Table of contents for May - June 2023 in Sound + Image

STREAMING MUSIC PLAYER OF THE YEAR OVER $1000 MUSIC SOURCES We could hardly head higher up the ranks than our second music streamer award — this is a version of Merging Technologies’ NADAC (Network Attached Digital to Analog Converter), with the ‘+PLAYER’ name indicating it is also a streaming player, and the ‘+POWER’ noting that it requires a separate power supply. (The multiple versions in this range can be a bit confusing; there’s also a +CLOCK which can be added, and Merging also manufactures eight-channel versions which look identical to the stereo versions, except for the rear panels. But as we reviewed it, +PLAYER+POWER, the price is $34,285. Which is a fair amount of money, but your return on investment is perhaps the world’s best streamer and DAC. The company…

TURNTABLE OF THE YEAR $500-$1000 MUSIC SOURCES The Classic is one of Music Hall’s turntables originally designed for the US market, which was always the company’s focus. Founder Roy Hall grew up in Glasgow, where he knew Linn founder Ivor Tiefenbrun from childhood, but it was for another longheld friend, Heinz Lichtenegger, the owner of Pro-Ject turntables, that he started Music Hall, bizarrely to deliberately compete with Lichtenegger’s own US distributor, to “stir things up”. Hall designed a turntable based on technology he’d learned at Linn, and from time distributing and repairing Revolver turntables, as well as technology developed by Pro-Ject. The first Music Hall turntable arrived in the US shortly afterwards. Lichtenegger has been building Music Hall turntables in his Czech factory ever since, but this Music Hall Classic…

MUSIC SOURCES TURNTABLE OF THE YEAR OVER $10,000 From Slovenia comes the latest edition of Holbo’s sole product, this turntable that does a number of things notably differently. It has only three legs. It keeps its branding to itself, presenting a plinth unadorned other than by buttonry. Its tonearm is very obviously not for pivoting, but adopts the linear tracking method which should, if successful, more closely track the information put into LP grooves by the lathes which, after all, cut the master discs using the same linear tracking motion. But perhaps most unconventionally of all, this turntable arrives with an offboard box which is not an isolated power supply, nor an offboard phono stage, but an air pump. It’s proudly branded “Holbo Air Pump”. This is required because Bostjan…

AMPLIFIER OF THE YEAR UNDER $2000 STEREO AMPLIFIERS The first three award winners in our amplifier categories have something in common: they are all ‘smart’ amplifiers, by which we mean not only a Bluetooth input but full streaming and even multiroom abilities. Denon’s ‘house’ platform for this is HEOS, which it shares with Marantz, so here you get full app-controlled streaming of the key subscription and free online services, all built in to the $1799 PMA-900HNE. The surprise, really, is that this is the first Denon ‘hi-fi’ amp to have gained the HEOS platform. Previous HEOS amps and receivers were all from the AV division, such as the similarly priced DRA-800H, which on paper offers more power and a useful HDMI input. But the team behind the PMA-900HNE told us…

STREO AMPLIFIERS AMPLIFIER OF THE YEAR $8000-$12,000 Perreaux is a New Zealand company, founded by Peter Perreaux in 1974 and now owned by electronics engineer Edwin Nieman, also the founder of the award-winning Dunedin-based Kamahi Electronics, where he heads a team of nearly two dozen electronics engineers. Nieman continues to champion Perreaux’s preferred use of MOSFETs in its amplifiers for their speed, stability and valve-like qualities — despite their cost and the complexity of power supply required to operate them efficiently. Perreaux’s model numbers indicate their power into 8 ohms, here 200W (with THD+N below 0.005%, typically 0.002% @1kHz). The 200iX provides four line-level inputs (one balanced), one mc/mm phono input, and six digital inputs: two coaxial, one USB, one AES/EBU, and two optical. Plus Bluetooth, for which a small…

STEREO AMPLIFIERS STEREO POWER AMPLIFIER OF THE YEAR It’s true that Adcom’s power amplifiers may not exude the ultimate in physical grace. But is that what you want from a power amplifier? Or would you prefer instead the evolution of a 1985 amplifier that became not only Adcom’s best-selling and most famous model but also one of the most famous amps of the last century. Stereophile’s contemporary review by Anthony Cordesman said: “It is so clearly superior to past amplifiers in the low-to-mid-priced range — not to mention most amplifiers costing two to three times its price — that I can unhesitatingly recommend it for even the most demanding high-end system.” Adcom seemed similarly confident about its abilities: the initials G and A stand for ‘Great Amplifier’. We’ll leave the…

WIRELESS SPEAKERS OF THE YEAR UNDER $2000 LOUDSPEAKERS So we arrive at one of our favourite categories: wireless speakers. They can be the ultimate compact solution: streaming speakers with amps inside — no other product required. Or you can plug into the inputs for a bigger system. KEF has had wild success combining wireless smarts with active speakers using its compact UniQ drivers; these put a tweeter in the throat of the woofer, not only saving space but delivering a point source which benefits soundstage imaging and detail. It started with larger standmounts, has recently released the remarkable LS60W wireless floorstanders, but one of its best successes has been the dinky little LSX pair, now in their ‘II’ edition at $2300. While little externally has changed, we thought their sound…

STANDMOUNT SPEAKERS OF THE YEAR OVER $5000 LOUDSPEAKERS JUDGES' “ COMMENT From a company in Albany, WA, come these solid and beautiful standmount speakers that leverage the very latest driver technologies for some thrilling results that had our listening rooms singing with beauty yet kicking serious arse. March Audio is based in Albany, WA, where it designs and builds amplifiers and loudspeakers. These already include the Sound+Image award-winning P452 stereo power amplifier — now updated as the P422. But we were keen also to hear the loudspeakers, hampered only by component changes: the tweeter changed between our first listen and our second, and since then the bass driver has changed as well. So what we’re describing here has now changed, albeit with an upgrade, according to the company. That upgraded…

This is a rare return to our awards — we could count the products that have won two Sound+Image awards on one hand, and to this elite collection we can now add Magico’s ASUB. Why does it get a second gong? Because when it returned to our offices this past year, it reminded us that, simply put, the Magico ASUB delivered the most fun we’ve had — in both calibration and use — with any subwoofer we’ve ever reviewed. It’s a fairly elite sub, priced at $13,950, but then California’s Magico is no ordinary brand. As with all Magico speakers, the ASUB subwoofer’s enclosure is made from 10mmthick sheets of solid 6061 T6 aluminium — a precipitation-hardened alloy NASA used to create the plaques mounted on the Pioneer 10 and…

AV SOUND SOUNDBAR OF THE YEAR UNDER $500 It has been a spectacular year for soundbars; we are recognising six of them here, although one is a returning former champion. Not so many years back we were barely recommending a soundbar at all — they were a compromise solution for those who didn’t want real speakers in their home, and for many long years they invariably sounded like the compromise they were. So it’s a delight to find multiple approaches now achieving very listenable results. Yamaha was always a leader in the field, of course, with multidriver beamforming soundbars, but in the last couple of years the Japanese company has also achieved remarkable results down at the very level where compromise usually kicks in. Last year we applauded the SR-C20A,…

SOUNDBAR OF THE YEAR OVER $2000 AV SOUND This is slightly controversial… we reviewed Sennheiser’s brand-new $2400 Ambeo Plus soundbar recently, along with the new $1120 Ambeo Sub. The pair in combination performed well enough, but its primary effect was to remind us how extraordinary was the original Ambeo soundbar, which was released three years ago, and required no subwoofer to support it, because it was massive enough to do an incredible job on its own. Indeed we didn’t really understand why, given the subwoofer, the Ambeo Plus also needs to be so big. It sounds best with the sub, yet remains an oversized bar. Meanwhile that original Ambeo bar has now been updated with the software from the new model, adding to its abilities significantly, and has been renamed…

AVSOUND SURROUND SYSTEM OF THE YEAR Soundbars have improved greatly in recent years. But they still can’t compete with a set of matched speakers around your room, putting you truly in the middle of the action. But such speaker systems require a separate AV receiver, they take up a lot of space, it’s hard to get them in the right place… and that’s why we had soundbars in the first place. Imagine, though, if you could have a very small AV receiver, transmitting wirelessly to a set of speakers that need be placed only roughly in the right positions. No centre speaker — they always get in the way, so four will do. Well, that’s Sony’s HT-A9 in a nutshell. We can hardly begin to tell you how much we…

AV PROJECTOR OF THE YEAR OVER $5000 TVs & VIDEO We’ve seen what Epson can deliver down near the entry-level with the EH-TW6250. But that’s almost a toy compared with what Epson can really do: this is a company that does massive imaging systems for museums, art galleries and entertainment venues. It’s also one of the world’s greenest and most sustainable companies — almost obsessed, it sometimes seems, but check any index of such companies and you’ll always find Epson at or near the top. Good on ’em. So this $8999 LS12000B projector sees Epson taking its home cinema performance to the next level, with high-brightness bigscreen images, realistic colours and excellent optimisation. It’s a stunner in performance terms, but no compact tabletop projector — quite the beast, indeed, at…

CINEMA DESIGN ‘GOLD’ AWARD INSTALLATION AWARDS This home cinema room was designed as an integral part of a newlyconstructed home on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. The owners were no strangers to the wonders of home entertainment, having enjoyed a number of high-end audio and video systems during the last 30 years, telling us that they “know what looks good and sounds great!” Indeed this is their third dedicated cinema room, and the second which has been developed in conjunction with a team led by Alan Anderson of Andersons AVI, supported by Steve Spurrier of Studio Connections, distributor of Genelec speakers, and Paul Kutcher of Visual Fidelity, distributor of Stewart Filmscreen. This reunites the team which has won a previous award (see left) for a theatre which achieved a spectacular…

INSTALLATION AWARDS INSTALLATION SPEAKERS OF THE YEAR Here we recognise a product outside our usual realms of consumer audio and AV. Theory Audio Design is a US company which emerged in 2018 as a sister brand to Pro Audio Technology, and when we recently auditioned a Theory system, the stars of the impressive performance were clearly the company’s sb25 ‘surface-mount’ speakers. These are designed to sit against the wall, or indeed behind a screen, mounting vertically or horizontally, with all manner of clips and screws for their universal bracket, plus a number of third-party stands available — ceiling ball mount, wall ball mount, a wall pan-and-tilt mount, even a ceiling pole pan-and-tilt. Each sb25 speaker is a sizeable 55cm long (or wide) and 24cm wide (or high), operating as a…

WIRELESS HEADPHONES OF THE YEAR (no ANC) HEADPHONES In a significant contrast with the headphones opposite, these wireless Audio-Technica headphones can be yours for just $169. Yet they bring some heritage of their own, being consumer derivatives of a model made for recording studios — a path we find often yields extremely high-value products. Audio-Technica has enjoyed great success bringing its weightier ATH-M50x headphones out of the studio and onto the street by adding Bluetooth (though not noise-cancelling) to their traditional cabled operation; now it’s the turn of the lesser studio sibling, the ATH-M20x. Although really, in value terms the M20x is perhaps not lesser at all, its lower price making it almost more prevalent in studios, thanks to its combination of reliability plus remarkably accurate, large and spacious sound…

tech brief wireless high-res audio First up: can we please all agree that there is no such thing as lossless high-res audio via Bluetooth. Bluetooth just isn’t fast enough to carry the required data rate. Indeed we can simplify and say there is just no high-res Bluetooth full stop. For my money, high-res (by which I mean above CD quality) must be lossless to be genuinely high-res. Otherwise you’re throwing away parts of the signal. And the whole point of high-res audio is not to throw stuff away. A codec like aptX HD is not remotely high-res. LDAC at its Bluetooth best is lossy high-res. aptX Lossless can achieve lossless CD quality if your signal strength is very good (but certainly not through the new low-power LE version of Bluetooth).…

30 Something box set Jim Bob and Fruitbat's finest hour. Wot, no T-shirt? This deep into the world-wearily complacent ‘whatthe-fuck-next?’ 21st century, it’s hard to believe that Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine weren’t just a figment; a desperate ex-punk’s wishful-thinking cheese dream, a Beastie Boys/Angus Young-inspired antidote to indie jangling and an ecstasy-encumbered pop zeitgeist reduced to giving flares another go. Chipmunk-faced cycling enthusiast Leslie ‘Fruitbat’ Carter thrashed-out irresistible ear-worm riffs to a DAT backing track as outwardly shy, inwardly seething human fringe James Robert Morrison wrapped righteous anger in punchy puns. Jim Bob was furious about everything and wrote emotively about slum landlords, rubbish radio, child abuse, bullying in the armed forces, alcoholism, racism, muggers, fat bastards, the prospect of shadows on his lungs and eventually, almost inevitably, aeroplane…

Consumer TV manufacturers have all given up on 3D TV — the hot new thing just a decade ago, but now relegated to a shelf of unplayable 3D Blu-rays. But there remain solid markets for 3D visualisation, from technical design to that great white elephant that is the Metaverse. Sony hasn’t given up on the idea of a glasses-free 3D display; it has been releasing Spatial Reality Displays for a couple of years, and the ELF-SR2 is the largest yet, promising 27 inches of glasses-free highly realistic three-dimensional content in 4K. It appears to use some sort of foveated rendering, requiring facial tracking to sense where a viewer’s eyes are positioned and looking. It should sell at around US$5000. Sadly 3D Blu-ray movies are not on the list of compatible…

MUSIC SOURCES CD PLAYER OF THE YEAR Of all our awards, why begin with CD? And why a player which weighs in at nearly 20kg and will lighten your wallet to the tune of $49,995? It is true that CD sales are on the wane. Yet that’s brought CD prices to their lowest ever, new and secondhand, so now is the perfect time to load up on the silver and make sure you have a machine that will deliver those laser-etched bits to the best possible quality. Besides, as the name makes clear, this player is all set up for the new as well as the old — it is a streamer as well as a CD player, playing from online music services such as Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify and Deezer,…

MUSIC SOURCES DAC OF THE YEAR Things we like in a DAC: versatility, visual feedback, and of course audio quality. And these come together beautifully in the $1595 MX-DAC from Musical Fidelity, a company which knows a few things about standalone DACs, having been one of the first ever to make one. That was for upgrading CD players, whereas today we have a variety of digital sources needing reliable and highquality conversion to an analogue output, and a host of filetypes they need to handle. We should note that this is not a new product; it has been available for a number of years. It came to use recently as a pairing with the company’s new MX-Stream, and much as we enjoyed that new unit, it was the MX-DAC that…

MUSIC SOURCES TURNTABLE OF THE YEAR $1000-$2000 Cambridge set us a quandary this year, by releasing two excellent turntables. We were extremely impressed with the Alva TT V2, an interesting direct-drive deck which at $3699 includes a moving-coil cartridge and clearly pitches for quality while still including conveniences like a built-in phono stage and even Bluetooth output. But in the end we decided to recognise the value proposition of this Alva ST, which appeared in our turntable round-up last issue. This deck has a moving-magnet cartridge rather than moving-coil, but it retains exactly the same built-in phono preamp as used in the Alva TT V2, as well as support for aptX HD Bluetooth (again, the exact same circuitry). It even has the same tonearm as the Alva TT V2. Yet…

MUSIC SOURCES VINYL PHONO STAGE OF THE YEAR This is our second award for Musical Fidelity electronics (see also the MX-DAC), from an ever-expanding range going great guns under the ownership of Audio Tuning, the Austrian owners of Pro-Ject turntables, and so gaining access to Pro-Ject’s electronics manufacturing base in Slovakia. From there came the MX-DAC, and this $3675 M6x Vinyl as well, a full-width unit that showcases the company’s long-held talents at phono-level amplification. Musical Fidelity’s M6x not only does so brilliantly, it is wildly versatile in what it offers. The front panel is stacked with more buttons and LEDs than most, indicating the level of switchable gain, switchable IEC curves, and adjustable input impedances and capacitances — all pleasingly settable via front panel controls. With a moving-magnet cartridge,…

STEREO AMPLIFIERS AMPLIFIER OF THE YEAR $2000-$4000 Our second smart amplifier winner makes an interesting comparison with the first. They both do the same thing, but from different starting points, Denon taking its hi-fi expertise and adding streaming to the front of it, while NAD has put the smart stuff firmly to the fore, most obviously in the 5-inch colour display behind the glass that fronts its solid aluminium body. This display often shows only monochrome things (it defaults to a graphic of VU meters, subject to your preferences) so that you don’t realise it’s full colour until it bursts into life with album art, as well as showing track progress, settings and more. The smart platform is BluOS from NAD’s sister company Bluesound under Lenbrook, offering one of the…

STREO AMPLIFIERS AMPLIFIER OF THE YEAR OVER Mark Levinson the man now designs at Daniel Hertz in Switzerland, but Mark Levinson the brand continues to thrive under Harman International, where it lives alongside Arcam, JBL, Lexicon and Revel (to mention only some), maintaining the original ML tradition of sound as ‘heard by musicians’. To that end, signals presented to the No. 5805 amplifier’s three line-level (two unbalanced, one balanced) and one phono inputs stay analogue right through to the loudspeaker terminals, along the way being amplified first by proprietary ‘PurePath’ circuitry (patents pending), which is dual mono, completely discrete and direct-coupled, and then by an equally dual-mono output stage configured as Class-A/B with two high-speed driver transistors operating in Class-A and six 260V 15A output transistors. All this transistorised muscle…

MUSIC SYSTEM OF THE YEAR UNDER $1000 SYSTEMS In our recent review of Ruark’s updated ‘smart music system’, we took pains to point out that while this looks like a modern take on a classic radio, the R2 is far more than that. Indeed in most respects it matches any of the streaming wireless speakers sold under major multiroom brands — you get app control from a smart device, it has wireless networking, direct streaming of services like Spotify, Deezer and Amazon Music, full access to global internet radio stations via its own app, and a specific ‘podcast’ source. Plus there’s Bluetooth in, with which you can stream anything else you want via your smart device of choice. Indeed the R2 goes beyond the abilities of most wireless speakers in…

LOUDSPEAKERS WIRELESS SPEAKERS OF THE YEAR OVER $2000 JUDGES' “ COMMENT Small but surprising standmount speakers which have both amplification within and extensive streaming/multiroom smarts available via the excellent BluOS platform from Bluesound. It’s a powerful combination. It had to happen. PSB Speakers was already making active versions of its Alpha series compact speakers, using unspecified amp modules within. But PSB is the sister company to NAD, with 50 years of amplifier expertise, and to Bluesound, now with 10 years of streaming skills under its belt. Add those both to the 50 years of unprecedentedly research-based speaker wisdom available from the company’s Paul Barton, and you get the Alpha iQ — PSB speakers with built-in BluOS streaming and impeccably-managed power to drive them. There are great advantages for the designer…

EDITOR’S CHOICE AWARD LOUDSPEAKERS JUDGES' “ COMMENT An astounding debut product, the Atalante 3s’ can highlight elements in an extraordinary soundstage while retaining truth of tone. Amazing. Aspecial award to close our loudspeaker winners: our ‘Editor’s Choice’ award is reserved for something special which doesn’t fit into our other categories. Here we had a simple clash of standmounts and an argument over which should win: it couldn’t be resolved, so we’re singling these Revival Audio Atalante 3s for special recognition, seeing as how it was our Editor arguing for their inclusion. His two favourite visiting speakers of the year were the March Audios seen earlier in these awards, and these debut speakers from a new French company, Revival Audio. The Atalante 3s are $4000 standmounts, a little nostalgic on the…

AV SOUND AV RECEIVER OF THE YEAR It’s not often we can congratulate an AV receiver for ease of use — they do so many things these days, and require so much wiring up that AV receivers remain the most complicated Component of any system. Yet the new Cinema range from Marantz does make things as easy as one could hope. At initial set-up, the Cinema 60’s tiny porthole display simply instructed us to “see the TV”, and this largescreen walkthrough then covered everything from wire-stripping to calibration. We reckon even a newbie should make it through, and thereby enjoy the excellent performance of this fully-equipped seven-channel receiver. The new Cinema models follow the company’s recent amplifier designs in having an attractive scooped-out frontage behind the main front-plate; gone is…

SOUNDBAR OF THE YEAR $500-$1000 AV SOUND Polk has here delivered a rather different soundbar and subwoofer solution — although it’s hard to call it a bar, really, when it sits like a little humpy at the centre of your TV. A TV speaker? A lozenge, perhaps? Let’s call it an unusual sound lozenge and subwoofer solution. The lozenge is remarkably small, just a ruler’s length at 34cm wide, and at 8cm low enough to sit under most benched TVs. It offers three physical audio inputs: HDMI with eARC to connect with a similarly-equipped HDMI input on your TV, an optical digital input as a fallback connection for TVs with neither eARC nor ARC, and as a last resort a 3.5mm analogue minijack input. Besides, there are more ways to…

AV SOUND SOUNDBAR SYSTEM OF THE YEAR Right on the bell of our awards judging, JBL’s Bar 1300 arrived for review. With a price coming in a coin or two under $2000, it clashed within its category against the Panorama 3. But it has a trick which allowed us to separate it into this ‘Soundbar System’ category. Because while the Panorama 3 doesn’t even bring a subwoofer to the party, JBL’s bar brings not only a very large subwoofer but also true wireless rears, and Atmos-enabled rears at that. The problem with wireless rear speakers is that while the signal may travel wirelessly, the power doesn’t — each one needs a mains plug. But not here. JBL’s rear satellites have internal batteries, which remain charged without much forethought because in…

AV PROJECTOR OF THE YEAR UNDER $2500 TV & VIDEO JUDGES' “ COMMENT Epson’s little projector comes with Android TV smarts inside and some key benefits of 4K, delivering great images at an attractive price. Something has changed in the world of projectors, especially at the medium levels. Traditional projectors may be fairly smart with how they create light and send it to the screen, but they’ve been pretty dumb otherwise, requiring a source plugged in to their inputs, and some kind of external sound system to hear what’s going on. Hence projectors have traditionally been permanently installed and cabled up — and not many are the modern living rooms in which that’s convenient these days, so that over the last decade bigscreen movie projection has moved more and more…

TVs & VIDEO TELEVISION OF THE YEAR UNDER $2000 Even accounting for inflation, this is the cheapest television we have ever featured in the Sound+Image Awards. The 55-inch 55RP630 has an RRP of $699; the 65-inch 65RP630 is $899 — and we’ve seen them even cheaper in stores. The 55-inch has proven so useful to us that it’s now one of our references — a $699 reference TV! This choice was made partly because it’s a reminder how good TV performance can be down at entry levels, but mainly because it’s a Roku TV, and it seems to work with everything we plug into it. Its eARC recognises every soundbar we’ve tried; it picks up the model numbers of Blu-ray players and other sources even when we hot-plug them during…

We deliver Sound+Image GOLD awards as a permanent status symbol to the companies that win them, recognising the quality of their work featured in Sound+Image magazine. So in addition to those recognised this year on the following pages, the companies here are also current GOLD award holders. WAVETRAIN CINEMAS wavetrain.com.au…

INSTALLATION AWARDS CINEMA DESIGN ‘GOLD’ AWARD This cinema space in a Perth home waited a decade and a half before being filled with a reference-level system… including vinyl. The owners, Darren and Sabrina, had a long-held dream of installing a state-of-the art home cinema, and even had a space reserved when their house was built some 15 years ago: a sunken double-brick construction usefully located at the back of the house, away from all the bedrooms — and the neighbours. When the time was right and the budget available, their research led them to Perth’s Hifi Hunter, and its director Josh Grondal. The planning stage took around three months as Josh and the owners discussed options. “The brief was to create a fully immersive experience,” confirms Josh. “But not only…

HEADPHONES WIRELESS HEADPHONES OF THE YEAR UNDER $1000 No great surprise here to those that follow our headphone reviews — Sony’s wireless noise-cancellers have been leaders since they first arrived, and this fifth edition just keeps nudging things up — including the price, mind you, so that we often suggest checking also the previous version, lest there’s a bargain in the offing (the XM5 is currently $549, the XM4 $439 as we write, but we’ve seen even bigger gaps than that between versions). Mind you, the XM5s are more of a rebuild than during previous iterations. Some changes we’re not entirely keen on — there may be smoother sweeping lines and less aggressive edges, but a number of joints and hinges that allowed the XM4’s earcups to fold foetally have…

Reissues: Nobody's Fools / The Amazing Kamikaze Syndrome Deluxe CD and coloured vinyl. It may have marked the beginning of the end of Slade’s UK chart dominance — the album’s third single only reached number 53, breaking a run of 17 consecutive hits — but ‘Nobody’s Fools’ is considered by many, including Noddy Holder, to be their most cohesive studio album. The result of having relocated to New York in the spring of 1975, it’s far funkier than its predecessors, Holder and Lea tapping into a can-do culture on sweltering funk work-out Do The Dirty — as soupy as Manhattan in a heatwave — the Motown-inspired title track, and joyous disco groove L.A. Jinx. All of which must have raised eyebrows on the rainswept terraces back ’ome on its release…

news KEF ◆ MQA Five years after its last refresh, KEF has updated its R Series speaker range with various improvements, led by the company’s performance-enhancing MAT (Metamaterial Absorption Technology). The sevenstrong range sits in the middle of KEF’s line-up, between the Q and Reference series. The latter was given the MAT treatment just over a year ago alongside the Blade, following the debut of the technology in the LS50 Meta and LS50 Wireless II in 2020, so it was somewhat inevitable that a refreshed R Series would also feature it. Essentially the circular ‘Westworld’ maze-like structure of the MAT disc sits behind the tweeter, with KEF claiming the disc’s multiple channels of different sizes together absorb ‘99%’ of unwanted rear radiation from the dome. That tweeter is part of a…

news dCS • Apple • NAD You’ll find the CD-equipped dCS Rossini Apex in our awards this year (p22); the company also has a new streamer in the dCS Bartók Apex. It works with the excellent dCS Mosaic Control app to access Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer and internet radio, while also having AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect and UPnP, and being Roon Ready. Technically the main news is that it includes dCS’s latest Ring DAC Apex technology, introduced on Vivaldi and Rossini products last year; it also gains some of the electronics straight from its higher-end brethren, such as the clocking architecture and digital processing for the Ring DAC Apex platform. As with all dCS components, the Bartók Apex is designed and handassembled in Cambridge, England. It comes in two variants: the…

news JBL soundbar launch You’ll find our opinion of JBL’s new Bar 1300 within our awards pages: (p70); it comes with a huge subwoofer and detachable wireless rears which assist the $1999 range-topper to achieve an impressive and powerful sense of immersion with Dolby Atmos material, both movie soundtracks and Atmos-mixed music. What we want to tell you about here is the Sydney launch of the full soundbar range by the Australian Harman team — because the launch was one of the bravest stunts we’ve seen in 30 years of audio reporting. The venue was Sydney’s Studios 301, chosen by Harman not only for its connections with so many great recordings but because it now has a full Atmos-mastering suite, pictured above. Harman is further involved with the studio, including…

MUSIC SOURCES STREAMING MUSIC PLAYER OF THE YEAR UNDER $1000 If you have an existing audio system that you love, but which doesn’t include the smarts for playing from online music services or streaming from your phone, then what you need is a standalone streaming music player. Connect it to your hi-fi, and you can enter the modern world of app-controlled music streaming. As with any kind of hi-fi component, you can go high-end (see opposite), or hunt the best-priced bargain that’s suitable for your level of system. Whatever the price, the key contributors to pleasure will be the quality of the digital circuits and the DAC within, but almost equally important, the interface through which you’ll be accessing music. We’ve had plenty of technically brilliant streamers through our doors…

MUSIC SOURCES TURNTABLE OF THE YEAR UNDER $500 If you’ll forgive us a WTF moment for our first turntable award, please welcome this blast from the past, the Audio-Technica Sound Burger, a portable and battery-powered record player which was revived in 2022 to celebrate the company’s 60th anniversary. The original Sound Burger launched in 1982. But the Sound Burger 2022 is not a replica: the AT-SB2022 has been brought into the 21st century. Instead of dual headphone outputs and RCA plugs, there are now no headphone outputs, because it has Bluetooth built-in, and just two sockets — one minijack audio output at line level for plugging into a system, and one USB-C socket to charge the player. The USB-C charging marks a key change in terms of practicality — the…

MUSIC SOURCES TURNTABLE OF THE YEAR $2000-$10,000 If you’re looking to buy a turntable, Pro-Ject is one of the places to start. The company offers more models than any other brand in history ever has, and in our experience they’re all reliably good value at whatever price you’re shopping. As our awards categories rise in price, it’s also worth remembering that spending a bit more on your turntable will probably bring more benefit than for any other link in your hi-fi chain. Cheap turntables are very cheap; mid-range turntables can do a great job — but head just a little higher, and that old black magic starts happening. This Pro-Ject X2 B certainly crossed that magical line during our time with it, assisted not only its Ortofon Quintet Red moving-coil…

STANDMOUNT SPEAKERS OF THE YEAR OVER $5000 P421 MONO POWER AMPLIFIER The P421 is March Audio’s first Purifi-based mono-block amplifier. Milled from solid aluminium with a tough anodized treatment, it features the new Purifi 1ET400A technology, Bruno Putzeys’ development of his previous Hypex Ncore designs, enabling extraordinarily low noise and distortion with further improved refinement in subjective audio quality. Fully 2 ohm capable with ultra-low output impedance, the P451 can deliver up to 450 watts and 25 amps, ensuring tremendous grip and drive even with the most challenging of speaker loads. P422 STEREO POWER AMPLIFIER Like its P421 sister, March Audio’s first Purifi-based stereo amplifier, the P422 (formerly the award-winning P452), has all these key qualities in stereo, packed into a beautifully built, high quality cabinet with balanced Neutrik XLR…

AMPLIFIER OF THE YEAR $4000-$8000 STEREO AMPLIFIERS JUDGES' “ COMMENT This amplifier combines MusicCast streaming and app control with a relatively purist modern take on a classic amplifier. It’s a magnificent release from Yamaha. You would hardly know that Yamaha’s smart 2000 Series amplifier is fully ready for the streaming age, so unobtrusively has the company embedded its MusicCast streaming and multiroom platform within, adding digital inputs to the rear, and tucking a quiet little digital display under the otherwise classic design of the $4999 R-N2000. This combination allows three line-level analogue inputs, a moving-magnet phonolevel input, and five digital inputs: two optical, one coaxial, USB-B for computer (thanks to the ultra-precision clock, this last is capable up to 32-bit/384kHz PCM and 11.2MHz/ DSD256), and finally a very useful HDMI…

STEREO AMPLIFIERS STEREO PRE-POWER AMPLIFIERS OF THE YEAR The idea of pre-power amplifiers is often presented as being to separate the various functions of an amplifier, keeping the delicate preamplication circuits away from heftier power components. But in fact the history is the other way around — preamps started off separate, and only later got lumped into ‘integrated’ amplifiers as a convenience option. So pre-power combos are the true originals of hi-fi amplification. In the C12000, the McIntosh team from Binghamton, NY, goes further than most, because it is one of their two-box preamplifier designs, further separating the audio section from the control and power sections. So in all this is a four-chassis amplifier: the power control, data ports and external control connections are in the C12000 Controller (above right),…

JUDGES' “ COMMENT Sonus faber’s Omnia exudes quality from its wide walnut control surface to its rich expansive sound when streaming music. And don’t miss its secret EQ modes, which can make it even better. An all-in-one system from Italian artisan speaker company Sonus faber is not a complete surprise — company founder Franco Serblin created a bizarre ‘The Snail’ in 1980, and in 2016 Sonus faber released the large SF16 with motorised pods that extended outward like wing mirrors. The new Omnia clearly inherits elements from its predecessors, but also simplifies things, with side speakers in the main body, for example, rather than out on wings. Its expansive walnut-topped laminated-wood surface, 65cm by 28cm, is split by wide strips of light (and is rather bravely entirely flat). The Omnia…

LOUDSPEAKERS STANDMOUNT SPEAKERS OF THE YEAR UNDER $5000 Back to ordinary passive speakers now, although there’s very little ordinary about our first awardwinners, another Canadian brand (as is PSB on the previous page), and one that has been back under the control of original co-founder Scott Bagby for four years now, along with Anthem (see our AV processor award) and MartinLogan too. We mention this not only for background but because it explains the name of the loudspeaker series from which the 40B comes — the company’s co-founder is back, with a ‘Founder’ Series. It includes floorstanders, a centre and an unusual LCR three-way, so along with Paradigm’s highly-regarded subwoofers there’s everything required for a home cinema set-up if you wish — though this award celebrates the solo stereo performance…

LOUDSPEAKERS SUBWOOFER OF THE YEAR UNDER $5000 There’s an aphorism in hi-fi that for movie bass you need a subwoofer, but a bad subwoofer is worse than no subwoofer at all. In fact this is true of bass within music as much as for movies: underspending on a bad subwoofer just brings bad bass. And a subwoofer that’s too small can’t reach the frequencies to do its job properly. So we tend to ring the bells when we find an exception — because SVS has here delivered its first-ever ‘micro’ subwoofer, a 39cm square footprint and just 28cm high. And this is a departure, since the company has hitherto favoured ‘big’, as witnessed by its PB16-Ultra, which has a 16-inch bass driver that’s fitted with a monster 8-inch voice coil.…

The more often we have an Anthem AV product come to visit, the more we appreciate them. We particularly love the control system, available through a browser interface, and the ability to switch easily between separate speaker arrangements for movies and music at the drop of a hat, or to set automatic behaviour depending on the type of input the receiver senses. We even love the calibration system, something we rarely say and even more rarely keep as our preference in general use. Anthem’s ARC system comes with a high-quality microphone and runs on a laptop rather than the receiver itself, and it harnesses the Athena research undertaken by Canada’s National Research Council to produce its results. When we flick between calibrated and uncalibrated sound, we find ARC actually improves…

AV SOUND SOUNDBAR OF THE YEAR $1000-$2000 The $1599 Panorama 3 which arrived last year is less dramatic aesthetically than its predecessor: stylish rather than flamboyant, of which we rather approve, especially that the company has finally cottoned on to the fact that a mirrored top surface is a daft thing to put below a TV. The Panorama 3 is now matte on top, with a painted metal grille split by a horizontal control surface, and a taut fabric wrap all around its width, with angled corners at the sides. These all play to the driver count, which includes upfiring drivers on a Bowers & Wilkins soundbar for the first time, with a pair of 50mm woven-glass-fibre cones on top towards the end, angled out so that they fire forward…

SOUNDBAR TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD AV SOUND JUDGES' “ COMMENT Samsung has had great soundbars ever since opening its Californian audio lab. But this one achieves an extraordinary slimdown of the bar without much compromising on either facilities or performance. Just one more soundbar award, and while it muddies our recommendations around $1k a little, the judges decided they could not let this one pass by unrecognised. So we’re giving it a technical award. We wouldn’t do this unless it was also an excellent performer, and you can have no doubt of that: indeed the subwoofer here is something of a star. Its bass descends to real depths, creating output from signals even below 30Hz, and it manages to sound not only resounding but astoundingly tight for a subwoofer doing so…

TVs & VIDEO AV PROJECTOR OF THE YEAR $2500-$5000 First up, this projector is larger than it looks! The $3299 X3000i measures 27cm wide and 26cm deep, yet its stylish cube looks kinda cool however you position it — right way up or upside down. Its abilities are pretty cool too. As with our previous winner this unit hides an Android TV stick inside, it has built-in speakers, and it’s designed to be particularly easy to set up. It has to be, because it was designed with gamers in mind. BenQ headlines it as a ‘console gaming projector’, part of the company’s ‘X’ gaming series. And it has gaming features, yes, but it’s equally suited to more general entertainment, coming as it does with consumer 4K resolution (or at least…

TELEVISION OF THE YEAR OVER $2000 TVs & VIDEO Samsung’s second generation of Mini LED TVs arrived with the weight of serious expectation on its shoulders. Can it improve on the already high standards we saw last year, when Samsung also won this award? What about OLED TVs? What about Samsung’s own new QD-OLED tech? Well, there’s no shortage of recommendations out there for OLED TVs, not only LG’s, but also Samsung’s own S95B which, along with Sony’s A95K, introduced the new QD-OLED to the world, with its second-gen also imminent. But QD-OLED is front-emissive quantum-dot light rather than true front-emissive OLED; we’re still making up our minds there. Meanwhile conventional OLED isn’t always the best choice for our open Australian lounge rooms which are often broadly sunlit during daylight…

Our GOLD Awards are not the only place to find high-quality custom work. Sound+Image is proud to have been a founder member of CEDIA in Australia, and we still work with the global peak body to publish in print their annual award-winners for the Asia-Pacific region each year. The awards recognise the best work by CEDIA members, but equally important is that members undergo continuous education in skills and technologies, so that CEDIA membership is a badge of quality in itself. For information, visit: cedia.net…

CINEMA DESIGN ‘GOLD’ AWARD INSTALLATION AWARDS This is a return appearancein our awards for Scott Rogan and Rogue Home Cinema, here for a space in a Western Australian home in which the owners — Anthony, Marisa and their three children — were already enjoying a multipurpose room with a Sony TV, Yamaha Aventage RX-A3080 receiver and Canton speakers, also a bar area, plus gaming via a full-size stand-up ‘Street Fighter II’ arcade game. Pretty nice — but the Rogue team set out to transform this room into an even more exciting space which would deliver a truly big cinematic experience. After a planning period “connecting with their vision”, it was decided to go from 65-inch TV to 4K projection, from 5.1.4 sound to 7.2.4… and from plain white walls to…

HEADPHONES HOME HEADPHONES OF THE YEAR OVER $5000 We confess that we’ve heard these only in pre-production form so far, but that, combined with the whole story here, was enough to secure this award for Yamaha’s new YH-5000SE flagship headphones, which look back some 47 years to Yamaha’s HP-1 in 1976, the headphones in which the orthodynamic driver made its debut. It wasn’t a new idea entirely, even back then, but it hadn’t yet been successfully implemented: a speaker diaphragm that used isodynamic magnetic fields to drive an über-thin diaphragm etched with a conductive material. Yamaha called it orthodynamic; more commonly now we say planar magnetic. Fast-forward four decades to 2016 and Yamaha’s engineers, freshly targeting stereo with the all-analogue 5000 Series (see p41), decided to apply this design concept…

Consequences Coming Passionate pop polemic from ex-Pistol. 'I gotta get this out there!’ Glen Matlock sings on stirring opener Head On A Stick, and the album almost brims over with rage at a world seemingly gone mad in the wake of Brexit and Trump’s election. Not that the debonair Matlock — currently moonlighting as touring bassist with Blondie — ever loses sight of the need for a melodic counterpoint to such righteous fury. Speaking In Tongues is a bluesy broadside at political double-speak, while the title track is a propulsive musical told-you-so in which he announces: ‘You ain’t ever gonna cramp my style.’ Elsewhere, This Empty Heart, Can’t Be Myself With You and a heartfelt cover of kd lang’s Constant Craving suggest severe emotional turbulence, too, culminating in cathartic finale…