Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2024/25 i Best Buys – Audio & AV

We recently had the pleasure of meeting and posing some questions to Epson’s global president Mr. Yasunori Ogawa. Our thorniest question was sidelined, but another brought an interesting summary of how Epson came to develop both the technologies and the products it now sells. We started by complimenting Epson on being 30 years ahead of the pack in sustainability and all manner of greenness, when most companies put shareholder profit before ecology. Short of a ‘triple-bottom line’ to get sustainability truly on the corporate agenda, how has Epson managed to do this so early and so comprehensibly? Yasunori Ogawa: So Epson has been around for 82 years now, and unlike many other Japanese companies, we were actually formed right up in the mountains, a mountainous area with very good natural…

The Sony VPL-XW6100ES came to us for review several weeks prior to its official release, for a stay of one week only, about a third of the time we’d averagely spend with a product. There was no literature in the box, no information at all until the official release date — after we had to return it. So we knew very little about the XW6100ES other than its model number, and that has since received a subsequent addition (and confusing numbering) as the ‘Bravia 8 Projector’. So we embarked on something of a ‘black-box’ challenge, to establish what this native-4K projector could deliver. Build & facilities The VPL-XW6100ES is a very big box indeed, particularly its depth, which is 52cm. We had to jerrybuild an extension onto our projector shelf…

JBL was founded in 1946, but in all the years since, the company seemingly hasn’t had the urge to produce a vinyl-playback machine. Until now. And it’s made two — one for its ‘classic’ range of more retro hi-fi, and the one here, more suited to its young and lively ranges. As the more modern and purposeful turntable in both looks and operation, the Spinner BT perfectly addresses the younger JBL audience who know their soundbars and their smart speakers better than they do their K2s and Everests. Their typical systems might currently comprise just a Bluetooth speaker and a smartphone. For such users a Bluetooth-capable turntable like this would be the coolest possible addition to such a set-up. And who sells more of such Bluetooth speakers than anyone else…

Masimo Consumer, owner of Denon, also has several speaker brands on its books — Bowers & Wilkins, of course, but also Boston Acoustics, and Polk. And locally it was suggested that Polk’s R200 standmounts would make a perfect pairing with the Denon Home to complete a zone of powerful music performance. We did not need persuading. The Polk Audio Reserve R200, to give its complete name, first came to us for review in 2021, and wildly impressed us, walking off with a Sound+Image Award. The Reserve series uses the same custom-made drivers developed for the brand’s premium Legend series, including the proprietary Pinnacle tweeter and ‘turbine cone’ midrange. That tweeter is a ring radiator design, with no central dome to enter break-up modes, so achieving lower distortion within the listening…

The earth was made so various, that the mind of desultory man, studious of change, and pleased with novelty, might be indulged. So said William Cowper in the 17th century, and though it is unlikely he was thinking back then about loudspeakers, there is undoubtedly more variety and novelty in the speaker market than for any other link in the hi-fi chain. Different types, different styles and sizes, and of course widely-differing prices, from high-value mass-market speakers to handcrafted artisan-made speakers. There are square speakers, round speakers, triangular speakers, and one famous pair shaped like elegant snail shells. It might seem overwhelming. How on earth do you start narrowing it down? By thinking through the main issues, and asking some key questions. For example, are you squeezed into a tiny…

Anyone who attended Wavetrain Cinemas’ room at last April’s Australian Hi-Fi Show in Sydney will already have experienced this BenQ W5800; it was the visual star in one of the Show’s top attractions, blazing spectacular images on a 158-inch Severtson screen, accompanied by equally-thrilling sound from the Wavetrain-related Elementi speaker brand. Three clips — from Barbie, Bond and The Last Showman (Loren Allred’s vocal performance of Never Enough for Rebecca Ferguson’s Jenny Lind) — proved both sound and image to be of the highest calibre. So we were rather pleased to have the W5800 come in for testing, allowing us to bring that performance home, and discover exactly what it can do. Equipment This is no small projector which you might pop on a table in your lounge. This BenQ…

Marantz is nearly always a brand ‘above’ — above the run-of-the-mill in both looks and more critically in performance, possibly for a few dollars more, but rewarding the investment with performance which is not only invariably a level above, but reliably so. We don’t recall ever being disappointed by a Marantz amplifier or AV receiver, and if ever anyone contacts us saying they’re considering buying a Marantz, we wouldn’t be gainsaying that decision. Marantz’s recent aesthetic refreshment has made the difference even more apparent: the new ‘interference’ patterning radiating from the shell-scoop behind the black front panel adds definite class over the former straightforward black or silver-gold boxes. It also now better differentiates Marantz from its sister brand Denon, which the parent company now seems to consider as a ‘value’…

TCL these days is a company which competes on quality and technology with any Korean or Japanese manufacturer. This C855 range is a key one for the Chinese brand among its 2024 releases: we are reviewing the smallest size, the 65-incher, for reasons of practicality in delivery and our test space, but we can quite understand those who might be interested in the higher 75-inch, 85-inch and (woohoo!) 98-inch sizes. The screen technology here is Mini-LED backlighting with quantum dots and an LCD panel, and it’s important to realise that the performance specs do change a fair bit with screen size, because of the differing number of rows, columns and zones of backlights in each size of the C855 range. This 65-inch model has 48 vertical columns of LEDs in…

Musical Fidelity, a UK company, was taken over by Heinz Lichtenegger’s Audio Tuning (owners of Pro-Ject) about six years ago. Compared with some such hi-fi takeovers, this was not so much a hostile corporate bid as an agreement between old friends: Lichtenegger has had long involvement with the brand, and a strong affection for certain of its products. It was this enthusiasm which has led to the rebirth of this A1 amplifier. The company’s audio engineer Simon Quarry, still in place at Musical Fidelity, summarises the situation, saying that “bringing back the A1 is fulfilling one of his [Heinz’s] hi-fi dreams… it impacted his life so strongly as a product and was one of his first major successes as a distributor in Austria.” The time for a classic amp was…

Let’s say you’re the current proud owner of hi-fi system with a sound you simply adore. But it’s old-school: disc-based. You crave the wavelengths of ‘today’s youth’: you wish to engage with that nifty new thing called streaming — but you don’t want to lose your classic hi-fi sound. Then you need a streamer. Silent Angel is a brand ready to oblige. Servers, power supplies and network switches all adorn Silent Angel’s current catalogue, but at the core of it all are the brand’s streamers. Plug one of these network streaming components into your system and you can retain all your cherished possessions, and your classic sound signature, while injecting them with new and potentially pure digital streams of various varieties. Equipment Silent Angel’s Munich MU builds upon the success…

This is another small amplifier designed to power a room of music, the type we’ve called ‘zone players’ ever since Sonos made the first of the breed. They are designed to be unobtrusive boxes combining an app-controlled streamer plus amplifier, so that all you need really add is a pair of speakers. Invariably such zone players have an unpowered sibling, and that is the case here, with the equally shiny but half-height S1 being the streamer-only equivalent. So if you’ve already got a hi-fi system in need of streaming, plug in the S1. If you’ve got nothing yet, the SA2 plus a pair of speakers will do the lot, or you can plug in a few external sources to expand the system. There are a good many examples of such…

First things first: the name ‘Ukkonen’ is Finnish. Yet their designer, Alan March, was born in the UK, the bass drivers are made in Denmark, the tweeters are made in East Java, and the speakers themselves are designed and assembled entirely in Australia… Western Australia, to be precise. According to March, ‘Ukkonen’ is the most appropriate word to describe “the incredible bass extension and dynamics” of his new loudspeaker, because the word translates into English as ‘thunder’. Equipment The Ukkonen AWG is a two-way,bass-reflex floorstander which marries a 221mm mid/bass driver to a 29mm horn-loaded tweeter. The bass reflex port front-fires via a thin slot at the base of the front baffle. The Denmark-made bass driver is designed and manufactured by Purifi (under the pithy ID of PTT8.0X04-NAB-01). It has…

Someone once said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness (and no, it wasn’t Oscar Wilde; the derivation is uncertain). And in this regard we’d note that Richter’s most successful model, the ‘Wizard’, may be the only Australian loudspeaker design that has ever been outrightly copied. The ‘knock-offs’ were marketed under the name ‘Lizard’, though the only thing that the real Wizard and the copy Lizard had in common was their general appearance (the drivers and crossover were completely different) and their one-letter-changed model name. But it was ‘imitated’ because Richter’s Wizard design was not only the best-selling Australian speaker on the market, but also the best-selling loudspeaker in its price category. When we reviewed the latest iteration of the Wizard earlier this…

New, new, and new — pretty much everything about the Pi8 is new. This latest pair of flagship wireless earbuds from the legendary British loudspeaker marque have a new shape, new internals, new drivers: Bowers & Wilkins seems to have left no stone unturned in its pursuit of performance — and perhaps just as well, given that their flagship status is accompanied by a flagship price. The Pi6 model, released at the same time, has a retail price of $449. These higher Pi8 earbuds rise to $599. Such bud prices are by no means unprecedented: another ampersanded brand, B&O, has a pair priced up in the same rarefied air. But it puts them significantly above key competing buds from Apple and Sony. Build, fit & features The good news: we…

Epson’s name is legendary in projection, whether in a small classroom or a massive outdoor event — or, for our purposes, lighting up the home with bigscreen entertainment. The brand has plenty of conventional projectors, but this EH-LS650B is something different: Ultra Short Throw (UST), meaning that instead of being at the back of the room, or on a table halfway back, the projector sits almost directly under the screen onto which the image is to be projected, shining the picture upwards. So even more than with standard projection, UST become a potential TV replacement technology. Sitting at the front of the room, it makes sense for the UST breed of projector to have built-in speakers, and usually also a smart interface, here Android TV, with streaming apps built into…

“Sound and space become one”, announced Dr Andreas Sennheiser at a Global Press Conference back in 2017 for IFA in Berlin. “If the brain can’t differentiate between reality and reproduction, we are there.” He was talking about AMBEO, Sennheiser’s “3D audio experience on headphones or loudspeakers”. It was a technology planned to span multiple fields — including virtual reality and immersive recording, for professional products as well as its consumer offerings, which have been led by its three AMBEO soundbars. These soundbars, in order of appearance and descending order of magnitude, are firstly the ‘Max’, secondly the ‘Plus’, and finally the ‘Mini’, smallest of the three but accompanied by a wireless subwoofer which is optional for the middle model and downright unnecessary for the Max. There’s no Goldilocks among the…

Paul Kutcher is a regular author in the pages of Best Buys Audio & AV, writing for us on the subject of projection screens and the wider projection systems within which they operate. These articles have usually been spurred by some dim-witted newbie question that we have posed to him — do you need different screens in different types of rooms? What’s the difference between woven and perforated? What the heck is a grey screen? Paul has answered all our queries with generous sharing of his accumulated wisdom, and no hint of impatience at our hurried copy deadlines. We had our usual dim-witted newbie question ready for this issue. With the rise of resolution from 2K to 4K and maybe, if the world goes mad enough, eventually to 8K or…

Ruark’s R410 is the first in a new series; it evolves the UK company’s approach of updating the traditional home radiogram into something which is up-to-date in its abilities yet familiarly classic in appearance. This R410 is the smaller of two new models, though still substantial at 56cm across, and weighing 9.5kg. The even larger R810 looks almost exactly as if two taffy-pullers have each grabbed an end of this R410 and stretched it to a full metre’s width, then put it on (optional) long legs. The R810’s price also stretches, to $5999, and we reckon for many users the R410 will prove quite large enough; it’s more than half as wide as the R810, and with all the same stuff — yet comes at just over half the price,…

The amplifiers highlighted in this issue of Best Buys Audio & AV are 100% on trend for modern hi-fi needs. Two of them, including the Denon Home ‘Wireless Streaming Amplifier’ reviewed here, are compact streaming amplifiers which can provide a room ‘zone’ of sound from a box which can be neatly hidden away. The third is a more conventional amplifier design, yet still comes loaded with the now all-essential streaming abilities. But the Denon here has quite the starting advantage: it comes at less than half the price of the others. So is there any limitation from the high-value entry price? Or is this the zone player of your dreams? HEOS & other facilities Key facilities can be gleaned from a six-pack of logos atop the pleasingly card-dominated packaging. The…

Yamaha calls the R-N1000A a ‘network receiver’, but this is a stereo amplifier; don’t think of Yamaha’s famous AV receivers, with surround and stuff. Here it’s traditional two-channel stereo, with ‘receiver’ just meaning ‘amp with a radio’. Mind you it’s not just ‘radio’, nor is it entirely traditional! There’s fully-fledged MusicCast onboard here: Yamaha’s streaming and multiroom platform, well-established and also regularly updated; a recent major revision included the addition of Roon-readiness for this model. The R-N1000A inherits much of its amplification ethos from Yamaha’s higher ranges; this ‘1000’ Series product was developed after the company’s latest 5000, then 3000 and particularly 2000 series, this last with the highly successful award-winning $4999 R-N2000A streaming amplifier, with which this lower model shares much in philosophy and abilities, while tailoring to the…

Wireless speakers can offer a wonderfully simple solution as what we call an “all-in-two” solution: not a single-box hi-fi, but two boxes, which can be positioned for genuine stereo. The delight is that no other gear is required: the speakers contain the electronics to stream, amplify, and play your music. In most cases they also have inputs on the back, so you can plug in other sources, like a CD player or your TV. But the main convenience factor is in having an easy-to-use space-saving two-box solution. So here comes Triangle, from France (and thus most accurately pronounced ‘tree-ongeler’) with these Capella wireless speakers, resplendent here in their cosmic Astral Blue finish. But the Triangle Capella wireless speakers are not, in fact, a two-box solution at all. There are three…