Indice dei contenuti per April - May 2019 in Sound + Image

I was talking with a cinema system designer recently, who told me that early in his professional career he had sold high-end consumer audio, but he ended up quitting the hi-fi side of things for the apparently paradoxical reason that he loves music too much. This seems odd — there are few places that play music as much or at such high quality as do hi-fi shops. But he says that was exactly the problem. He was so busy listening for the differences between equipment that he was no longer listening to the music. Even in his spare time, listening to music became a bus-man’s holiday, and he lost the ability to immerse rather than analyse. I know exactly what he means, though it’s something from which, thankfully, I do…

The rumours are now confirmed — Sonos has collaborated with IKEA on a range of speakers to be called ‘Symfonisk’, selling through IKEA stores beginning in August. And the two announced models don’t simply offer a speaker; they combine other functionality with sound — one is a lamp, the other designed to be used as a bookshelf, though it can also be used in vertical orientation. For IKEA, the entry into the sound space hopes to “democratize the home sound system”, and continues its push into smart-home products, following smart lighting (TRÅDFRI) a couple of years ago and its connected blinds, which are just coming to market. “For IKEA, the smart home is not about gadgets, it’s about making life at home better with solutions that create a better atmosphere,…

Loewe recently announced a greater focus on its audio products, so it is timely to have a play with the smallest speaker in its range, and the smallest this group test, yet perhaps one of the most desirable. Just 13.3cm wide, the klang M1 is thoroughly luxurious in construction, especially in the rose gold version supplied to us for review, its stainless steel case coated with genuine gold, according to its data sheet, and it feels surprisingly solid in the hand, weighing 325g. Graphite grey and silver are the other available options. Into this stylish shell Loewe has fitted twin active drivers plus two ‘membranes’ driven passively to the rear by the back energy within the cabinet; we were surprised to discover this true stereo ability in a unit so…

The MusicCast ecosystem is too vast to picture in a family portrait, as we have done with some others in this group test. From lifestyle speakers through amplifiers and AV receivers to a piano and the Vinyl 500 networked turntable reviewed last month, Yamaha has been spreading its streaming and multiroom platform across a wider product portfolio than any of its main rivals; only the third-party platforms like Google Chromecast and Apple AirPlay could claim a larger list of compatible models. But of course all MusicCast products include AirPlay, plus Bluetooth, Spotify Connect and DLNA network streaming. They can form a multiroom system under app control using your home Wi-Fi or Ethernet, and they can also work with third-party control systems such as Control4, ELAN or RTI. So this MusicCast…

Bluesound is one of the leading streaming/multiroom platforms, although slightly confusingly it has separated the brand Bluesound from the platform itself, which is called BluOS — perhaps so that other brands can incorporate the BluOS platform into their gear, as have NAD (Bluesound’s sister company) and DALI. As a streaming and multiroom platform BluOS has a reputation for quality above most rivals, having supported high-res audio from the start, as well as gaining from impressive access to NAD’s high-quality amplification, which is used in Bluesound’s own products — wireless speakers, streaming preamps and amplifiers, a soundbar/subwoofer combo and the CD-ripping hard-drive Vault (reviewed last issue). This $1099 Pulse Mini is the middle of three standalone wireless speakers — above is the $1599 Pulse, while below is the $699 Pulse Flex…

When I sit down to write a review of a new product, such as the Epson EH-TW9400W, I usually check to see if I’ve reviewed its predecessor. I was not at all surprised to find that I have indeed reviewed the Epson EH-TW9300W... but I was startled to see that it was way back in September 2016. That’s a relatively slow model turnover. Since then, Epson has kind of re-branded its UHD technology to Epson 4K PRO-UHD. It still uses 1080p panels with pixel shifting to increase resolution above 1080p. But the emphasis is much more on a wide colour gamut and improved support for the High Dynamic Range that comes with most Ultra-HD content. We have more detail on 4K PRO-UHD in News on page 14. Equipment I’ve got…

Don’t worry too much about the ‘Home’ part of Beyerdynamic’s Amiron Home. It’s there to distinguish these headphones from the Beyerdynamic Amiron Wireless, which is a powered and closed design which is, as the name suggests, Bluetooth connected. Whereas these are passive, wired — and open, likely why they have the ‘Home’ tag. They use a dynamic driver with what Beyerdynamic calls ‘optimised tesla technology’. Apparently that means “a much stronger magnetic field than standard headphones”. Apart from anything else, that should result in greater control of the driver cone. However that works, the headphones are rated at 250-ohms impedance, which is rather higher than the norm these days. That suggests best operation with a headphone amplifier that has plenty of voltage available on tap. But it also offers greater…

Blue hails from the United States, and is perhaps best known for its microphones. (Heard of the Blue Yeti?) But it also does a bunch of headphones. We have the wireless NC Blue Satellite model currently under review for next issue, but here we spent time with the cabled Blue Ella, the top of Blue’s range. They are unusual in a number of ways. First, they have dual modes available: active and passive. They have a 250mW amplifier built in (it’s unclear whether that’s total, or per channel) and a lithium-ion battery to store power. But they are not Bluetooth headphones; they are purely wired. Furthermore, they’re primarily intended for plugging into headphone outputs, even when you’re using active mode. They have no volume control. The only control is a…

I almost disappeared down a rabbit hole when trying to make sense of an apparently nutty design decision in Pioneer’s XDP-30R portable music player, which I reviewed for this issue, but which we have since discovered is not going on sale in Australia. Could the two things be connected? Because the strange behaviour led me, perhaps inevitably, to European Union bureaucracy. Let’s back up a step. In my now spiked review (we’ll put it online at avhub.com.au/pioneer30R, should you be interested), I had whinged a little about how the Pioneer’s output could well be too low for some higher impedance, lower sensitivity headphones. The maximum headphone output into an open circuit for this unit was 0.427 volts RMS (at 1kHz; I’ll use that for all my measurements in this article).…

On the shelf next to my desk is the tome ‘1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die’ by Stephen Schneider. I’ve long since consumed a fair proportion of them, but I’ve long been slightly embarrassed by never having seen the iconic Australian (kind of) movie Walkabout. Umbrella Entertainment’s announcement of its release for the “first time on Blu-ray in Australia” allowed me to eliminate this deficiency. I quibble about the Australian-ness because although it is shot here, the director, writer and two of the three main actors were British. But it must be considered Australian because the three main characters wander through landscapes shot around Alice Springs, Arnhem Land, the Flinders Rangers, Iron Knob, Lake Eyre and elsewhere in Central Australia. The story is simple. Jenny Agutter is a…

BenQ has two new projectors for home cinema; we review the $3999 W5700 next issue. The other is the $2499 W2700, which comes loaded with features including Ultra-HD resolution (delivered by Texas Instruments’ four-flash DLP470TP digital micromirror device), support for High Dynamic Range in HDR10 and HLG flavours, and 95% delivery of the DCI-P3 colour space. But for many home cinema fans, its smartest feature may be that it’s been designed as a direct replacement for the highly successful W1070 and W1070+ projectors. That means users of those models can keep their mount and their screen, and simply swap in the new ‘4K’ W2700 model with the minimum of fuss, and no fiendish screen size and throw distance calculations required. The demonstrations at the launch were impressive, and we await…

Three new projectors have arrived from Epson, all “crafted to a level” as it was nicely put to us at the Sydney launch, that level being a sub-$5000 price for what the company calls ‘4K PRO-UHD’ projection. But what exactly is 4K PRO-UHD? Well for starters, the 4K in 4K PRO-UHD is not native 4K. The three new Epson projectors use a 1920 × 1080 panel, pixel-shifted once to deliver around four million pixels, half the number of actual UHD, and overlapping too (we’ve never quite been able to get our heads around the geometry of this pixel-shifting method of resolution raising). Epson describes it as 4Ke, or ‘4K enhanced’. But hold on before you head off in search of the real thing. Epson has some good arguments for why…

It’s easy to get inured to the wonders of the latest TVs, the iterative advances in brightness, colour, processing and the rest at CES, ISE and IFA. But we confess to being well impressed by LG’s recent InnoFest roadshow, where the company took over a swanky home in Cremorne on Sydney’s North Shore to demonstrate the full range of LG product to visitors from all over the Asia-Pacific region. There were cabinets that lightly steam your jacket while it hangs, a battery-powered handheld air purifier, new soundbars, some more of those alarmingly large wireless speakers that flash lights — but the stars of the home were undoubtedly the TVs. And the OLED TVs in particular. For all the protestations that LED-LCD technology is catching up with OLED, the side-by-side comparisons…

This is not the first smart speaker with a screen that we’ve reviewed, and our view remains that there are obvious benefits from the visual information, but the screen also places limitations on their use. Google’s Home Hub does, however, go some way to overcoming these issues. So while a display inevitably makes a smart screen far larger than a smart speaker, the Home Hub proves remarkably dinky when you unbox it — 18cm wide and 12cm high, with a 7-inch diagonal screen. That’s far less dominant of a bedside table than, say, our award-winning JBL Link View smart screen, which adds speakers either side of an 8-inch screen, making it far larger at 33cm wide. Secondly an always-on screen is visually distracting, especially in a lounge, or in a…

Bowers & Wilkins has such a strong brand position in conventional loudspeakers that it’s easy to forget what a leader the company has been in lifestyle audio and active loudspeakers as well. Back in 2007 the Zeppelin was the first premium iPod docking speaker (remember them?) at a gasp-inducing price of $999 — surely madness! But it wasn’t madness, it was the future. The Zeppelin’s exceptional design and performance showed that quality could sell, and an ongoing series of Zeppelins tracked the changes from ye olde iPod docks to modern wireless operation. With the relatively recent change in B&W’s ownership, expectations are high for a new series of electronics-based products to arrive over the next couple of years. Meanwhile B&W has the T7 Wireless available as a little jewel in…

Wireless vary rarely actually means wireless — wireless speakers need mains cables, except for the very smallest of designs. For any level of hi-fi reproduction, of course you’ll need cables. Or will you? Aurender — a digital specialist which splits its operations between California and Korea — offers these S5W compact active speakers. They can run on battery packs — not internal batteries but more like the packs which slot into power tools. Slot those in and you enjoy true wireless listening, and since the packs charge elsewhere, you could choose never to plug your S5Ws into power at all. Décor demons rejoice! Truly wireless, then, and also not Bluetooth but a CD-quality wireless connection, a dedicated link between your source and the speakers. If using a smartphone or tablet,…

While smart speakers are handy for answering your queries and controlling your smart home gear, we’ve found the smaller models to be wanting when it comes to decent sound quality — which is at least partly because of their size. Hence Google and Apple have both addressed sound quality by creating larger smart speakers (as have some third parties, including JBL). But not Amazon. Rather than release a larger top-shelf speaker to rival the Google Home Max and Apple HomePod, it has instead decided to beef up its sound by adding a subwoofer to the mix. This has been the solution chosen already by some of the more hi-fi-styled multiroom speaker brands — Sonos, HEOS, Bluesound and Yamaha all have separate subwoofers available which can be paired with smaller wireless…

Given that the word ‘television’ means, literally, vision at a distance, it is a little strange that the large entertainment screens which dominate our living rooms today still bear the name. It made perfect sense throughout the black-and-white era, and when we switched to colour television in 1975. But about a decade after that, things started to change. VCRs appeared, spawning a revolution in what we watched on television and when. A decade after that, the coming of the internet brought other screens into our lives and other program sources onto the ‘television’ screen. The share of TV content from those distant broadcasters has been steadily eroded by VHS, DVD, cable TV, Blu-ray, downloads, Chromecasts, and multiple streaming services. For some time now, replacement TV buying has been driven largely…

The movie musical is a persistent form, and even today is sometimes successful. Witness the success of La La Land a couple of years ago. Like that movie, The Greatest Showman is an original movie musical. That is, the movie was written entirely for screen. It’s not adapted from the stage. And it’s a biopic, after a fashion. Hugh Jackman plays P.T. Barnum, the mid-19th century American entertainment entrepreneur. Barnum’s name lived on, until recently, most prominently in the Barnum and Bailey circuses. As a real person, he was a mixed bag. The real Barnum started his show-biz career by purchasing and exhibiting an elderly female slave, implausibly claiming she had been a wet nurse to George Washington (to justify which he had to claim that she was 160 years…

There was a groan of disappointment as our group of mere scribes and media persons emerged from a black Mercedes van in the grounds of the 2019 Melbourne Formula One race. The van’s windows were heavily tinted and a crowd of enthusiasts had assembled and, seeing the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport logos, had obviously hoped for the appearance of Lewis Hamilton or Valtteri Bottas. The occasion was organised by Epson, a major sponsor of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport team. Earlier in the day, before we disappointed the fans, Epson took the opportunity to talk about some of its newest technology, mostly its commercial range of projectors. The hero product was the Accent Lighting Laser Projectors, nifty units that look like spotlights. Put them on a shop ceiling and they become pretty…

It’s easy to define what a wireless speaker must be, though in most cases, that definition wouldn’t actually include being completely wireless. Those with internal batteries to support portable operation aside, they all require plugging into the mains. So the wireless bit is about how they receive their tunes. Most commonly this is via Bluetooth, streaming direct from your smart device. But many wireless speakers can also connect to your home Wi-Fi (or can be plugged in using Ethernet cable) and receive tunes that way. App control can enable internet streaming from music services like Spotify and Tidal, plus network streaming from files stored elsewhere in your home on computer or NAS drive. Of these options, Bluetooth is invariably the easiest to set up. However, one thing evident time and…

The HEOS streaming multiroom platform was the first of the new wave which arrived to rival Sonos, and in many ways it’s been the most consistent of them ever since. Its ecosystem of wireless speakers, preamp, amps and soundbars has evolved to include new models and new generations, including the latest ‘HS2’ versions which include high-resolution audio support and integrated Bluetooth. But the physical designs have not been radically revamped, as some rivals have felt the need to do. And while the available music services have been extended, the app design remains as simple and solid (see above left) as the day the range was launched. And we might note proudly that a significant part of HEOS development took place here in Australia. What has changed is the extended availability…

Altec Services maintained the very first movie sound systems back in the 1920s. And the Lansing Manufacturing Company made loudspeakers as early as 1927, then was bought by Altec in 1941, with Mr Lansing leaving five years later to become the ‘L’ in JBL. These days Altec Lansing is more a ‘brand’ than a company, operating under equity investors in New York: Infinity Lifestyle Brands. We suspect those early founders would marvel at the XPEDITION 8. It has twin eight-inch woofers that light up and flash. Bluetooth sends music to it wirelessly. It has a ‘Beast’ mode, and strobe lights. Yank the power cord and it can continue playing on batteries for a quoted 24 hours of playback, depending on how loud and how flashily you choose to use it.…

There is, truly, no substitute for stereo reproduction when it comes to delivering music the way it was designed to be heard. The first stereo demonstration was made in 1881, with Clément Ader’s stereo telephone headsets delivering sound direct from the Paris Opera. British engineer Alan Blumlein at EMI extended the idea to speakers in the 1930s after watching early talkies movies where the sound didn’t follow the on-screen movements of the actor. Stereo went via tape to the LP in 1957, and has been the mainstay of hi-fi ever since. And yet today the trend towards smaller wireless speakers has led to a regression back to mono, or at least one-box stereo, which is not much better. So we applaud KEF’s marketing slogan for the LSX — “Give your…

It’s a what? A CD player?? Since the revival of vinyl, CD has to be the format of least renown for the younger generation of streaming Bluetooth-connected listeners, who will be focused on our group tests of headphones and wireless speakers this issue. We could try to explain that back in the 1980s we couldn’t stream anything, because there wasn’t anywhere to stream it from, and high-quality music took up more space than our floppy disks could possibly handle, so instead we had to burn holes in a layer of silver and then read them back with a laser, and pretty neat we thought it too. But they’d just look at us strangely. Yet the CD player delivers CD-quality music (oddly enough), better than Bluetooth, better than Spotify. And besides,…

“ It’s pure Bauhaus, what you’re sitting in here — the ‘Form Follows Function’ maxim,” says design engineer Ian McGrath as he leads us through this wildly impressive room, “The functions here are sound and image, and the room must provide as near as possible the final mixed and mastered movie as laid down by its creators. The design development of a cinema needs to follow that edict if it’s to reach what’s bandied about as the ‘immersive experience’.” Yet this room is not only a fully-immersive 7.2.4 Atmos home cinema; there is a separate high-end stereo system in the same space. “Yes, it’s a hybrid room”, he explains. “I don’t think what we’re doing here has ever been attempted in quite the same way, to have such a high-end…

Can there be a headphone brand more famous than Stax, and yet one that is more rarely experienced? I must shamefacedly admit that I’ve never before donned Stax headphones. [Our Editor chokes into his coffee at this revelation.] So now’s my chance. Their fame, of course, in part rests on their electrostatic designs. And electrostatic designs do come with certain idiosyncrasies. First, they cannot be driven by conventional headphone amplifiers. Rather than dynamic drivers (which use a coil and cone, somewhat like miniature loudspeakers) or planar magnetic drivers (which are a variation on the same theme), electrostatic drivers don’t use magnets at all. They rely on the attraction and repulsion of objects carrying electrical charges. As with magnets, opposites attract, while likes repulse. So the driver consists of a very…

Pro-Ject terms this product a ‘digital micro preamplifier’... we would be more prosaic, and call it a DAC/headphone amp, although with three inputs and an output under volume control, preamplifier it certainly is as well. It’s a small thing, larger than life in our picture above, being just 103mm wide, 37mm tall and 122mm deep… which includes the volume/control knob on the front. It weighs just 366 grams. Yet my goodness, it does enough for both its size and its price. Some might even call it overkill — but it overkills in the right way, and does so without the usual monetary penalty. Equipment Pro-Ject is, of course, best known for its turntables, and primarily for the quality of those turntables and their value for money at whatever given price…

Around 48 minutes into Bohemian Rhapsody, Freddie Mercury (played by Rami Malik) and Kenny Everett (Dickie Beau) are chatting in the latter’s radio studio. Everett has just started the title song to this movie spinning on the turntable, sowing the seed of a demand that would soon bring the record company to release it as a single — a single that would eventually spend nine weeks at the top of the British charts from the closing weeks of 1975. As the music rolls, selected quotes from the music press appear on the screen. “Wannabe Led Zeppelin” says one. “A song that should be sunk to the bottom of the sea,” says another. “Pompous and overlong”... “A dull pastiche”. Rolling Stone magazine continued its long tradition of getting things completely wrong,…

Key  AWARD Shows the year and level of Sound+Image Award W = Product of the Year HC = Highly Commended PRICES marked * indicate a superseded model, see notes AVHub indicates where full review is on AVHub.com.au WELCOME  Our buying guide is based on the Sound+Image Awards that are presented each year, highlighting the very best value products at each price level. We list all the latest winners from our recent 2019 Awards, along with every still-available product from previous awards. Our buying guide is built from the Sound+Image Awards that are presented each year – the very best value at each price. We list all the latest winners, and also every still-available product from previous awards, varying the categories each issue. First from the back: loudspeakers... Turntables Welcome back…