Indholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2020 i Australian HiFi

The in-room frequency response of the B&W DB4S subwoofer measured by Newport Test Labs is shown in Graph 1. You can see that it remains within a 5dB envelope from 20Hz right up to 200Hz, which is an outstanding achievement. Using a more conventional ±3dB envelope, this response is 14Hz-280Hz. Graph 2 shows the frequency response of the DB4S for four different settings of the crossover control and 12dB/octave filter slopes when measured by Newport Test Labs using a nearfield microphone technique that essentially delivers the response you’d expect to get in an anechoic chamber. All traces were measured after the subwoofer’s response had been equalised using B&W’s Android app. The black trace shows the frequency response for the 150Hz setting and you can see that the response extends from…

Do you know what would improve Musical Fidelity’s new M8xi integrated amplifier immediately? Feet. Four of them. Four big large feet. Oh, and handles. Four of them too. But I’ll get to grips with those issues a bit later in this review. Probably the important thing I can say about this new M8xi is that unlike many famous companies that have been sold whose new owners have subsequently, let us say, “dropped the ball”, Musical Fidelity’s new owner, Heinz Lichte- negger, has instead moved the company to the top of the hi-fi league table. Not only has Lichtenegger retained the services of long-time Musical Fidelity designer Simon Quarry, he has also decided that rather than shifting the production of Musical Fidelity’s components to one of his own factories in the…

The Yamaha R-N303D stereo receiver takes me ‘way, ‘way back. Back to when I was a poor student with a love of stereo, but with limited finances to indulge it. Everything was analogue back then, but the analogous cash-strapped student of today would surely want a mix of analogue and digital. The Yamaha R-N303D stereo receiver does both very nicely. THE EQUIPMENT I think about the Yamaha R-N303D in this way: take a modern, networked home theatre receiver and eliminate anything and everything beyond what’s required for stereo music. I know audiophiles are not keen on home theatre receivers but in practice they provide lot of performance for the money. In this case, the things dropped are anything to do with video, all the extra power amplifiers, and all the…

It seems to some that Sennheiser has taken its time to join the true wireless party, observing quietly from the sidelines how it might best approach this particular headphone category. But those with longer memories will know that Sennheiser was in fact very early indeed, bringing out the MX-W1 wireless buds more than a decade ago, back in 2008. They used a bespoke transmission system, and you had to attach a transmitter pack to your phone (or back then, iPod). And I darned nearly dropped one of my test sample buds down a drain getting off a bus, which was alarming since they were $999 a pair. Perhaps this early experiment put Sennheiser off the category. It returned in late 2018, with the original Momentum True Wirelesses. They delivered a…

WILSON AUDIO SABRINA UPGRADED Wilson Audio has upgraded its smallest floor-standing loudspeaker, the Sabrina. “The new Wilson Audio SabrinaX is a ground-up rethinking of the universally loved, small, floor-standing Sabrina that combines traditional Wilson hallmark attributes such as bass authority, dynamic resolution, midrange beauty and integrity, and a sense of inherent musical rightness,” said Nigel Ng, of Advance Audio, which distributes Wilson Audio in Australia. Whereas the original Sabrina used Wilson’s famous ‘X-Material’ only for its baffle and lower spike plate, the entire outer enclosure is now constructed from it. “The SabrinaX cabinet comes that much closer to the near-silent ideal Wilson has relentlessly pursued for decades,” said Ng. “Music emerges through SabrinaX from a blacker background. Bass transient performance and clarity are vastly improved. Listeners will hear superior silence…

LOUDSPEAKERS If you’re a small, boutique hi-fi manufacturar that wants to save money on something that has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the products you’re making, one way to do this is by cutting down on your photography costs, because professional photo shoots are expensive. And one way to do this is to build products that look identical, so you can get a profes- sional photographer to shoot one model, then use the same photographs for all your other models. Now I am not saying that this is the reason that Chario’s Constellation II Lynx looks identical to the Chario Constellation II Delphinus, but there’s no doubt that- in photographs at least-the two appear to be absolutely identical. However, just as the mother of identical twins can…

Upgrade paths loom large as part of the journey of hi-fi. Sometimes a curse (always something more to make your system sing), they are also one of its greatest pleasures. And they are not always found where one might expect. Most will upgrade something in the system path, exchanging old equipment for new, improving cables, even fixing up that final link in the chain, the listening room itself. But they might also sit off to one side, as in the machine under review here, which aims to improve the purity of your source material, reducing signal noise by physically removing impurities. All hail the vinyl record cleaner. THE EQUIPMENT Record cleaners range from cheap-and-cheer- ful simple wiping Solutions to ultrasonics and wildly expensive transcription systems of deep cleansing. The Record…

29/09/1949 - 23/09/2020 Josef Riediger, the owner and founder of two of Australia’s best-known and most famous distributors of audio equipment, and founder and owner of one of Sydney’s top hi-fi retail stores, died on September 29, just six days short of his seventy-first birthday. Born in Manholtz, Germany, Riediger’s family migrated to Australia in 1969 with so little money that they decided to walk from Mascot to Sydney rather than pay for a bus ticket... though it would have been eight tickets, as he arrived with his mother and six brothers. Despite language barriers and cultural differences, Riediger landed a job with with Shell Oil, then based in the Sydney suburb of Silverwater, but accepted a position in the Northern Territory. It was there that Riediger found his passion…

You now own one of the most revered and highly acclaimed loudspeakers in the history of high fidelity audio. That sentence is on the certificate you get when you purchase a pair of Klipsch Heresy IV loudspeakers. They also have a very good claim to being the only loudspeakers that have been in continuous production for more than 50 years, because Paul Klipsch, who founded the company that still bears his name, built his first pair of Heresy speakers ‘way back in 1947. It’s the reason the Heresy model and its near relation, the Cornwall, are part of the Klipsch ‘Heritage’ Series. Oddly enough, the model name wasn’t ‘Heresy’ back in ‘47. Neither were the speakers sold as pairs. The original ‘Model H’ as it was called, was designed as…

You can see from the in-room on-axis frequency response measured by Newport Test Labs (Graph 1) that the Chario Con- stellation MkII Lynx has a response that’s clearly a little elevated at high frequen- cies plus it has a minor ‘kick’ upwards at around 150Hz, but overall, the response is very flat and linear, extending from 79Hz to 40kHz ±3dB. Graph 2 shows the high-frequency performance in greater detail, using a gating measurement technique that elim- inates room effects and therefore shows the ‘true’ response above 800Hz. You can see that the response is almost ruler-flat out to 6.5kHz, where there’s a minor dip followed by a 5dB rise that peaks at 8kHz after which it shelves out to 10kHz before rolling off slightly to 13kHz, after which it rises…

B&W’s latest DB Series subwoofer, the DB4S, is something of an enigma. Although the lowest-priced model in the series, it’s not the smallest. So does it have the smallest bass driver? Nope, its low-frequency driver is actually larger than the one in the model in the range that’s above it. So maybe it has a lower-pow- ered amplifier? Again, nope. With a rated output of 1,000-watts, the DB4S’s amplifier has exactly the same rated power output as two other models in the range (though only half that of the range-topping DB1D, whose internal amplifier is rated at 2,000-watts). What the new DB4S does not have is the ‘dual balanced’ low-frequency driver configu- ration that’s an integral part of the design of B&W’s DB1D, DB2D and DB3D models. THE EQUIPMENT As…

But that’s a misleading typecast for those who know Laurie Nicholson. He’s affable and friendly and is most often to be found entertaining guests-with his hi-fi system at centre stage. His wife, Deanie, prepares finger food as people chatter sotto voce among recliner chairs and soft furnish- ings, sharing wine and nibbles, while records play on the hi-fi or villains are shot on the movie screen. He loves his Tchaikovsky and he enjoys Black Sabbath and he doesn’t differentiate. He says for the right listener there is an ‘emotional rapport’ between Pyotr Ilyich and Ozzy Osbourne. His guests don’t mind what he plays. “If they don’t like one track, the next one will be different,” Laurie says. “It’s the dynamics of the music. It’s the sound and the emo- tion.…

Anyone living in Melbourne, even if they know absolutely nothing at all about hi-fi, will be familiar with Carlton Audio Visual, if only because of the store’s iconic logo-the head of Michelangelo’s famous David, originally carved back in 1504 and appropriated for marketing purposes almost five hundred years later by the two founders and owners of Carlton Audio Visual, Rab Turner and Paul Eliopoulus. ‘We didn’t have much money to advertise that we were open for business,’ says Rab, ‘so we had to come up with an idea of generating maximum advertising impact in the smallest space at the lowest possible cost, so we came up with the idea of the head. It was an on-page attractant in our print advertising and it’s been so successful for us that we…