Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 1 - 2022 i Audio Esoterica

Stereo sound is remarkable. Using just two speakers we are able to enjoy a spread of sound within which multiple individual instruments can be positioned accurately, audibly separated from each other — a guitar here, a violin there — and each sound still reproduced with its individual tone, even gifted an individual sense of acoustic space around it. The best and most accurate stereo speakers can deliver the sense of a front-to-back plane as well as left and right. But there is a problem. To achieve the very purest of soundfields, you would want only a single driver in each speaker. As soon as you have separate tweeters and woofers, the sound of each originates from a slightly different place, and those two outputs will interfere, breaking down your sound…

Back in 2011, the Australian Audio & AV Show was a great excitement in itself. For the previous decade there had been no proper hotel-based hi-fi shows in Australia at all, so the organisers had no template to work from, making the choice of a high-class Melbourne CBD hotel a bold start to the enterprise. It was a success, with some world-class demos and some world-beating loudspeakers: Cabasse had its giant eyeball-like La Sphere, Bowers & Wilkins its 800 Series, and some notably impressive presentations from local brands including SGR Audio, W.A.R. and VAF Research. But there was little debate about which room should win Best Sound in Show. The accolade went to an Australian newcomer with an extraordinary high-end 20-driver loudspeaker system which didn’t merely amaze everyone who saw…

The world’s most venerated loudspeaker manufacturer? It’s a reasonable sobriquet to apply to a company which has pushed the boundaries of performance, sound quality and aesthetics ever since it was established in Britain in 1966 by John Bowers and Roy Wilkins. During the more than half-century it’s been building loudspeakers, the co-branded company has produced some decidedly ‘out there’ designs like the classic Nautilus ‘snail’ speakers, while the moderately less out-there speakers from the ongoing 800 Series have become legends not only through their well-publicised use in Abbey Road Studios and other studios throughout the world, but for the sheer craftsmanship that goes into the design and delivery of each successive generation. The 800 Series has been the iconic height of the UK-based brand since John Bowers introduced the original…

When we spoke recently with Philip Swift, the wise and enthusiastic owner of Spendor loudspeakers in the UK, he explained to us how the company’s three ranges of loudspeakers have each been developed with a particular type of customer in mind. The divisions between the A-Line, the D-Line and the Classics are more about sound character and style than technology or performance, he told us. “A few years back we asked ourselves, ‘How do we communicate who we are and what we do on a consistent global basis to our increasingly diverse but ever more discerning and aware — via the internet — target audience’,” Swift says. “We identified three groups, which internally we refer to as making up our ‘Music Lover’s Universe’ — our audience, in other words. We…

The wood drying takes six months. Then there’s 90 minutes of machining to flawlessly form the cabinet elements. And that’s followed by a full 126 hours of artisan handcrafting before final assembly and quality control sees a single pair of Chario’s Academy Sonnet loudspeakers signed off and ready to be shipped from their home in Italy. Chario has been handbuilding loudspeakers for 47 years from its base in Milan, long favouring heavy wood cabinet construction, and strictly of Italian origin sourced from walnut plantations in the north-east of the country. They’re age-dried for six months until the correct internal humidity is measured, before machining begins and then assembly of jointed slats with dovetail joints, which Chario regards as the best solution in attaining structural rigidity for its hefty loudspeakers. These…

It started with a mass-produced polystyrene cup, the kind used for hot drinks, made by vacuum-forming the foamed plastic over a shaping tool. These were patented in the US in 1957, at which time one Raymond Cooke was designing loudspeaker drive units as Technical Director of Wharfedale, a position he’d taken after working for the BBC’s Designs Department. By 1960 the humble polystyrene cup had made its way across the Atlantic, and when Cooke saw one, the proverbial light bulb illuminated above his head. His driver cones were made from paper pulp in a process that was expensive, time consuming and difficult to achieve consistently. Suddenly, here was a new technique, a new material — and one suited to mass production. Could drive units be formed in the same way?…

We find ourselves curiously compelled to pronounce ‘Holbo’ in a cod-Swedish accent rather than a Slovene one, but then we confess to having been a little short on Slovenian background information until our research prior to the arrival of this turntable from that Central European locale. We might surmise that one national characteristic is an innovative way of doing things differently, as this is the first turntable we have reviewed which arrived with an off board box that is not an isolated power supply, nor an off - board phono stage, but an air pump, proudly branded “Holbo Air Pump”. Which of course means we can chuckle as we insert the following amusing subheading… PUMP UP THE VOLUME What precisely is Holbo pumping up, aside from the volume? Bostjan Holc,…

When you see the word ‘Project’ preceding a JBL loudspeaker model, it means something special is going on. JBL uses the word only when its engineers have had all restraints removed, instructed to build the speaker system they have always wanted to build. Whatever resources they need, they get. It’s a brave brief, and at JBL it has only happened eight times since the 1950s, when the first “search for new frontiers in sound reproduction” yielded the 1954 Hartsfield. With its high-efficiency compression-driver technology, the Hartsfield set the tone for the Project speakers that followed — the Ranger-Paragon, the Everest DD55000, four iterations of K2 designs, and the 2006 Project Everest DD66000, now evolved into the D67000. And while this K2 S9900 actually combines the tradition of the 2001 Project…

There are very few manufacturers who can claim to both design and build their own loudspeakers entirely in-house, and still fewer who do so from the UK, a location which may still play home to a number of major speaker brands, but nearly all of which manufacture all or most of their speakers in Asia, usually in China. But not Spendor. “We design and manufacture all Spendor drivers and cabinets in-house in the UK,” says Spendor’s Philip Swift. “This gives us complete control over the quality of our products and manufacturing processes. It also means we can experiment with new ideas and realise/test them quickly in-house. “Our cabinet manufacturing facility Timberworx is set-up specifically to make quality hi-fi loudspeaker cabinets and some turntable parts and plinths — we don’t make…

McIntosh built its first valve amplifier back in 1949, making it one of the longest-running audio brands in the world. It started building transistor (solid-state) amplifiers in 1967 and now also builds not only valve and solid-state amplifiers, but also ‘hybrid’ amplifiers that employ both valves and solid-state devices. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the McIntosh C12000ST Preamplifier can operate either as a valve amplifier or a solid-state amplifier. Choosing which amplifier type you’d like to listen to is as simple as flicking a switch. The MC3500 MkII mono power amplifier’s design is an homage to one of the most famous amplifiers of all time, the original McIntosh MC3500, dozens of which were used to power the sound system at the most famous music festival of them…

Kiseki means ‘miracle’ in Japanese, but the company’s founder back in the 1980s was a Dutchman, Herman van den Dungen, who commissioned Japanese cartridge makers to create something that would compete with the Koetsu Black: the original Kiseki Blue was the result. The company did well, partnering with Dan D’Agostino’s Krell, but declined and fell during the CD era, before reappearing in 2011, using existing parts to make 105 new Kiseki Blues before introducing the Kiseki Blue N.S. (New Style) for ongoing production. SPECIFICATIONS Kiseki Blue N.S. Body: aluminium alloy, 25mm long Cantilever: solid boron rod: 0.28mm diameter Stylus: 0.12 × 0.12 Nude line-contact diamond, mirror polished Stylus tip radius: 4 × 70μm VTA: 20 degrees Coilbody: pure iron Weight: 7 grams Output voltage: 0.40mV at 5cm/s Internal impedance: 40…

Preparing company histories can be a fascinating endeavour: this writer enjoys the rabbit holes down which one can scurry, finding a book or an article lost in time or on the web that will add a small detail missing from official histories, or a revealing quote from back in the day that unlocks what a company was really trying to achieve. A fair part of this Audio-Technica history is based on Japanese-language sources, which was fun, and we should perhaps start by saying that any errors here are entirely our own, or those of Google Translate. We anticipated a history of cartridges, headphones and pro audio gear. But it was soon clear that what has driven the development of that equipment is Audio-Technica’s ongoing innovation in technologies. Working out how…

At the high-end of hi-fi, the whole concept of an integrated amplifier can be considered by audiophiles as a compromise, allowing the convenience of single-box construction to outweigh the benefits of separate enclosures in keeping apart the heavyweight power amplification from the more delicate signal paths required in the switching circuits of the preamplifier. Power supplies are also routinely separated from the main boxes, and of course when hi-fi entered the digital age, the fear of potential interference from ultra-high-frequency operations within digital-to-analogue conversion saw audiophiles keep DACs separate as well. All of which combines to make the idea of an integrated amplifier together with a DAC and all its power supplies inside one chassis seem the epitome of one-box practicality over the more moral pursuits of audio perfection. And…