulate or agile as we would like, and edges towards a matter-of-fact presentation that lacks a degree of verve.

Now, let’s be clear about this. We aren’t asking this pairing to add extra flavouring to the sound. We just want it to convey the energy already present in the recording, and this Audio Research pairing tempers that to a degree.

Listening to the pre and power separately points the finger at the S-200. For all its talents, this chunky power amplifier just doesn’t share the LS-2’s all-round sonic excellence, and ultimately limits what the preamplifier can do.

Verdict

We love the LS-2. It is everything we would hope for in a high-quality valve preamp. It is quiet, insightful and beautifully natural in its delivery. We like using it too, with the touchscreen display being a nice bonus.

While we admire many aspects of the S-200 power amp, it isn’t quite the all-rounder we crave. It will certainly do the job with difficult speakers and with certain types of music, but we feel it isn’t good enough to allow the preamp to truly shine.

That said, we like the direction Audio Research has taken with its new series of products. They are easier to use, smarter to look at and, in the case of the LS-2 preamp, still wonderful to listen to.

Review published: 26th October 2026

SCORES

• Sound 4
• Build 4
• Features 4

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A collection of nearly 1300 Beatles rare records is going on sale later this week.

Once part of a large private collection, many rare and unique pressings are set to be available via Discogs and Black Plastic Records, a record store in Dortmund which has worked to identify and catalogue the records ahead of their public release.

Available exclusively through Discogs Drops, the newly on-sale assortment includes original UK pressings, promotional singles, export editions, and rare releases from across Europe.

The musical treasure trove spans mono and stereo LPs, compilations, singles, and 7-inch EPs. Various international LPs will also be available with their own quirks and idiosyncrasies, as records didn't look or sound the same across differing markets and territories.

A 1964 Italian edition of No Reply / Baby’s in Black, for instance, features an early cover design that was later replaced by a more familiar international version.

Among the standout finds is a 1963 promotional pressing of Please Please Me, one of only 250-or-so copies produced for radio stations ahead of the single’s commercial release, as well as a promotional pressing of From Me to You, the group’s first UK number one.

According to Russ Ryan, Director of Seller Experience at Discogs: "People forget Beatlemania never landed the same way twice. Different sleeves, different pressings, promo copies nobody’s seen in 60 years. That’s devotion, and a lot of record culture comes down to that: wanting to stand as close to the music as a pressing can put you".

The first release of nearly 1300 records from the collection will be available exclusively through Discogs Drops beginning October 30th, 2026 at 1pm GMT (2pm CET). The sale will remain exclusive to Discogs for its first 10 days, while fans in Dortmund can browse the collection and arrange in-store pickup at Black Plastic Records.

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A big sound demands a big speaker, right? Not according to Steinway Lyngdorf. Its new Steinway & Sons Model O promises room-filling sound from a slim design.

Steinway says this is achieved through a combination of sound technologies, the firm's Integrated Systems Approach and RoomPerfect calibration.

This is the new version of the original Model O, which was introduced in 2018. Both are named after Steinway's Model O piano, which was dubbed "The Living Room Grand Piano" when it launched 120 years ago. Its aim was to bring the musical experience of a Steinway concert piano into the living room.

Despite a relatively small footprint, the new Model O speaker claims to deliver "full-bodied, detailed and clear sound". A passive bass unit concealed on the back works with the wall against which it's placed, giving you more floorspace – the speaker was tuned specifically for such placement.

For the high frequencies, Steinway's Air Motion Transformer tweeter provides "exceptional clarity and detail, reproducing the music's finest nuances."

This model has two front-mounted midrange bass drivers (the original Model O only had one), a cabinet with 80 per cent more internal volume and a 50 per cent larger passive radiator. This should mean better bass performance, more dynamic range and a more room-filling sound.

It has Steinway's trademark look too, with a gold-coated tweeter eye with a matte or polished surface and high-quality lacquer. The 26 black strings on the front are a nod to the brand's heritage in musical instruments, and there are plenty of customisation options, including gold-coated rings around the two front-mounted midrange drivers, individual lacquers and wood veneers.

Each Model O is assembled and finished by hand in Skive, Denmark, and boasts RoomPerfect calibration technology to optimise the sound to the room in which it's placed.

The Model O is out at the end of November, with the price on application.

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It might be hard to believe now, but back in the mid-1970s, Stevie Wonder was considering quitting the music business.

With 17 studio albums under his belt (including the critically acclaimed Fulfillingness' First Finale, Innervisions, Talking Book and Music Of My Mind), and a string of awards to his name, Little Stevie Wonder wasn't quite so little anymore.

Unhappy with life in the US, and probably contemplating what was left to achieve on a 12-inch record, he considered throwing it all in and emigrating to Ghana to work with children with disabilities. Plans were already underway for a farewell concert when he changed his mind and signed what was at the time the biggest recording deal in history.

The first album from the multi-year deal was Songs In The Key Of Life, a landmark double album that shows Wonder's immense versatility, spanning classical arrangements, pop, ballads, jazz, funk, and much more.

Like What Hi-Fi?, it's just turned 50. With Wonder currently on tour, playing the album in its entirety, let's dig into it and explore what makes it such a great workout for your system (not to mention one of my favourite albums of all time).

A musical education

I still remember the first time I heard the opening harmonies of Love's In Need Of Love Today come through the speakers of my JVC microsystem. It was the late nineties, and I was in my late teens. My knowledge of Wonder's work was rudimentary at best. But, having loved some of his early tracks from various Motown Chartbusters compilations I had bought or borrowed from friends, and aware of his immense influence on the pop and hip-hop scenes of the time, I was keen to know more.

I recorded a Wonder VH1 documentary on VHS (see, it really was the late nineties), and while I don't remember much about that, I do remember the brief snippet of Sir Duke it played, complete with profile shots of some of the musicians who played on the track. Those horns. The sheer unbridled joy of it. I watched that bit so many times I must have worn out that section of the VHS tape.

I promptly bought the album on CD, and excitedly stuck it on my JVC microsystem.

Now I still lived at home with my parents, and my system was no listening room setup – it was classic Argos catalogue fare. But even through its relatively weedy speakers, those opening harmonies sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. It was otherworldly.

I came for Sir Duke, but reader, I stayed for a musical education.

Love's In Need Of Love Today is certainly a bold opening choice. While most of the album's tracks are around four minutes in length – perfect for radio play – the opener stretches out over more than seven minutes. But then when you're critically acclaimed, with 17 albums already to your name by age 26, I guess you can afford to take your sweet time.

Flexing your system's muscles

Things stay fairly placid through Have A Talk With God and Village Ghetto Land – though both tracks have plenty of fine detail that a decent system will pick up on – before kicking into gear with the jazz funk flex of Contusion.

But it was track five I really hammered. Sir Duke is a tribute to Duke Ellington and also name-checks other jazz pioneers, among them Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald. And how better than with an absolute foot-stomper?

This is Wonder letting rip after the relative constraints of the heavier subject matter of the previous tracks. This is a celebration of the joy music can also bring, in one of the most grin-like-an-idiot tracks ever committed to vinyl.

By now the album is really finding its stride. I Wish follows and to really appreciate it, your system will need a great sense of musicality. We're back in ballad territory with Knocks Me Off My Feet, while Pastime Paradise (sampled by Coolio for Gangsta's Paradise) serves up a whomping bassline that really underpins the track.

Disc two also has plenty of highlights, including Isn't She Lovely (which is indeed lovely), As (which you might recognise from the cover by George Michael and Mary J Blige), Joy Inside My Tears and the angry but funky Black Man.

If you've never heard the album in its entirety (including the bonus tracks like All Day Sucker and Ebony Eyes), or even if it's just been a while, I urge you to give it a listen from start to finish to really flex all of your system's muscles.

As the title suggests, it's a musical journey taking in numerous styles and tones, with subjects ranging from childhood memories and first love to racial injustice and music's ability to spread happiness.

Thank goodness Little Stevie decided to stay in the music business after all.

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Newbie hi-fi brand Ubiqaudiolab has launched its ultra-high-end Ubicube range of power amplifiers, and they make quite a statement of intent.

The company's Ubicube line-up consists of three models, the Ubicube 700, 400 and 200, arriving alongside the Ubiquitous 300B preamplifier.

If you're unfamiliar, Ubiqaudiolab is a Slovenian hi-fi manufacturer established in 2021 with the aim of bringing together "exceptional engineering talent, industrial ambition and an uncompromising vision of musical realism".

Sounds like our kind of company.

The massive Ubicube 700 certainly looks to encapsulate that vision. The luxury amplifier delivers a hefty 700 watts of power into 8 ohms, boasting a Class A input stage alongside a high-bias Class A/B output stage to deliver "perfectly consistent, lightning-fast power".

The new amp uses massive internal copper heat-dissipation plates with chimney-effect airflow for faster heat transfer from the power amplifier modules, housed within a solid aluminium monocoque chassis designed for optimal mechanical stability and vibration control.

The 700's Ubicube 400 and 200 siblings are designed to deliver "the same uncompromising audio performance in a slightly smaller form factor".

The Ubicube 400 delivers 400 watts into 8 ohms, whereas the Ubicube 200 puts out 200 watts into 8 ohms.

The Ubicube 200 and 400 incorporate audiophile-grade power modules working alongside an advanced, oversized power supply in a bid to reveal the subtlest details of each recording.

Finally, the Ubiquitous 300B preamplifier aims to deliver "seamless, continuous reproduction of authentic human expression across every genre of music".

Developed with a dual-mono Class A topology and new 300B electron tube technology, the luxury preamp is designed to work with Ubiqaudiolab power amplifiers to create a "truly lifelike reproduction" of music.

While it will be unveiling its first commercially available range at the Warsaw Audio Video Show this weekend , Ubiqaudiolab reportedly has its sights set on the UK market in the future. Pricing is yet to be confirmed, but expect the amps above to cost well into the tens of thousands of pounds.

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Forget the vinyl revival – I'm getting excited about CD players again

New issue of What Hi-Fi? out now: super standalone streaming systems, tempting turntable cartridges and more

These are the best stereo amplifiers you can buy

I have a confession to make. I’m yet to be swept up in the emotion of the vinyl revival. In fact, *whispers quietly* I don’t think I’ll ever own a turntable.

Now, please don’t think I don’t appreciate the format, or any physical format for that matter. I love being able to gorge on all of the tunes that Amazon Music offers (why I insist on sticking with Amazon is a feature for another day), but I grew up in the era of tape, CD and MiniDisc.

And when I started working for What Hi-Fi?, the CD was, how should I put it, the format du jour. I enjoyed and still do enjoy the ritual of taking a CD out of its case and dropping it onto a loading drawer or sliding it into a slot loader.

Sure, it’s not the same as carefully slipping a record out of a sleeve and playing it on a turntable, and the clunk and whir of a CD mechanism isn’t quite as warmth-inducing as the crackle and pop of a record coming to life, but both have their merits.

Now, back in the early noughties, I would have no problem calling in seven or eight CD players, all around the same price point for a What Hi-Fi? Super Test. Our stockroom was awash with them (and CD changers too!).

But for the past decade or so, the well has been pretty dry. You could count the number of new affordable players on one hand. It’s been reflected in the fact that the Marantz CD6007 and Cyrus CDi have become multi-year Award-winners. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great players, but the lack of any real competition has undoubtedly helped their cause.

But times are changing. In the past couple of years, I’ve heard the Rotel Michi Q5 (£5499 / $7499 / AU$9499) and two high-end monsters: the Esoteric K-05XD (£11,650 / $12,000 / AU$15,000), and Gryphon Audio Ethos (£37,500 / $50,500 / AU$64,995). Sadly, being realistic, neither of these machines is going to be slotted into my system any time soon.

Happily, I’ve also tested the Marantz CD 70 and Arcam CD25, two machines that are both brilliant and much more attainable. And it’s the Arcam that has really made a mark on me.

Hearing the jump in performance over the excellent Marantz CD 70, the increase in refinement and sophistication, and the insight that the CD25 could extract from our copy of The Eminem Show had me grinning like the Cheshire cat. This is the kind of player that will provide an instant upgrade to any suitably matched system.

And there’s more good news on the CD player front. NAD has recently announced the C 569 (£749 / €949), which slots in neatly between the Marantz and Arcam. There’s also the Rotel Michi Prestige Q430 (£3599 / €3999 / $3999), which I was lucky enough to hear in China earlier this year. Don’t worry, a full review unit will be winging its way in for review in the not-too-distant future.

Of course, this could all just be a minor blip and brief renaissance rather than a long-term trend, but I’m all for it. I don’t know about you, but I certainly can’t bear to part with my CD collection just yet.

MORE:

Read our full Marantz CD 70 review

Want a step-up model? Read our full Arcam CD25 review

Or go high-end and read our full Esoteric K-05XD review

Thought CD was dead? Our audio experts pick out the best CD players and some of our favourite test discs that you can own for ever

Our pick of the best CD players you can buy across a range of prices

Canor Audio has launched the Crius H5S, a headphone amplifier, DAC and preamplifier designed "to bring exceptional performance to a single, elegant component".

The new model uses a dual-mono ES9039Q2M DAC alongside a fully discrete, balanced analogue output stage. The new unit supports hi-res PCM up to 32-bit/768kHz alongside DSD512, plus nine digital filters to help you achieve your desired audio signature.

Canor claims to have optimised each stage of the DAC circuit to deliver high linearity and extremely low distortion. An adaptive bias circuit moves between Class A and Class A/B amplification, aiming to combine "the purity of Class A with the headroom needed for more demanding loads".

Canor bills its new unit as able to drive a wide array of headphones courtesy of its balanced 4-pin XLR, 6.3mm, 3.5mm and 4.4mm headphone outputs. Optical, coaxial and USB-C inputs all provide compatibility with a range of digital sources, complemented by balanced XLR and unbalanced RCA inputs and outputs.

On the outside, the Crius H5S is constructed using a compact aluminium chassis, fronted by a volume control knob alongside a 1.8-inch circular display.

The Canor Crius H5S is available in Black, Silver or Bronze finishes, priced at £1799 (further prices pending). For that kind of money, the Crius H5S is going up against the exceptionally talented Chord Hugo 2 (£1795).

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Shortly after the second World War, an unlikely trend took hold in Japan. Passing certain of Tokyo’s kissaten cafes, you could, quite reasonably, have come across a room full of people not saying a word to each other, sitting in perfect silence – that is, apart from the sound of a record playing through a well-specified hi-fi system.

Similar locations were opening in Japan as early as the 1920s, but due to the significant interruption of a World War, the widespread popularisation of these cafes would take a little while longer.

By now, it’s old news that listening bars have become a global phenomenon. It’s hard to visit a major city, these days, without stumbling upon at least one such venue. But for Paul Noble, founder of Spiritland – a London-based listening bar, which has just opened a new location at the Barbican Centre – inspiration struck right where things began.

Incredible sound systems

Formerly a sound engineer and radio producer, Noble first witnessed Japan’s listening-bar culture while travelling to the country for work in the 2010s.

“Spending time there, I just fell in love with it,” he says. “I felt that something like this would work in London, where we had this deep music culture, but nothing that combined the sort of really considered programming, incredible sound systems, and service that was aligned in terms of quality.”

Before long, Noble had started a pop-up in Merchants Tavern, a restaurant in Shoreditch, London. “I put in some Tannoy speakers, a huge pair of Westminsters, and had all sorts of DJs play there,” he says. Such was the project’s success, that by 2016, Spiritland had opened its first dedicated location in Kings Cross, London – a venue that would eventually make it onto our global list of listening bars we would love to visit.

“We've spent 10 years refining our offer,” Noble elaborates. “We work across all sorts of genres; you could hear jazz, funk, soul, reggae, dub, but also indie, Americana, ambient, classical – it’s unlikely to be anything too banging.” Crucially, he adds, “There’s always going to be a firm hand of curation.”

Over that decade, the company’s efforts have seen them grow to become one of London’s most well regarded listening bars. The latest collaboration, which recently opened on level two of the Barbican Centre, and is scheduled to run until July 2027, came about quickly.

The birth of a listening bar

“A conversation started,” says Noble, “then, suddenly, this space became available. We moved very quickly.” Looking for an equally snappy audio solution, Noble turned to his long-time collaborator, Kevin Scott, a designer at British high-end speaker manufacturer, Living Voice.

“Kevin had already been building this system for his own purposes, and it became clear that this was going to work well in the room,” says Noble. “So, we whipped [the bar] together with furniture and equipment we already had.”

The sound system you can now find at Spiritland at the Barbican was chosen and tested at a similarly sized space in Living Voice’s headquarters at Definitive Audio, Derbyshire.

“The only unknown was the acoustics of the room at the Barbican,” says Scott, “which we have addressed over a week of listening, using professional acoustic devices with a combination of absorption, diffusion and reflection.” The team have also run ‘soft launches’ with 50-70 guests to “qualify the system under real world conditions”.

There’s certainly no shortage of kit at the new location. Walking into the bar, we are greeted by a hulking pair of Living Voice R252 loudspeakers, a densely packed rack of audio separates and a DJ booth, not to mention the trendy, metropolitan types, who are sure to be found sipping on something from the bar’s carefully curated cocktail list.

Musical artistry as a guiding light

Taking a closer look at the audio set-up, eagle eyed visitors will notice Kuzma record players, network streamers and DACs from APL, amplification from Sugden and SJS Electroacoustics, phono transformers from Consolidated Audio and power conditioning from Audes – all connected by cables from DH Labs.

Explaining how he chose the products for Spiritland’s system, Scott says: “The performance balance of any system is dependent on a sympathetic relationship between each of the components as well as their dynamic interactions and the relationship with the acoustic environment. This system has balanced these considerations with musical artistry as its guiding light.”

Operating in a global city such as London – and within an international cultural hub such as the Barbican – means the venue caters to a diverse, worldwide clientele. According to Scott, the new system reflects this global audience.

“The system has a marked international flavour, with components from Bulgaria, Slovenia, England, Estonia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong and the US,” he says. “All of the designers have a long-standing history in the audio industry, and each is a leader in their respective fields. More importantly, though, we have chosen these components because they work together as a hand-in-glove team.”

Due to the retro origins of listening bars, some locations opt for an all analogue, vinyl-driven approach. But staying true to their inner audiophile, Spiritland has chosen to keep their options open.

Nothing compressed

“We’re pretty format agnostic,” says Noble. “You could hear music on CD, you could hear hi-res files. We’re not dedicated solely to vinyl. While it’s a great mechanism for curation and finding and filing music, vinyl is not necessarily the most hardy material. There are incredible pressings, there are terrible pressings.”

Despite this broad-minded approach, Noble explains that Spiritland does have certain boundaries when it comes to sound quality. “Our hard and fast rule is nothing compressed,” he says. “Our systems are so revealing. If you play an MP3, you’ll hear it instantly.”

When we visited Spiritland at the Barbican, a vinyl DJ was playing a downtempo mix of jazz and electronica. In the cosy, dimly lit room, tables were packed with couples and friends conversing, drinking and eating small plates of food from the bar’s kitchen. Not quite the intensely focused, pin-drop experience of some of Japan’s original listening bars.

Noble says that the relaxed atmosphere was an intentional choice: “If you go to some of these places in Japan, they’re very, very quiet, and music is front and centre. Everyone’s sitting in rows, staring at the speakers, and the experience is akin to watching a film.

“That’s not what we’re doing and we’re not trying to emulate it,” he says. “You know, we also have elements of the Balearic, Ibiza scene, the sort of New York, David Mancuso world and the reggae sound system world. We’re not just trying to clone what happens in Japan. So, there are people talking, eating, drinking – having a good time. We’re not gonna go around policing people’s behaviour. That’s not what we’re about.”

Accommodating though that attitude may be, some visitors will surely find the hubbub an unwelcome distraction. It is a listening bar, after all.

Thankfully, for such guests, Noble explains that Spiritland runs a regular programme of more music-focused sessions. “We do dedicated listening experiences, too, where we'll listen to an album all the way through, or there will be a talk interspersed with tracks,” he says.

During such events, Scott adds, “Orders can be whispered.”

Entry to Spiritland at the Barbican is completely free, and walk-ins are welcome. The bar is open Tuesday through Friday from 4pm to 11pm. Over the weekend, you can visit from 12pm to 11pm on Saturdays, and 12pm to 7pm on Sundays.

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Check out our list of the top five hi-fi listening bars we would love to visit

Audio Solutions has announced its latest pair of floorstanders, the Overture G4.

Audio Solutions is a hi-fi manufacturer based in Lithuania. Founded in 2011, it’s still a relatively fresh-faced brand which lists four main loudspeaker ranges – the Vantage, Virtuoso, Figaro and Overture – among its overall lineup.

The G4 are, naturally, the fourth generation of the brand’s Overture roster, inheriting trickle-down structural and acoustic innovations from the higher-tier Figaro and Virtuoso ranges.

Designed to “bridge the gap between entry-level and high-end”, each fourth-gen tower packs a 19mm silk-dome tweeter alongside a 15cm paper-cone midrange and two 15cm paper-cone bass units.

The tweeter benefits from Audio Solution’s ‘Mini-Horn’ waveguide technology, designed to enhance tweeter performance by damping the micro-flexing that affects soft-dome tweeters at higher volumes, resulting in “exceptional clarity, detail, and transient speed”.

Elsewhere, the Overture G4 cabinets employ a dual-shell design consisting of a 10mm inner shell and a larger 22mm outer shell. These layers are separated by a specialised damping material to eliminate unwanted resonances inside the cabinets.

The Overture G4 also use an internal bracing skeleton to enhance structural rigidity and further manage internal standing waves.

The new speakers are available in two standard finishes – Gloss White or Gloss Dark Grey – or you can use Audio Solutions’ product configurator to customise the speakers’ front panels, side panels and accessories to your liking. For a cost, of course.

The new Overture G4 come in ‘S’ and ‘M’ sizes, with the former costing £6000 and the latter setting you back £7500.

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These are the best floorstanding speakers around

When is a pair of loudspeakers not a pair of loudspeakers? When it’s a streaming system, of course. Time was when we at What Hi-Fi? would urge the serious music enthusiast to invest in separate components to get the very best performance from their system to enjoy their hobby.

These days, things aren’t so simple. Or rather, perhaps, they have in fact been made more simple, by the introduction of some absolutely superb all-in-one set-ups in the form of a pair of speakers; for these are speakers that perform the functions of source, amp and speaker in one package. And they are brilliant – as our round-up of all-in-one systems makes clear.

We also have a Group Test of £800-£1000 soundbars with the mighty Sonos taking on rivals from Sony, Samsung and Bose; premium home cinema amplifiers; and a round-up of turntable cartridges from less than £100 to just under £1000. Plenty here, then, to get your teeth into.

All-in-one streaming systems

For many years the received wisdom when it comes to domestic hi-fi equipment has been that, if you want the best sound quality from a sound system, buy separates.

Although all-in-one systems have existed in one form or another since hi-fi itself came into being (remember the ‘music centre’ anyone?), such musical multi-taskers were never any match for a system in which the source, amplification and speakers were each provided by a dedicated unit.

Then, not so long ago, the market started to fill with one-box technological marvels whose sound quality could rival – and often surpass – equivalent systems comprising three or more different products.

Essentially, hi-fi technology developed to such an extent that electronic circuits could be fine-tuned to produce superior sound quality in a very confined space, making it possible to build complex, multi-faceted devices inside a single unit – and by a single manufacturer.

The pinnacle of this sonic engineering is the ‘speaker system’ – a hi-fi breed that provides a source, amplification and stereo speakers in just two boxes. Not only are these creatures sonically impressive, they are also beautifully practical, minimising the need for lots of space and wiring.

Today’s speaker systems are the epitome of what modern hi-fi should be: quality and convenience in one neat, compromise-free solution. This month we round up four such fully-contained systems between £2000 and £3500.

Premium soundbars Group Test

If you want to upgrade your TV’s audio, a soundbar is a great way to go. It takes up much less space than a hefty surround sound system, while still delivering a room-filling and detailed audio experience that gives movies and music extra punch.

We have tested countless soundbars over the years, with some expertly delivering three-dimensional sound wrapped up in a compact design. Others, however, have not quite nailed the concept and fall short of five-star greatness. Will it be a similar story with the premium all-in-one Dolby Atmos soundbars we have here?

All of these single bars can be upgraded by adding in separate subwoofers or surround speakers but, for this Group Test we are looking at the soundbars on their own.

So, which premium Dolby Atmos soundbar will come out on top? Find out in this month's mag!

What Hi-Fi?'s reference system

It being our 50th birthday year, it seems the perfect time to take a look at the stereo system that the What Hi-Fi? team uses most of all.

The systems we usually suggest, you will note, aren’t generally quite as pricey as the one you see here. But there are good reasons for us to invest in (well, okay, borrow from the manufacturers – but you know what we mean) a top-notch set-up.

This system needs to do more than simply sound brilliant. It needs to be able to perform day in, day out for months at a time – indeed, years in the case of some of the products – without letting us down.

Each component needs to be able to get on with doing its thing, without unduly affecting the other parts of the system. That way, the What Hi-Fi? review team can know, when they swap a product out with something new that has come in for test, that any changes to the sound they hear are coming from the new piece of kit and that there is no colouration from its system partners – or, at least, as little as is possible.

Find out what we use as our reference set-up only in this month's What Hi-Fi?.

Upgrade your vinyl sound

You might not realise it, but your cartridge has as much or more to do with the character of your turntable’s sound than any other component part. Consequently, if you feel that you’re not quite getting the sound you want from your turntable, it’s worth considering changing the current cartridge rather than swapping out the entire record player.

It’s a simple but effective change, and you might find yourself listening to your records with fresh ears thanks to a new, updated cartridge.

This month we present our pick of the best cartridges, spanning budget to premium models, and both moving magnet and moving coil types. If you’re looking to upgrade and enhance your vinyl replay, any of these options would be a fine choice.

First with reviews

As always, our First Tests section is where you'll find What Hi-Fi?'s considered verdicts on the very latest hi-fi and AV gear.

We kick off this month with a new soundbar from Sonos. Thanks to the company's Sonos Arc and Beam models especially, Sonos has carved out an enviable reputation in the soundbar world. Its latest entry into the popular Beam range, the Sonos Beam Ultra, adds proper up-firing drivers and, spoiler alert, scores five stars for its efforts.

That's not all from Sonos, though. We weren't exactly blown away by the sound of the company's first stab it wireless over-ear headphones, the Ace, when they released a couple of years ago. But this month we've had the sequel, the Sonos Ace Ultra, in for testing. Will they fare any better? Find out in this month's What Hi-Fi?.

Elsewhere we have reviews of the Marshall Kilburn III wireless speaker, AudioQuest's DragonFly Copper DAC, Acer Vero HL6810ATV projector, Cambridge Audio's Evo 300 streaming amplifier, Hisense PX4 Pro UST projector, iFi iDSD GR2 DAC and new TVs from TCL and Samsung.

Find all these reviews in December's What Hi-Fi? – out now!

Finally, don't forget to check out our Buyer’s Guide, featuring a definitive and freshly updated list of all the best home entertainment kit you can buy – including winners of 2025's What Hi-Fi? Awards. If you’re looking to purchase anything from a pair of the best wireless headphones to a home cinema speaker system, this section will tell you where to spend your money wisely.

Whatever you do, don't miss the December 2026 issue of What Hi-Fi?. Grab a copy today, or simply download it onto your tablet or smartphone. Enjoy!

You can subscribe or buy the latest issue here, or buy the digital edition on iPhone, iPad, Android devices or Kindle edition

Technics has today announced a new direct-drive DJ turntable, the SL-1210MKX, which the company says was “developed with direct input from working DJs and sound engineers to deliver greater stability, enhanced pitch precision and expanded creative freedom”.

According to the Technics, the new model is positioned above the SL-1210MK7 as the latest evolution of its iconic SL-1200 series.

The turntable has been designed specifically to address the challenges DJs face “in high pressure performance settings where powerful sound systems, deep bass, structural vibration and extended operating periods place exceptional demands on equipment.”

To confront these challenges, the SL-1210MKX features a “significantly heavier, optimally balanced chassis”, which Technics claims improves resistance to external vibration, while the turntable’s isolation feet have been re-engineered to balance “effective feedback isolation with the stability required for confident scratching and performance use.”

In a first for the SL-1200 Series, the SL-1210MKX features a ±4% pitch modulation range, allowing users a finer degree of adjustment for “accurate beatmatching and subtle tempo correction”. Alongside standard pitch settings, there is also a ±50% range, which expands the series’ tempo variation options.

Other developments include a quieter reset switch, which Technics says was inspired by earlier SL-1200 models, and a coreless direct-drive motor with adjustable start-up torque and brake speed, 78rpm playback and reverse functionality.

Emphasising the model’s “premium character”, a polished silver tonearm and a black finish pay tribute to the SL-1200MK2, a staple turntable in DJ history.

According to Stefanie Baron, manager Technics DJ channel Europe, Panasonic Consumer Europe (PCEU): “The SL-1200 Series has earned its reputation through decades of real-world performance in clubs, on stage and in studios around the world. With the SL-1210MKX, we wanted to build on that legacy by working closely with professional DJs and sound technicians to better understand the challenges they face. The result is a turntable that delivers even greater stability, precision and creative freedom while staying true to the qualities that have made the SL-1200 an industry standard for more than five decades.”

The SL-1210MKX will be available from January 2027 for £1299 (we will add US pricing once we get it). At this price, the turntable comes up against the slightly cheaper, What Hi-Fi? Award-winning Rega Planar 3 RS Edition, which is currently available for around £1099 / $1,795. We can’t wait to see how these turntables compare.

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Nagra has announced the latest addition to its Series II range, the Nagra Amp II-S.

Following the arrival of the Preamp II-S earlier this year, the Swiss brand’s new stereo power amplifier aims for outstanding “musical coherence, transparency and refinement”. Although conceived as the natural partner to the Preamp II-S, Nagra bills the Amp II-S as equally at home in a wide variety of high-end setups.

At its heart is a new linear power-supply, built around a custom-made 800 VA potted transformer. Thanks to the greater energy reserves and increased voltage headroom, Nagra promises its latest amp reproduces “demanding musical passages with greater ease and authority”.

The new model delivers 120 watts of Class A/B power per channel into 8 ohms, with the first 10 watts operating as purely Class A.

The amp’s input board derives from Nagra’s high-end Reference Amp, aiming for improved channel separation and spatial precision. Revised circuit layouts, internal wiring, and isolated controls work together to improve overall transparency and clarity.

The high-end amplifier’s mechanical construction includes a massive CNC-machined heatsink for providing “exceptional thermal inertia” while minimising vibrations, whereas a specially designed transformer suspension also reduces the transmission of unwanted mechanical oscillation.

The Amp II-S sports Nagra’s established front-panel ‘Modulometer’, a precise analogue audio level meter inspired by the company’s IV-S reel-to-reel recorder from 1971.

The Nagra Amp II-S is available to order now, priced at £21,998 / AU$33,955 (further prices pending).

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Esoteric has launched its latest high-end CD player, the Grandioso K1XE, alongside the Grandioso PS1 XE, an optional external power supply.

Touted as the brand’s flagship ‘Super Audio CD player’, the K1XE features a premium suite of Esoteric’s high-end technologies and materials, all designed to push towards “the pinnacle of all-in-one CD and DAC performance”.

The flagship player incorporates Esoteric’s in-house ‘VRDS-ATLAS’ transport mechanism, featuring an exceptionally rigid, heavyweight platform engineered for outstanding mechanical precision.

The K1XE is also fitted with a Master Sound Discrete DAC G2, designed in-house, deploying a fully dual-mono configuration and discrete components in pursuit of boundary-pushing performance.

The flagship model is built using a multi-layer chassis, designed to prevent interference between circuit components in pursuit of greater sonic purity. A semi-floating top panel – a design signature found across many of Esoteric’s high-end amps, including the five-star F-01 – aids a more open presentation.

For physical connections, you are furnished with USB, XLR, and optical outputs, as well as an ‘ES-Link 5’ input for granting a connection to Esoteric’s Grandioso N1T streaming transport.

Complementing the K1XE as an optional addition is the PS1XE power supply. This is designed to enhance the performance of the Master Sound Discrete DAC G2 via its four independently aligned power transformers and optimised filter circuits.

Like its CD player companion, the new model also boasts a multi-layer chassis and a semi-floating top panel, as well as advanced isolation feet for reducing resonances and enhancing sonic clarity.

The Esoteric Grandioso K1XE and PS1XE will be available in November 2026. The K1XE will cost £37,999 / $45,000, while the PS1XE will set you back an additional £16,500 / $19,000.

MORE:

Read our five-star Esoteric N-05XE review

“It’s not our job to fix a bad recording” – Goldmund’s brutal pursuit of honest sound, according to its head of acoustics

These are the best CD players around

What is perfect sound? It’s a question that has haunted many an audio brand.

Some brands like to argue they get a unique “good” sonic signature from their hardware. One that – like when I hear anything that King’s X guitarist Ty Tabor plays – any fan can identify after one note.

Others take a more clinical approach, arguing that, in the strictest audiophile terms, it’s about accuracy and being as true to the recording as possible.

And some play sonic Switzerland. They stay neutral, arguing that “it’s all about enjoying the music”. So each camp is technically right as long as they’re having fun.

Which is why, continuing the Swiss theme, when I got the chance to visit high-end powerhouse Goldmund’s Geneva factory, I couldn’t resist the urge to quiz Dr Véronique Adam, its long-standing head of acoustic research and development, on the topic.

And her answer is simple.

It's all about being honest

“We try, always, to be as transparent as possible,” she says.

This might not sound controversial, but Adam admits it can be problematic when listening to older or poorly recorded tracks:

“Modern tracks recorded at the highest level are better. But many of our customers listen to older recordings, and that can be a problem for us – because their reference and standard is completely different.

“New recordings are more clean; it’s just more clear. And sometimes customers tell us ‘okay, I can’t listen to the old recording any more’ – because there’s not enough detail. And that’s because the detail comes from the recording; it belongs to it.

“It’s the same problem with bad movie dubs. If you go to the cinema as a customer and say ‘the translation is not as good as the original’, we [the people making the hardware playing it] cannot do anything. It is what it is.”

She adds that Goldmund believes it would be a bigger wrong to try to hide weaknesses in the recording:

“We are not responsible for the recording, or fixing a bad source,” she says. “We are responsible for accurately reproducing it.”

This, according to Adam, has been the core focus of Goldmund since it was founded.

“I learned a lot with Michel Reverchon [Goldmund’s founder]. I don’t know how many hours we listened together, but it was over a lot of years, with a lot of different genres. He liked the blues and jazz; I like classical. It was a long process and a long way to come, but from it, we know what our reference is, and we make sure it’s based on fact,” she says.

“With the new recordings, things always change. You don’t hear the same types of songs for ever, so you’re always learning; the experience just continues – we’re never at the end. But the most important thing is to be sure that we don’t diverge from the reference we have set.”

She adds that this remains the case with the firm’s latest hardware and will continue in the future as Goldmund continues its quest for sonic perfection and evolution under its newly elected leadership team, which took over the company 18 months ago.

Do you agree with Dr Véronique Adam’s approach? Let us know in the comments below!

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When streaming entered the music-playing limelight, at some point in my late teens, I was swept off my still growing feet. Any song I could possibly desire, available for a sum of money that I could, at that time, just about scrape together from my part-time job’s salary, seemed to me something akin to what fire must have felt to neanderthals.

But, as sometimes happens with such incendiary infatuations, our relationship eventually came under hard times – to the extent that I am now considering leaving music-streaming services altogether. I should clarify that this will be for personal uses only; streaming services such as Tidal play an integral part in how we test certain products here at What Hi-Fi?, be it an all-in-one hi-fi system or a humble Bluetooth speaker.

So what pushed me over the edge?

Having grown up with an inexhaustible supply of music at my fingertips, this is no small decision. But recently, as AI-generated music has flooded online streaming platforms, resulting in a flurry of hastily assembled AI-charters and fraud-prevention strategies, I think I’ve finally had it.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m relieved the platforms are taking action. A few months ago, Tidal implemented an ‘allow AI content’ switch, and Deezer has also recently granted users an option to exclude any music detected as AI-generated from their libraries. But, as this new technology infiltrates every corner of life, bringing with it equivalently mind-bending benefits and risks, I simply don’t want to question whether the music I am listening to has been made by a real person or not. As such, I am taking physical music as a place of refuge.

Not long has the drawbridge risen, however, before I realise the challenge I am facing.

Abandoning the streaming services results in a tediously inconvenient and sometimes costly process of recovery. Quite understandably, that is often enough to put people off. There’s a term for this sort of thing: ‘path dependence’. In the social sciences, it means that past events or decisions constrain or define later events or decisions.

In relation to technological developments, we have all become dependent on all sorts of ‘paths’. How we would now struggle if the internet suddenly fizzled out of action, or even if the lights went out for any prolonged period of time. In my specific case, I find myself wondering how much money I will have to spend to recover some semblance of my former music library.

Choose your fighter

So, as I look, for want of a better phrase, to get physical, the first step is to decide on my chosen format. Of course, there’s an appeal to taking the retro route and going fully vinyl. Here, I envision joining the ‘vinyl revival’ and being taken into the arms of a cheering horde of fashionable, cigarette smoking, wax-spinning hipsters. Fond as I am of that idea, however, records are simply too expensive.

With a starting price of anywhere between £25 and £40 per album, anyone looking to make regular updates to a vinyl collection is sure to find themselves facing a staggering bill in no time. It’s all too easy to overlook the fact that many people simply cannot afford to transition back to physical media, no matter how much they adore and care about the formats or musical artists in question.

Furthermore, shopping for second-hand vinyl has become a gamble. Recent exposures of large-scale counterfeit operations – including one that generated a staggering £2.7 million between 2017 and 2024 – mean it can be hard for collectors to be sure what they are buying.

But it’s not all doom and gloom

These days, the CD is an eminently affordable form of physical media, with constantly renewing bargains popping up in charity shops, record stores and at online retailers. At the charity shop near my house, I often see great CDs on sale for prices starting from £1.99. For just slightly less than Spotify’s monthly subscription fee, I could buy six CDs each month – I think that’s enough to keep me entertained.

What’s more, many people have old, neglected CD players hiding in their attics, which keep things even cheaper by mitigating the expense of picking up new equipment.

If you’re looking for a more up-to-date set-up, however, some manufacturers, such as Marantz, NAD, FiiO and Roberts are developing new and affordable CD-focused products, from portable, Discman-style options to fully fledged separates components.

Among the more affordable CD players we recommend for less than £500, the five-star, Award-winning Marantz CD70 (£499 / $750 / AU$1000) is a solid choice for anyone looking to integrate a CD player into a wider hi-fi system, with a modern design and a precise, powerful sound. The CD player’s older sibling, the six-time What Hi-Fi? Award-winning CD6007 (currently priced at around £349 / $650 / AU$900) is also still available for cheaper at the time of writing, although only while stocks last, of course.

There are cheaper, if somewhat less hi-fi options, too. FiiO, for example, recently announced a highly versatile CD player, the DP11 (priced around £200 / $170), which can act as a DAC and preamplifier, too. Back in December 2025, the company also released a portable CD player that supports hi-res Bluetooth and doubles as a DAC, called the DM15 R2R (priced at £249 / $269).

Fantastic though some of these products are, I understand people’s reservations.

This is a hard dream to sell

Although CDs strike a fantastic middle ground in terms of audio quality, they aren’t as high-resolution as the offerings of some premium streaming services. Neither is it a small sacrifice to forgo the millions of songs from a streaming service that were once at your fingertips. There are sure to be withdrawals and growing pains. Nevertheless, while online services grapple with getting AI music under control, I want to give it a try.

By choosing physical media and accepting the relatively tame sacrifices that come with that option, I feel a bolstered confidence that the ‘path’ I am on is one I won’t regret in ten or twenty years’ time.

Unbeholden to the whims of tech giants – at least when it comes to listening – I will still own my CDs further down the line, whether they have by then become relics or taken on a newfound relevance. Perhaps most crucially of all, however, for each one I purchase, I will know that a human being has been paid for their ever more necessary work of expression. And that, I hope, is a cause we can all get behind.

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Swiss high-end hi-fi firm Goldmund has unveiled its latest premium pre-amplifier, the Mimesis Statement.

The analogue pre-amp was unveiled at the firm’s Geneva headquarters at a press event attended by What Hi-Fi?.

Featuring a three-box design that mixes a cover glass display and metal-coated front-panel controls for the amp section with two power supply boxes, at first glance the Statement continues Goldmund’s hard-edged, minimalist design philosophy.

However, Goldmund COO Gaspar Baldunciel told us the pre-amp is otherwise completely new and the result of vast R&D investment, with nearly every part being either proprietary to, or newly developed by, the firm.

For starters, the Statement is the first from Goldmund to feature a dual-mono power supply, with one box dedicated to feeding either the left or right channel.

Goldmund head of engineering, Dr Mehran Erza, clarified that every part of the power supply has been custom-designed by the internal team, with the aim of helping minimise noise and interference.

Despite housing the amplification electronics in one box, the firm has also taken a different approach with the pre-amp section’s design, working to isolate and separate the left and right channels as much as possible. This includes physically separating them with a custom “unique heat dissipation component” on the board.

“[For the amplification] if you see the main board, you’ll see things for controlling [things like] input/output selections, displays, volume. But everything relating to the sound and the signals will not go through the main board,” he explained.

“They’re going into the dedicated audio boards [on top], which are separated into the left and right channels, which each has its own power supply. Everything is separated to reduce crosstalk and interference. And again, the circuitry we’ve developed for that is not something you will find anywhere else.”

This, according to Goldmund, means the Statement can deliver a wide-bandwidth signal – 0.2Hz-1.5 MHz (±3 dB) – with low distortion.

He added that he believes the design is more elegant and less problematic for the end user than a four-box design.

Connectivity-wise, the Statement features three balanced XLR and seven single-ended RCA line-level inputs. For outputs, you will find three balanced XLR and three RCA connections.

Goldmund confirmed the amp has been tuned to deliver “a pure” listening experience that lets the original recording “pass through with minimal alteration”.

The Mimesis Statement costs £220,000, which makes sense given its place at the top of the range and recommended matching with the firm’s latest Telos 9800 power amp.

The step-down pre-amp, the Mimesis Reference, is around £145,000, and the partnering monoblocs are around £350,000 each.

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“Goldmund, isn’t that a Bond villain?” That’s the question a friend down the pub asked when I told him I had to skip drag bingo night, as I’m on a press trip in Switzerland. To be clear, it’s not.

Editor’s Note: He’s thinking of Goldfinger from the book and film of the same name. Or if we’re going lowbrow (which would make sense for him), Goldmember from the Austin Powers satire.

But there is a connection with the franchise’s fictional villains, as Goldmund – which, to be clear, is a Swiss high-end hi-fi brand responsible for some of the best premium amplifiers we’ve tested recently, including the five-star Goldmund Mimesis 37S NextGen/Telos 300 from 2023 and Telos 690 from 2024 – does have a penchant for secrecy and rarely lets people into its Geneva headquarters.

So, when I got the golden ticket and was offered a chance to get a behind-the-scenes look and listen with its latest Goldmund Mimesis Statement pre-amplifier (£220,000) and Telos 9800 power amplifier (£370,000 / €430,000 / $500,000), which both include numerous firsts for the firm, I couldn’t get on the plane fast enough.

Here’s what my audio sleuthing revealed.

Lots of changes are afoot

Both products are being pitched as “a new beginning” by Goldmund, which shifted its leadership 18 months ago, when CEO Marius Chapel, CCO Gaspar Baldunciel, and COO Paul Tétaz took over the company.

The firm says this means every circuit and aspect of its new pre- and power-amps are new, rather than tweaked versions of old designs. After a chat to the R&D team, and a sneak peek at both units’ internals, I can confirm there is proof in the pudding – though the firm remained fairly tight-lipped when pressed for specific details on its technology.

Capable of delivering a staggering 1560 watts of power into 8 ohms, the Telos 9800 is being pitched as the firm’s most powerful and advanced mono power amp to date. Featuring a towering design that physically separates the power supply and amplification circuitry into two interconnect boxes, the unit comes loaded with a wealth of custom hardware.

Though Goldmund didn’t go into detail, these include everything from a unique PCB (printed circuit board) design to creating custom capacitors and transformers – each “designed by and only manufactured for Goldmund”.

On top of this, the amp features a proprietary power management system, with what it describes as “the largest capacitor bank ever developed by the company”, and backed up by Goldmund's 'Leonardo' processing algorithm tech. Leonardo works to digitally realign frequencies, reducing phase distortions and “dreaded accidental oscillations”.

“Pure, precise, stable” – the three words are muttered throughout the demo.

Outside of this, the Telos 9800 features all the trappings of a high-end power amp, featuring balanced XLR and RCA inputs and a quartet of speaker binding posts. The power amp also features a coaxial digital input, letting you connect digital sources with a volume control directly to it, should you so choose.

The new Statement preamplifier continues the theme, being the first analogue design from Goldmund to feature a dual mono power supply housed in two boxes.

The twin power supplies feed into the preamp, which, while a single box, has a ‘twinned’ design Goldmund claims “you won’t find anywhere else”, where the left and right channels are isolated and physically divided by a “unique heat dissipation component” on the board.

The circuit has an atypical "symmetrical" design the firm claims reduces noise and interference while improving overall “signal purity", resulting in a more accurate, precise and articulate sound.

When it comes to connectivity, the Statement offers three balanced XLR and seven single-ended RCA line-level inputs. Three balanced XLR and three RCA outputs then follow.

But the important question is: after all these changes…

How do they sound?

I was able to listen to this pre/power combination as part of a system in Goldmund’s newly built listening room – which, sadly, hadn’t been fully finished while we were visiting, with things like a bare, reflective door next to the system and unfinished treatment making for less than optimal conditions.

The system featured a Mimesis Statement and two Telos 9800s connected to Theia Passive speakers (£190,000), with the Eidos Excellence SACD player (£55,000) and Eidos streamer (£25,000) acting as sources.

We can’t make any final judgments about sound quality until we have them in our listening rooms. But Dr Véronique Adam, Goldmund’s long-standing head of acoustic research and development, told us the firm’s mission to create the most transparent – to the point of being brutally honest – sound possible, and not try to “fix” a bad source, has not changed. That was apparent the moment the listening session began.

Starting with Prince’s Get On The Boat, the system delivers a punchy, dynamic sound, ably dealing with the interlinking grooves with a solid sense of rhythmic timing and precision. The soundstage feels expansive and wide, creating an accurate stereo image, where every part of the freeform big-band funk experience holds its spot, refusing to congest in the middle and devolve the piece into a muddy wall of sound.

This continues as we transition to Philip Glass’s Floe, where the complex arrangement retains a suitable sense of drive, while leaving enough room for each interlinking instrument to breathe – the dreaded bass synthesiser remaining firmly in its lane, rather than drowning out the more subtle sections, making it possible to count along with the composition’s direct 2:3 polyrhythm.

Moving to SMV’s Thunder, the booming basses hit you in the gut as the system delivers an impressive amount of low-end heft. But the higher-frequency scooped slap bass sections began to take on a hard edge and feel a bit raised compared to the other parts, making for occasionally unpleasant listening, despite its otherwise capable handling of the tricky piece’s dynamics. I suspect the less-than-perfect acoustics of the unfinished demo room are to blame here.

Pressing the issue with Steve Vai’s Touching Tongues, a famously bright song, this continues, as the system delivers the squealing lead guitar with so much force it veers towards forthrightness in its earnest delivery. Again, the system occasionally feels forced, with the track not quite sticking the landing with the upper frequencies, in particular – an issue that, again, could easily be explained by the room.

All in all, it left an impression, but we’d really like to listen to it again in a room we’re familiar with that has been fully treated – at this level, it’s not fair to play the hardware in anything less.

Final thoughts

While I didn’t get enough time with the new Goldmund amps to make any final judgments, our time with them and the company’s new leadership team shows the firm is looking to make big changes, both to how it runs and its product range.

That alone makes me eager to hear more and see what that means for the iconic Swiss hi-fi brand and its offerings – especially given the sweeping changes that have been made in developing the new Telos and Mimesis amps since the new leadership team took over 18 months ago.

Add to this the strong impression of its bold designs and ongoing unapologetic focus on a pure, unadulterated sound, and I can’t help but feel we should all be keeping an eye on Goldmund, as it continues its metamorphosis.

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If we asked you to think of two brands from the worlds of hi-fi and automotive that you thought should work together, the names Bowers & Wilkins and Aston Martin would probably crop up more than a couple of times.

It might surprise you to know, though, that these two officially tied the knot only in 2023, when Bowers & Wilkins was announced as Aston Martin’s audio partner.

The first project was a 15-speaker system for the then all-new Aston Martin DB12 – but we are here to talk about one of B&W’s more recent systems, the 23-speaker set-up for its DBX S SUV.

Price

As you would probably expect from a performance SUV with an Aston Martin badge on board, the Bowers & Wilkins system for DBX S isn’t cheap. The car itself starts from £210,000, and the speaker package is a meaty option which comes in at around £8500.

That, though, is roughly what we’d expect a set-up at this level to cost – especially when it comes to top-tier automotive brands. It’s a similar story when talking about the Naim for Mulliner audio option for Bentley’s Bentayga SUV.

In the grand scheme of the actual cars themselves and the other options you can pay for, the step-up audio systems can actually make a lot of sense.

System

As standard, the Aston Martin DBX S comes with the 790 watt, 14-channel Premium audio system, which features 13 speakers and a subwoofer.

Tick the Bowers & Wilkins option, and power more than doubles to 1600 watts, while the speaker count increases to 23 with 21 channels of amplification.

The speaker count breaks down as follows:

4 x 17cm paper-cone woofers split between the front and rear doors

7 x 25mm aluminium tweeters spread through the dashboard, front/rear doors and roof lining

4 x 40mm full-range speakers in the front and rear ceiling

7 x 10cm midrange speakers split between the dashboard, front and rear doors and the roof

1 x 19cm x 13.3cm subwoofer in the boot

Those midrange speakers all use Bowers & Wilkins’ proprietary Continuum cone material, which you can find on all the brand's domestic loudspeaker ranges.

The double dome aluminium tweeters can be found in the likes of B&W’s 600 Series speakers – behind each one you'll find special spiral diffusion channels to help absorb reflected sound and reduce vibrations.

The DBX S system also uses Bowers & Wilkins’ tweeter-on-top speaker configuration, which places the tweeter in a separate enclosure to isolate it from vibrations caused by other drivers in the same cabinet. The result is a more open, transparent sound.

In the Aston Martin, each tweeter is hidden behind an intricately designed grille, which looks distinctive and premium, and this grille design is used to cover larger drivers elsewhere in the cabin.

Audio processing for the system is controlled using a combination of QuantumLogic Immersion and Dirac Unison.

The former crunches the numbers and separates your stereo track into individual elements before it then decides where to send them within the system for the best listening experience.

The latter optimises loudspeaker performance and includes bass-management tech to get all the speakers working together in unison.

Sound modes

As is the case with most premium car audio systems of this type, the user has a range of different sound modes at their disposal.

First, you have a choice between ‘studio’ and ‘stage’. Studio is designed to be the most authentic and purest sound mode, while stage is designed to replicate the feeling of being in the middle of a live performance, with extra processing that makes the mode feel more immersive.

Once you’ve picked your flavour (we prefer the studio mode for a more accurate sound), you also have the option of switching the focus of the system between an ‘all seats’ listening mode, a more specific ‘driver’ mode or a ‘rear’ mode biased towards your back-seat passengers.

In our experience of other systems on the market, choosing between these modes tends to come down to personal preference. And the same rings true here. During testing, we edge towards the all seats mode because it delivers a nice blend of immersion, detail and focus.

The driver mode is a bit more intense and the effect more obvious than in other systems we’ve tested. Vocals in particular are brought right into focus in front of the driver, and they sound quite pronounced. This isn’t in a negative way; we just find the effect more noticeable, and during testing it took us a bit longer to get used to.

As you might expect, this driver-specific setting gives you a greater sense of your own personal stereo image when you’re behind the wheel – there’s greater precision within what feels like a tighter soundfield. You are also aware of a greater sense of verticality and height with the stereo image compared with the all seats setting.

We see the appeal of the driver-focused mode, but in this instance we think you sacrifice a bit too much of the free-flowing nature of the sound – we prefer the greater spread and feeling of immersion encouraged by the all seats mode.

In addition to these modes, you also have traditional tone controls at your fingertips for bass, midrange and treble, none of which we feel we need to tinker with during our time with the system.

Sound

The better-sounding premium systems we have tested all deliver a more mature, refined and sophisticated performance than entry-level set-ups, and this Bowers & Wilkins set-up definitely fits into this category.

It’s an expressive and exciting listen, with one particular highlight being the level of refinement and detail you can hear at the very top end.

The system does a great job of extracting detail and pushing high frequencies without overstepping the mark. You get crisp, sharply drawn lines from the tweeters, but they don’t sound stressed or harsh when pushed.

It’s sometimes difficult to convey subtlety and low-level dynamics of a track when you have external factors such as road and engine noise to contend with, but the DBX S’s interior does a great job of isolating you from outside interference.

This allows the system to peel more layers away from the music and delve impressively deep into the fine detail. Spin a couple of minutes of Nothing Arrived by Villagers and you soon get the drift.

The speakers do a great job of communicating the intimate nature of the track. The system captures and surgically extracts the intricate plucking of the acoustic guitar extremely accurately but delivers it with a sense of life and expression too.

You get a real feel for each note; a mixture of intensity, delicacy and authenticity hooks you in.

The system does an excellent job communicating the dynamic shifts in the track’s vocals and the guitar strings, as the pace slows and the dynamics quieten before everything shifts back up through the gears.

Play something with a bit more power and drive, such as Macklemore & Lewis’s Downtown, and Bowers’ system hits with intensity and power. The track marches along in a lively and energetic fashion.

As the different vocals rotate around each other from verse to chorus, the system paints each element with impressive texture and tonality. Here, the studio mode really delivers refinement and sophistication in spades.

However, although there is an impressive amount of bass weight and power on display and the system can drop to impressive depths, the lows don’t gel quite as smoothly with the rest of the frequency range, in our opinion.

They have a tendency to stick out from the rest of the presentation, and we’d also like a greater level of definition.

It’s not a question of dialling down bass weight in the tone controls; the quantity isn’t really the problem. It’s more that the system doesn’t differentiate between bass notes quite as clearly and obviously as the very best systems we’ve heard.

Verdict

It can be tricky getting in-car systems to deliver like proper hi-fi, but the Bowers & Wilkins for Aston Martin DBX S system succeeds in many ways. The package delivers a large-scale, dynamic and refined sound with the midrange and treble being particular highlights.

In our opinion, it doesn’t quite have the quality of bass needed to secure that fifth star, but if it was our money, we still wouldn’t hesitate ticking the options box.

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English manufacturer Audiolab has announced the release of its first standalone phono stage in almost 20 years, the PPA7. The company says that the new unit is “much more than a traditional phono stage”, calling it “a veritable multitool for vinyl lovers”.

It may not include a corkscrew or a nail file, but the PPA7 doesn’t fall short of its “multi-tool” status, with a built-in headphone amplifier and an analogue to digital converter (ADC).

In this case, the ADC serves the dual purpose of enabling wireless streaming to Bluetooth headphones or speakers via Bluetooth 5.3 (with support for the hi-res aptX HD codec), and also allows the unit to be connected to a PC or Mac via USB-C for digitising and storing records.

The ADC supports 16 and 24-bit recording at sample rates ranging from 44.1kHz to 192kHz. Audiolab says the ADC's adjustable output level allows users to “achieve an ideal balance between recording loudness and the audible noise floor”.

The company has acknowledged the PPA7’s visual likeness to the five-star rated D7 DAC, which launched last year. The units have identical 5.6 x 18 x 20.8 cm (hwd) aluminium cases, sharing features “right down to the multifunction rotary controls” which flank the 33mm OLED display.

Separate stereo RCA inputs are included for moving magnet (MM) and moving coil (MC) cartridges, alongside RCA outputs for connecting to an external amplifier or powered speakers. The output can be switched between fixed or variable modes, the latter of which engages a built-in volume control for direct connection to a power amplifier.

Both types of cartridge are well-accommodated by the PPA7. For MM cartridges, a 47kOhm input impedance can be switched between capacitances of 100pF and 220pF, while selectable 100 ohm and 330 ohm resistance loads provide further flexibility for MC cartridges. Audiolab claims that these settings allow users to “fine-tune the sound to suit their system”.

Gain can also be adjusted with a maximum value of 52dB for MM and 66dB for MC cartridges.

A front-mounted 6.35mm headphone socket can deliver up to 600mW of power to drive loads ranging from 20 to 600 ohms, supporting “a detailed and dynamic performance with a broad range of wired headphones”.

Future and past-proofing the PPA7’s design, a USB-A input has been included for firmware updates, while a 12V trigger inputs allow the unit to be integrated into a wider system for coordinated powering up and down.

We've previously seen headphone amps integrated into phono stages, with five-star products such as the Cambridge Audio Duo pulling it off in style, but we look forward to testing the extra functionality of Bluetooth and USB that the PPA7 has to offer.

The PPA7 will be available for £499 / $699 / AU$1099 in a choice of black or silver, with sales beginning in late October.

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Sony has lifted the lid on two new hi-res Walkmans, but they are both significantly more expensive than their 2022 predecessors.

But let's not dwell on that – after all, it would be a bit naive to expect new products at four-year-old prices. Let's focus on the good stuff.

And there's certainly plenty of that. The flagship NW-WM1ZM3 and step-down NW-WM1AM3 promise to "bring together Sony's most advanced audio technologies" and capture "subtle nuances throughout a performance, while maintaining clarity, scale and dynamics at higher volumes."

So what's the difference between them? The flagship NW-WM1ZM3 features a gold-plated oxygen-free copper (OFC) chassis which doesn't just hold the parts in place, but helps enhance the sound quality.

The 99.99 per cent (4N) purity OFC main chassis and OFC rear chassis are secured with screws secured with a low-resistance gold-plated treatment that's exclusive to the ZM3, which provides a stable ground connection to deliver "powerful bass, an expansive soundstage and smooth, extended high frequencies."

It also has the same thick Kimber Kable wiring as the massive DMP-Z1, which reduces noise and preserves signal integrity.

The NW-WM1AM3 isn't quite as premium, but still boasts an aluminium-alloy main chassis and gold-plated OFC rear chassis to enhance rigidity and hence sound quality.

Both models have upgraded power supply architecture, with the single high-polymer capacitor replaced by dual ones. Add in hand-soldered OFC wiring, and it should produce a cleaner, more stable power supply with less interference.

The larger, high-purity 4N copper coil used in the L-C filter optimises the balance output signal from the digital amplifier, while its flat conductive wire reduces resistance and distortion, meaning better clarity and detail across the frequency range.

The digital ground is further strengthened by an OFC milled block covering the digital components, resulting in more clarity and definition, Sony says.

Also onboard is Sony's S-Master HX digital amp tech, which was developed specifically for Walkmans, and promises a powerful, detailed sound. It's compatible with Native DSD formats, and includes a look-ahead noise shaper that predicts quantisation noise in advance and applies optimal processing for a clearer, faster sound reproduction.

The same look-ahead noise shaper features in Sony's five-star WH-100XM6 headphones, courtesy of the HD Noise Cancelling Processor QN3.

Sony's DSD Remastering Engine is there too, to resample PCM audio into an 11.2MHz DSD ultra-high-frequency stream. Sony claims this gives the sound a character that's closer to analogue.

You can now use the DSD Remastering Engine when listening to music streamed over wi-fi or that's been downloaded.

The 35-hour battery life (for both) is a big step on from the 18 hours offered by the ZM2, but there's a caveat. That figure involves listening to 128kbps MP3s, which would seem a bit of a waste considering the audio chops at your disposal. Listening to DSD files will drain the battery far quicker – we got less than 10 hours from the ZM2, which is around 50 per cent less than the quoted run time.

Over streaming, Sony claims the new players will last 31 hours (though that's in "offline mode with balanced connection").

The screens have also been enlarged, and now stand 5.5 inches across (half an inch bigger than the ZM2's). You can now customise the home screen interface, too. And the screens promise to be smoother and more responsive – which is good news, given that the clunky interface was one of our main criticisms of the last model.

Which brings us to the price. The NW1-WM1ZM3 costs £4299 / AU$8499 (around $5899 and the NW-WM1AM3 £2099 / AU$3999 (around $2999). That's an increase on their 2022 predecessors of £949 for the flagship and £799 for the step-down. Ouch.

We found the ZM2 to be a deeply impressive performer with beautiful build quality, but it was let down by its limited power output and rather clunky operation. Let's hope these improvements can help the new model earn that elusive fifth star.

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British hi-fi mainstay NAD has announced two new products in its Classic Series: the C 359S streaming amplifier and C 569 CD player.

The C 359S brings streaming smarts to a traditional Class AB amplifier courtesy of the BluOS platform. And the C 569 uses NAD's Dynamic Digital Headroom (DDH) and QRONO d2a technologies to bring out more detail, depth and presence from your CD collection.

While the C 359S uses Class AB amplification, it foregoes the large transformer and linear power supply usually associated with that design. Instead, it employs a high-current, low-noise switch mode power supply that's derived from NAD's flagship Class D amplifier platform.

Power conversion, signal processing and amplification are kept separate by a modern multi-layer architecture, while grounding, current paths and signal routing minimise unwanted interaction between the amp's various functions.

NAD claims the C 359S is "a remarkably quiet, responsive amplifier" that delivers 2 x 70 watts of continuous power into 8 ohms, and can handle demanding loudspeakers "without compromise".

Hi-res streaming and multi-room audio come courtesy of the BluOS platform, so you can beam audio to speakers dotted throughout the house. With aptX HD Bluetooth also onboard, a phono input for turntables, plus an HDMI eARC port for connecting to your TV, it's equipped to handle multiple audio sources.

By redirecting deep bass to the subwoofer via high-pass filtering, it eases the load on the main speakers and amp for better clarity, imaging and headroom within a 2.1-channel setup.

And the design is recognisably NAD, with push buttons, knob controls and a bundled IR remote.

The C 569 CD player sits between the entry-level C 538 and flagship (and much more recent) C 589. Onboard is the latter's Qrono d2a filtering technology, which refines timing and resolution for a more natural performance from PCM- and MQA-encoded music.

NAD's own Dynamic Digital Headroom (DDH) tech eliminates inter-sample clipping so that percussion and transients can hit harder and cleaner without digital distortion.

Both of these technologies are part of NAD's "Music First" design, which "favours musicality, tonal balance and clarity over exaggerated detail or specs", creating performances that are "naturally engaging" even during long listens.

Onboard are an ESS Sabre DAC, improved op-amps and a refined power supply that should lower noise while preserving low-level details, while the C 359 can also be used as a CD transport with a separate DAC.

The C 359 is out now and costs £1099 (around $1400 / AU$2000), while the C 569 CD player is coming in late November for £749 (around $1000 / AU$1400). The C 569 is just a tad pricier than the Award-winning Arcam CD5, so it'll be fascinating to see how they compare.

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Moon has expanded its Compass collection of hi-fi separates with its latest integrated amplifier, the 341.

Combining Class A/B power amplification and fully balanced preamplification into a single unit, the new model boasts 100 watts of power into 8 ohms, to deliver what its maker describes as “exceptional sound” with “clarity, poise and musicality”.

The Moon 341 comes equipped with an integrated phono stage with support for both moving magnet and moving coil cartridges, as well as four RCA outputs and a balanced XLR input.

The integrated model features the brand’s ‘Moon Hybrid Power’ (MHP) and ‘Distortion-Cancelling Amplifier’ (MDCA) technologies derived from the company’s flagship North collection.

MHP aims to combine the benefits of a traditional power supply with modern switch-mode tech for better energy efficiency and stability; MDCA uses error correction outside the audio signal path to further reduce audio distortion.

According to Renaissance MD John Carroll: “The 341 is a new classic. It has been created using more than 40 years of audio design expertise and is set to be popular with our customers, especially as physical music formats continue to see strong sales. We know that owners of the 341 will love the way it delivers a powerful yet detailed performance from both CDs and vinyl.”

You can manage your new integrated amp via a large rotational dial alongside on-unit buttons, or use the provided aluminium remote control.

The Moon 341 integrated amplifier is available in combined black and silver or an all-black finish, priced at £4400 / $5,000.

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Naim has announced its latest high-end all-in-one wireless music system, the Mu-so Utopia.

We travelled to Naim and Focal’s respective headquarters for a hands-on preview of the new system ahead of launch – you can read our first impressions via the link below.

• Read our Naim Mu-so Utopia hands-on review

Following on from the excellent Focal Mu-so Hekla we tested earlier this year, the new system combines Naim-powered amplification with trickle-down technology taken from Focal’s high-end series of Utopia loudspeakers.

Inside, the do-it-all system packs 720 watts of Class D and A/B amplification driving a whopping 15 drive units, teasing an “immersive experience” that will happily cover rooms up to around 50m² in size.

The majority of the drivers are powered with Class D amplification, including a pair of 2.75cm ‘M-shaped’ midrange woofers and four full-range drivers housed at the sides and top of the unit.

Twin 25mm ‘PRISM’ tweeters – derived from those found in Focal’s more prestigious Scala and Diva Utopia loudspeaker ranges – are driven using Class A/B power, with Focal’s engineers informing us that A/B gives greater control to the upper frequencies.

On the streaming side, Tidal, Qobuz and Spotify are all on board in their ‘Connect’ forms, as are AirPlay 2, Google Cast and Bluetooth 5.3 with standard AAC and SBC codecs. UPnP streaming lets you play stored files from your local network, and you can create a multi-room setup with compatible Naim and Focal products.

The Naim Mu-so Utopia is capable of handling hi-res files up to 32-bit/384kHz PCM alongside DSD128, while Dolby Atmos support is a major part of the system’s appeal. There are plenty of sound modes from which to choose, ranging from a Dolby Movie mode to ‘Sphere Music’ which uses beamforming microphone tech to build a three-dimensional audio experience.

Physical connections include HDMI eARC for integration with a home cinema system, as well as an optical input and an RCA output if you want to connect to a subwoofer. There’s also an Ethernet port for a physical connection to your wi-fi network.

The Mu-so Utopia follows a similar design language to the Mu-so Hekla and Naim Mu-so 2 systems that preceded it, with an anodised aluminium chassis accented by a red trim that runs lengthways across the main body. Just be aware that, at 100cm in length and weighing around 14kg, this mighty Mu-so will need plenty of space.

An illuminated white dial is found atop the Mu-so Utopia, from which you can control volume by turning it to the side, with the dial also acting as a touch screen for selecting your input and switching power on/off.

The Naim Mu-so Utopia will set you back £4499 / $5500 at launch, a good deal more than the £3000 / $3600 for the Hekla we took for a spin earlier in the summer. Once we have put it through its paces in our test rooms, we’ll know whether it’s worth the extra outlay.

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Read our Naim Mu-so Utopia hands-on review

And our established Focal Mu-so Hekla review

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Focal has always felt like a brand that does things its own way. Take a look at a pair of the company’s Grande Utopia Em Evo floorstanders, complete with their articulated rear ‘spines’ and £220,000 asking price, and you’ll get an immediate feel for a company that is comfortable in its own skin.

Founded in 1979 in Saint-Étienne, France, Focal has anchored its core reputation to luxury high-end speakers, stereo systems and headphones, seeking “to enhance listening experiences and restore the authenticity of artists’ work” by “pushing back the boundaries of musical reproduction”.

A noble aim on paper, but what interests us most about Focal is its approach to that “boundary pushing” production. Described as a shared French philosophy, so much of the brand’s output seems to remain rooted in a human-led, almost artisanal approach.

Focal’s headquarters are still located in Saint-Étienne, a facility from which the company assembles, primarily by hand, its loudspeakers, speaker systems and headphones.

As France is only a short flight from Heathrow, we hopped across the Channel to delve deep into Focal’s audio production and, crucially, the people behind it.

Made in France: flax drivers and crafted cabinets

In this age of all-encompassing automation, what is perhaps most striking about Focal’s production philosophy is its apparent focus on human craft. From cabinets to drive units, humans remain central to Focal’s overarching manufacturing process.

Unlike most of its key rivals, practically all of the company’s drivers are made in-house, with much of the work done by hand. Focal favours a flax sandwich cone for many of its drive units, manually constructed using French-sourced flax fibres sandwiched between two layers of fibreglass, chosen for its combination of rigidity and lightness.

The cone is then cut using a precision laser cutter, while a magnet, voice coil, spider and surround are added later to support the driver.

Why flax? As Louis Gibout, Focal’s deputy brand, digital marketing and retail director explains, the chosen material affects the resultant sound: “Flax has a warmer sound colouration. That’s why we deliberately choose one membrane or another, depending on what we want to do.

“We have two floorstanding speakers, the Kanta and the Sopra. One uses a flax membrane and a beryllium tweeter, the other uses a beryllium membrane and a beryllium tweeter. One customer will want a warmer feeling [of the flax], and one will want a more analytical approach. Two different versions, two different philosophies.”

That brings us on to beryllium, one of Focal’s signature materials reserved for the company’s more rarefied ‘M’ dome drivers. According to Focal, the brand’s signature ‘M-shaped’ unit profile helps to reduce the stress on the membrane during movement, resulting in less distortion and unwanted colouration at high frequencies.

While Focal’s new ‘Prism’ tweeter has moved away from beryllium, the brand’s affection for the material runs deep. As our guide explains, this is an element that provides an exceptional stiffness-to-weight ratio, granting outstanding movement control and precision in the upper sonic reaches.

The one problem? It’s a pretty nasty material to work with: “When people are working with beryllium, they are in a cosmonaut suit, because [the dust] can be very dangerous. We’ve not had any issues in more than 20 years, but still, we are very, very cautious.”

Just as humans remain firmly embedded in the production process of Focal’s drivers, they are equally important when it comes to quality control.

Here, the process blends man and machine, with each driver on the production line undergoing both an electrical test via audio signal analysis and a more personal test with the good old-fashioned human ear. As Gibout explains, actual human beings are essential to ensuring that each product meets the required standard:

“[We need] to keep a human process in the quality process. When you hear Focal products, you know it has been tested individually throughout production.

“Our production staff are able to recognise from what they hear where the issue is coming from. You know that every speaker [driver] has been tested individually, and when it’s assembled, it is matched with another speaker to make sure you get the best matching possible.”

This human element applies to everyone at the company. We are told that each new staff member, no matter their role or job title, spends two days in production as part of their onboarding process, from helping produce a flax membrane to assembling the drivers.

“It’s part of the journey. We want people to feel that and to know that what we do here is subtle, requires technical training and cannot be done by everybody, to make sure we have this know-how from the production of the driver membrane until the high-gloss finish [is applied].”

Obviously, Focal isn’t going to be left behind the times for the sake of tradition. Once a speaker is assembled, it is tested in one of the most Batman-esque anechoic chambers we’ve ever seen. It features a hydraulic platform upon which samples can be mounted, raised and then measured using lasers to assess the speaker’s frequency response, distortion and directivity.

A lot of the facility has a refreshingly low-key, artisanal feel to it, but such a high-spec anechoic chamber, complemented by some very sophisticated listening rooms, hints at a blend of the traditional and the cutting-edge.

The cruel hand of quality control

While driver production and cabinet assembly are performed in Saint-Étienne, Focal’s sister workshop in Bourbon-Lancy manufactures the cabinets and finishes for the likes of its Utopia and Sopra high-end loudspeakers.

While the cabinets are put together in France, certain woods and materials may be sourced from further afield. If you want a signature White Ebony finish, that comes from a rare tree species from Southeast Asia; the deeper, rich tone of ‘Ziricote’ is taken from sapwood grown in Mexico and Central America.

Luckily for us, the Saint-Étienne team have panel samples a little closer to hand, demonstrating the seven or so steps involved in producing both painted and high-gloss wood effects for its MDF exteriors.

For the most part, the process is again done by hand, often starting from a panel of MDF which is rough cut and sanded before a layer of gloss or paint is added, a process which is then repeated until the smooth, unblemished effect is realised.

“We use MDF because it’s very stable and the density is always the same. If you use real wood, you can have unwanted grains and hard spots, and it’s not very good for the vibration of the product,” explains Paul Weill, Focal’s special projects manager.

To Focal, it seems that how a pair of speakers looks is almost as important as how they sound. Perhaps the most striking example of this apparent commitment to quality comes at the end of the production process, wherein the hopeful speakers are exposed to blue, yellow and white lights to reveal any scuffs, scratches or marks that might have blemished their paintwork.

If nothing is found, the speaker is pretty much good to go, but if a sufficiently major imperfection is uncovered, the speaker is disassembled and sent back to Bourgogne so that the whole process can start all over again. Ouch.

Given that a pair of Utopia can take up to a month to craft, it’s a brutal test, but as Louis Gibout tells us, one that must be passed every single time: “We know how much speakers like these are. For the customers, it’s an investment, it’s an emotion, it’s a commitment to the brand, and the brand needs to deliver this quality.”

Arts and crafts: leather jackets and peacocking speakers

Sometimes, a pair of Focal Diva Utopia isn’t exclusive enough. Sometimes you need a pair of speakers that is utterly distinctive from the rest – a pair that is unique.

That’s where Focal Crafts comes in. Take a short walk from the company’s main facility, and you’ll find yourself standing in a small but airy workshop that could just as well be mistaken for an artist’s studio or fashionista’s boudoir as opposed to a wing of an international hi-fi brand.

This is the Focal Crafts atelier, wherein some of the brand’s most exclusive and sometimes eccentric creations are crafted – and, if they are really special, displayed. Such kooky creations include Diva Utopia speakers clad in leather, another sporting a peacock feather finish, one covered in denim (yes, they have a pocket), as well as a Scala Utopia Evo floorstander wrapped in luxuriant faux marble.

The Focal Craft division is responsible for creating some of the brand’s most entrancing exclusives, including a set of Diva Utopias adorned with Capiz shells and another covered in sand and mineral flakes designed to catch the light at different angles.

For those looking for the ultimate exclusivity, you can collaborate with Focal’s design team to come up with a set of speakers to your own particular aesthetic tastes. Focal’s designers will work with you to create a specially commissioned exterior, generally reserved for its reference-grade loudspeaker lines.

There are, however, some rules. All panels must be the same colour and type, and certain aspects of the speaker, such as the glowing company logo, must remain untouched to preserve brand identity.

We cheekily ask whether some customers’ tastes are simply too, well, tasteless to merit a custom paint job, and are gratified by the honesty of Paul Weil’s reply: “Yes, [but] our work is to move them in the right direction. If something is very terrible, we have no problem saying no. This is why we have pictures and examples of what we can do.”

Sometimes, practicality plays a part in the materials chosen. We are told a story of a customer who wanted a wireless stereo speaker system clad in green marble; not only was it too expensive, but its thickness also prevented each speaker from connecting via their Ultra-Wideband connection. Happily, a thinner marble-effect solution was found.

Earlier this year, Belgian projector manufacturer Barco announced an agreement to acquire the Vervent Audio Group, the parent company of Focal and Naim, ending the main stake ownership of Alpha Private Equity.

We hope that change in ownership will not profoundly affect how the company is run, and that whatever happens, Focal continues its apparent commitment to human-led research, development, construction and quality control.

In a world that is moving faster than most of us can manage, it’s reassuring to see that real people remain the key components in the brand’s quest for great sound.

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The Mu-so Hekla felt like a big deal for Focal and Naim. While branded as a Focal product, the all-in-one Hekla represented a careful collaboration between the French manufacturer and its sister company Naim Audio, with Naim’s Mu-so wireless speaker pedigree adopted under the prestigious Focal banner.

The new Naim Mu-so Utopia promises to take that symbiosis to new levels of performance and price. Billed as the “Hekla with the brakes off”, the new Mu-so Utopia all-in-one wireless system once again takes the amplification and pedigree from Naim’s Award-winning range of Mu-so wireless speakers, and marries it with trickle-down technology taken from Focal’s high-end range of Utopia-branded loudspeakers.

The Hekla but better? Focal driver tech powered by Naim amplification? One listen was never going to be enough, so we headed to both Naim’s UK headquarters and Focal’s facility in France to get a proper taste of what the Mu-so Utopia can do.

Price

The Naim Mu-so Utopia will set you back £4499 / $5500 at launch, a good deal more than the £3000 / $3600 for the mighty Hekla we took for a spin earlier in the summer, and a lot more than, say, the £1299 / $1699 for the five-star Ruark Audio R410 all-in-one system we have so admired since its 2023 launch.

That’s a decent wad of cash by most objective standards, but when you have a product that’s touted as a soundbar, a streaming hub and a Dolby Atmos-powered hi-fi and surround system, the numbers do make more sense. On paper, at least.

Build and design

We’ll do our best to rein ourselves in here. We know that the Utopia doesn’t come cheap, that we have encountered it only in a demo setting, and that taste is an inherently subjective and slippery beast; but it’s hard not to be enchanted by the imposing allure of this substantial all-in-one system.

The Naim Mu-so Utopia follows the same core design language as the Focal Mu-so Hekla and Naim Mu-so 2 systems that preceded it. It has a brushed black anodised aluminium chassis complemented by a red trim that runs lengthways across the unit’s 100cm-wide body.

Speaking of which, the Utopia is a pretty sizeable beast, weighing in at around 14kg – so you’re going to need a reasonable amount of space and a sturdy rack capable of giving it proper support. If you intend to integrate it within a home cinema system, a separate rack from your TV is probably going to be required if you don’t want to block the bottom of your screen.

At the top of the all-in-one wireless system, you will find the same white illuminated dial used across the Mu-so range. You can control volume with a turn to the side, with the dial acting as a touch screen to adjust input and power. While we didn’t have the chance to try it out for ourselves, our time using the Hekla suggests that we are likely to be equally happy getting up close and personal with the Utopia when we get the chance.

Physical connections include HDMI eARC, for integration within a home cinema system, as well as an optical input and an RCA output if, say, you want to pair your Mu-so Utopia with a bass-boosting subwoofer. There is also an Ethernet port for granting a more stable internet connection.

Inside, the Mu-so Utopia packs 720 watts of Class D and A/B amplification driving a whopping 15 drive units, teasing an “immersive experience” that will happily cover rooms up to around 50m² in size.

Most of the drivers are powered using Class D amplification, including a pair of 2.75cm ‘M-shaped’ mid-range woofers and four full-range drivers housed at the sides and top of the unit.

Twin 25mm ‘PRISM’ tweeters – derived from those used on Focal’s high-end Scala and Diva Utopia loudspeaker ranges – are driven using Class A/B power, with Focal’s engineers telling us that A/B grants greater control and precision in the upper frequency ranges.

Features

At this kind of price, you should expect an extensive streaming suite backed by decent high-resolution file support. So Tidal, Qobuz and Spotify are all on board in their ‘Connect’ versions, as are AirPlay 2, Google Cast and Bluetooth 5.3 with standard AAC and SBC codecs.

UPnP streaming supports playing stored files from your local network, whereas multi-room capabilities let you create a chained system with compatible Naim and Focal products.

The Utopia is capable of handling hi-res files up to 32-bit/384kHz PCM alongside DSD128, while Dolby Atmos support is one of the system’s big trump cards.

There are plenty of sound modes from which to choose, including a ‘Dolby Movie’ mode for smaller or more standard listening rooms, alongside ‘Sphere Music’ and ‘Sphere Movie’, the latter of which uses Focal’s beamforming tech to construct “exceptional clarity and spatial accuracy”.

There is even a Night Mode, which reduces dynamics and bass so you don’t disturb your neighbours or co-habitants.

You can choose your desired listening mode using the Focal & Naim app, a platform from which you can also calibrate your system’s settings via an equaliser and Focal’s ‘ADAPT’ (Adaptive Acoustic Personal Tuning) room-calibration technology.

ADAPT collects and analyses data about your listening space and then adjusts the resultant audio output accordingly; just be aware that you will need to know your room’s dimensions first if you want a proper tailor-made experience.

The Mu-so Utopia doesn’t come with its own dedicated remote, so you will be operating predominantly via the dedicated app or, if you’re an iPhone user, Siri voice control. HDMI CEC further allows your television’s remote to control your Utopia without needing a separate device.

Sound

At What Hi-Fi?, we like to be thorough, and we like to do things properly. As such, we have heard the Mu-so Utopia in two separate countries, listening at Naim’s headquarters in Salisbury, England, before flying over to France to discover how it sounds in Focal’s dedicated Saint-Étienne facility.

These demonstrations are, naturally, never going to be as in-depth as having the product to ourselves, and we will need to get a review sample of our own before we know whether or not Naim’s latest system makes the grade. Still, the two trips have given us a firm idea of what the Mu-so Utopia can do.

Our Salisbury session was, as the French might say, something of an apéritif. Even with Naim’s gentle warning that its particular model still needed a bit of tinkering to its tuning, our three-track sampler gave us a taste of the system’s abilities.

Lyle Lovett’s The Road to Ensanada hints at the unit’s capacity to bring texture and delicacy to the track’s gentle guitar strums, whereas Leo Kottke’s Across the Street sounds fulsome and rich as Kottke’s meatier guitar playing fills Naim’s listening room with breadth and authority. Like the best demos, it leaves us wanting more.

A few weeks down the line, that’s exactly what we get. With a Mu-so Utopia firing on its native turf, we have the chance to hear what the premium all-in-one system can do across music, movies and even a short gaming showcase.

The cinematic portion of the demo includes a Dolby Atmos clip from 2014’s Unbroken, during which the American Air Force is sent on a bombing mission against Japanese installations on Nauru during the Second World War.

The Utopia’s ability to fill Focal’s 50m² test room without breaking stride is remarkable, but what really gives us hope is how it handles directional audio.

There is a tangible sense of definite sonic placement as anti-aircraft explosions burst and thud amidst the soaring allied planes. And, as an enemy fighter whizzes past our central heroes, we experience the sound of the aircraft’s engine moving from right to left as the Utopia tracks that roaring growl with precision and authority.

Away from movies, the Mu-so Utopia can be integrated as part of a gaming set-up – something Focal’s enthusiastic team demonstrate via a Dolby Atmos-powered clip from the ever-chaotic Star Wars: Battlefront II.

It’s a typically barnstorming sampler, and once again the Naim seems accomplished in how it grants genuine scope and scale to the unfolding action as lasers blast, soldiers bark orders to one another, and spaceships whizz across the crowded sky.

Our continental demonstration ends with the Mu-so Utopia flexing its musical muscles via renditions of Bittersweet by Billie Eilish, Happiness Is Simple by Simon Franglen from Avatar: The Way of Water, and Annette Askvik’s Liberty.

Again, our initial impressions are positive. Subtler textural insights rarely appear to go missing amid the Utopia’s remarkably powerful, room-filling approach, be they the whispered idiosyncrasies of Eilish’s signature vocals or the mournful strings that rise and fall across the elegiac Liberty.

Happiness Is Simple further hints at the Mu-so Utopia’s apparent talents for blending power and precision, with the premium system granting shape and scale to the track’s arcing strings as they soar above simple percussive rhythms and impish pipes.

If we had to raise any point of concern, it would be that the Utopia occasionally showed hints of hardness in the mid-to-upper ranges, especially during a closing stereo recording of Dr Dre’s What’s the Difference. This, though, could well have been due to the volume the track was playing at and our proximity to the unit itself.

A more suitable listening position and volume – not to mention ample running-in time to smooth out those hard edges – may well rectify any potential issues.

Early verdict

Does the Mu-so Utopia live up to its name tag as an all-in-one system capable of taking you to a higher plane of audio enjoyment?

It’s too early to say. That asking price is far from a modest sum, especially when compared with the five-star Hekla, so the step-up model is going to have to work hard to justify not only its higher price tag, but its place within the Mu-so range.

We’ll need much more time to get to grips with everything that new system can do, but it’s hard not to be optimistic at this stage. The Utopia has ample Mu-so pedigree on its side, and when you’ve got trickle-down tech from Focal joining with amplification from Naim, you’re always going to have a fighting chance.

For now, though, all we can do is wait until we get a Naim Mu-so Utopia into our own test rooms to give it the full What Hi-Fi? test treatment. Stay tuned.

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Scottish hi-fi manufacturer Linn has announced the 343, its latest high-end four-way active floorstanders.

Available in two distinct flavours, the new compact floorstanders harness Linn’s proprietary technologies to project an “unshakeable illusion of reality”.

Each new speaker packs a woven carbon 19mm tweeter and a 6.4cm midrange driver, as well as a 22cm bass unit alongside a 19cm upper bass driver. Both lower-end drivers harness the brand’s Pistonik motor system inherited from Linn’s flagship 360 speakers introduced in 2026.

That Pistonik motor system promises “flawless linear force” over its entire wide range of in-and-out travel thanks to its long-stroke motor topology and extended magnet gap.

The result, says Linn, is “bass performance with the depth and authority to give 343 its remarkable sense of scale, and the precision to preserve its composure”.

Each speaker’s continuous cabinet is free from hard edges, designed to let sound leave the loudspeaker more consistently and reduce diffraction effects that reveal the position of each box within the room.

Central to realising this effect is the cabinet material, made using a glass-fibre-reinforced moulding compound which allows for the enclosures to boast thinner walls while preserving structural integrity and performance.

The 343 is available in two variants. The Exakt Integrated version comes fitted with a power supply, digital crossover, DAC architecture, and amplification housed within its integrated module. As its name suggests, it also harnesses Linn’s Exakt technology, which adjusts your speaker’s output to a given space in pursuit of better harmonics and time alignment.

The Passive with Active Bass (PWAB) variant shares the same drive units, this time boasting a Utopik and Power DAC for the bass system, with the 343 array comprising upper bass, midrange and tweeter units driven instead by external amplification.

Both versions are available now in a choice of Triton Black, Single Malt, Clyde Built, Linn Heritage, Piano Black, or Alpine White finishes. The Exakt edition is on sale for £65,000 / $97,500 / AU$139,995 while the PWAB version will set you back £45,000 / $67,500 / AU$99,995.

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Cambridge Audio has announced a new turntable, the Spira, which the company says is “built to work with any system you already own, whether that’s a full hi-fi set-up, active speakers, a Bluetooth speaker or even headphones”.

According to Cambridge Audio, “Spira has everything you need straight out of the box”, including a pre-fitted Audio-Technica cartridge, a built-in phono stage and a Bluetooth transmitter for streaming to wireless headphones or Bluetooth speakers.

We have previously seen similarly equipped turntables from Cambridge Audio, such as the premium Alva TT V2 and Alva ST models, but at a price of £329 / $499, the Spira is the company’s most affordable model to date.

What’s more, despite its reasonable pricing, the turntable has kept flexibility and upgrades in mind. A removable headshell makes cartridge changes “far easier”, while the built-in phono stage can be bypassed, allowing users to connect their own external phono stage.

But it’s not all about change. Cambridge Audio says the turntable has been “tuned to perform and made to last”, with an aluminium alloy tonearm with adjustable counterweight and anti-skate, alongside a 1.8kg steel platter mounted on a “solid wooden” plinth for “stable, low-vibration playback”.

Speeds of 33 1/3 and 45 RPM are supported, but however fast you spin your wax, your records will be safe from harm thanks to a full dust cover. To “keep rumble out of the signal”, the turntable also comes with a felt mat and vibration-absorbing feet.

The Spira comes in Black, White, Green, Orange and Blue finishes, which are conveniently matched to Cambridge Audio’s L/R active speakers.

The Cambridge Audio Spira is available now, priced at £329 / $499. This puts it right between two of our favourite Bluetooth turntables – the Sony PS-LX3BT and the Sony PS-LX5BT, both of which received five-star reviews earlier this year – so we can't wait to hear how the Spira compares.

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Read our full Cambridge Audio Alva TT V2 review

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Plus, check out our pick of the best turntables tested by our expert reviewers

Rega has announced a brand new budget turntable with a completely new design, aiming to “remove all the paranoia and confusion” of the vinyl world by creating the “perfect” plug-and-play deck for new vinyl listeners.

The Rega Replay is the brand’s new entry-level offering priced competitively at £259 in the UK. Labelled as the “audiophile gateway drug”, the turntable has been designed from the ground up over three years, to “deliver exceptional sound at an accessible price”.

The Replay sits just under the multiple Award-winning Planar 1, which has traditionally been the most affordable record player in Rega’s line-up. We originally tested the current Planar 1 back in 2016 at £250, but the price has steadily risen over the years to £329 now.

The Rega Replay features many of the core elements of the standard Planar 1 – the phenolic resin platter with flywheel effect, the RB110 tonearm, and the Carbon moving-magnet cartridge fitted as standard.

But instead of a full-size conventional rectangular plinth, the Replay’s plinth is as minimal as can be.

Inspired by the skeletal plinths of the more premium Planar 8 and 10 turntables, the Replay features a reduced plinth footprint that weighs a mere 2.2kg in total.

The plinth features a laminated “high rigidity, low skeletal mass” design with an MDF core. This follows Rega’s long-held engineering belief that more mass saps music’s natural energy and introduces unwanted resonances that negatively affect the turntable’s performance.

The motor module under the main pulley also features the power input, power switch and a new PCB with built-in ventilation, and incorporates one of the three feet of the turntable.

The turntable remains a manual, belt-driven design, although there is no need to set the tracking force or anti-skating weight or balance the arm – you simply push the counterbalance weight on the tonearm as far as it will go, and that’s all the set-up required. Rega claims the Replay “can be set up and ready to use in under one minute”.

The Replay comes with a white mat that has a “different texture on one side to optimise grip on the textured platter surface”, says Rega, while the dustcover included is a minimal design, rather than a full-size hinged lid.

The Rega Replay will be going up against another long-running Award-winner, the Pro-Ject Primary E, which has been our favourite budget turntable for eight years now at a similar price of £249 in the UK. That’s going to be quite the battle.

We are waiting to get a sample of the new Rega Replay in for testing, so stay tuned for a full review soon.

MORE:

Read our recent Rega Planar 6 RS Edition review

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