Indholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2021 i Australian HiFi

There are facts and there are facts. Or, as the Kellyanne Conway would have said, ‘alternative facts.’ Oh no, wait, she did actually specifically state that there were such things as alternative facts.) And there are words and there are words, as Lewis Carroll pointed out in his book Alice in Wonderland. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” These are all thoughts that came immediately to mind when I read a list (on the internet, of course) that purported to identify ‘Ten facts about digital’. I say ‘purported’ because if you google the phrase and discover the particular list I ran across, you will discover that several of the…

WOLF ALICE Blue Weekend [Dirty Hit] ‘Great guitar hopes’ does a reductive disservice to the brilliance of Wolf Alice. They’ve bagged two No.2 albums and the 2018 Mercury Prize (for 2017’s Visions Of A Life) by being the evolutionary leap into an era where alt.rock, psychedelia, dream pop, grunge, punk and intergalactic next-gen shoegaze intermingle on a binary-defying sonic spectrum. Their third and finest album ventures further still, folding Kate Bush’s operatic mistiness, minimalist art-pop and the odd R&B intonation into a flavoursome stew. Befitting an album about escapism (The Beach dreams wistfully of an exotic postlockdown bender; lustrous, Delicious Things is an ode to the Hollywood high life) and the turbulent tides of love, an oceanic crescendo is never far away. More vulnerable moments (Feeling Myself, Safe From Heartbreak)…

ESTELON XB DIAMOND MKII The Mk II models of German manufacturer Estalon’s high-end X Diamond Series loudspeakers are now available in Australia. To look at the X Diamond Mk II you’d see no difference between it and its predecessor, because externally, it’s the same gorgeously sculpted exterior, so graceful one would hesitate to call it an ‘enclosure’. Internally, however, it has a new ultra-hard diamond inverted dome tweeter and a new crossover network with improved components for wider dynamic range and transparency and new cabling (Kubala-Sosna Pure Copper) to connect that network with the drivers and the rear terminals. The bass driver of the X Diamond Mk II is a 280mm ceramic sandwich coned transducer made by Accuton. The midrange driver, which is also made by Accuton, has a pure…

Andy Whittle, who worked for Rogers in the early 90s before it shut down its UK operation and moved to China, is now back working for Rogers. Andrew Murphy asked him how it came to be that Roger is now once again manufacturing speakers in the UK. Andy Whittle: Michael O’Brien, who owned Rogers, sold the company to the Wo Kee Hong Group in Hong Kong. They ran it for four or five years before the big financial crisis in the late 90s when they pulled the plug on the UK manufacture. They weren’t making those products in Hong Kong or China, they were basically making their own products and introducing them to the domestic market; so they moved a bit more mainstream, doing more AV stuff. But that was…

If you know anything at all of the history of Daniel Weiss, the founder and owner of the Swiss firm Weiss Engineering, you will realize why the company for many years designed and manufactured only professional digital electronics intended for use in recording and mastering studios. It’s because after graduating from HTL Rapperswil in 1979 with a BSEE, Weiss joined Studer/Revox where he designed analog anti-aliasing filters, test signal generators, sampling frequency converters and digital audio processors for one of the first digital recorders. He left Studer/Revox in 1985 to found Weiss Engineering and after first creating the famous modular 102 Series system that’s still used by Sony Music in New York, he followed up with a range of specialist stand-alone studio components that included dynamics processors, de-noiser/de-clickers, A/D and…

BILLY F. GIBBONS Hardware [Concord]] It was rather late in the day for ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons to start a solo career as he did in 2015 with the Latin-tinged Perfectamundo and The Big Bad Blues. Album #3 was recorded in the Californian desert with former Guns N’ Roses/Velvet Revolver drummer Matt Sorum, one-time Slick Lilly leader Austin Hanks and, on the whip-smart Stackin’ Bones, Larkin Poe. Hardware is a riff-strewn feast of scuzz. Gibbons is back to songwriting too, having a hand in everything bar Augie Meyers’s Hey Baby, Que Paso, which he transforms into a cousin of Dire Straits’s Walk Of Life. The desert looms large, and not just in some of the Queens Of The Stone Age-style guitar, or Desert High, where you can almost feel the…

LOUDSPEAKERS The new AudioSolutions O305F is a bit like a Russian doll, despite being made in Lithuania, because it has two cabinets, one inside the other, in what founder and lead design engineer Gediminas Gaidelis calls a ‘box in a box’ design. It’s also the forerunner of a whole new series for AudioSolutions which sees all the previous O2xx designs replaced by O3xx designs, so the O305F reviewed here replaces the old O205F. That the design is completely new is no better illustrated by fact that whereas the old O205F was a five-driver, three-way design the new O305F is, as you can see, a four-driver, three-way design. EQUIPMENT The tweeter is a 25mm silk dome type custom-made for AudioSolutions by Swedish manufacturer SEAS. It’s fitted with what AudioSolutions calls a…

Linn Sondek LP12 Turntable (Grace tonearm/Grado moving-iron cartridge) Oppo BDP-105 BD Player (plus a Music Library on an external HDD) Phono Preamp Own design with discrete JFET MM head amp, bipolar MC head amp, and op-amp-based RIAA equalisation and output stage. Separate box houses ultra-low noise linear power supply. Cartridge loading and gain is adjustable for each input. Preamplifier Own design using National Semiconductor LM4562 opamps, Greyhill input selector switch, Alps Blue Velvet volume control, and low-noise linear power supply. Power Amplifier Own design with Texas Instruments TPA3251 Class-D amplifier and linear power supply. Loudspeakers Own design. 3-way sealed box (100-litres) made from bamboo plywood on sand-filled steel stands. Raal 70-20XR ribbon tweeter, AudioTechnology C-Quenze 5-inch midrange, AE Speakers TD12S 12-inch bass driver. Passive 4th order Linkwitz-Riley crossover at 270Hz…

Daniel Weiss was recognized at the 63rd Annual GRAMMY Awards on Sunday, March 14, 2021, with the Recording Academy bestowing him with a Technical GRAMMY in the 2021 Special Merit Awards division. Technical GRAMMY Award recipients are voted on by the Academy’s Producers & Engineers Wing Advisory Council and Chapter Committees, and are ratified by the Academy’s Trustees. The award is presented to individuals and companies who have made contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording industry. “As we welcome the new class of Special Merit Award honorees, it gives us a chance to reward and recognise the influence they’ve had in the music community regardless of genre,” said Harvey Mason for the Recording Academy. “Daniel Weiss is one of the true pioneers of digital technology. In 1985, he…

Readers interested in a full technical appraisal of the performance of the Audio Technica AT-LPW50B turntable and AT-VM95E phono cartridge should continue on and read the LABORATORY REPORT published on the following pages. Readers should note that the results mentioned in the report, tabulated in performance charts and/or displayed using graphs and/or photographs should be construed as applying only to the specific sample tested. Newport Test Labs first tested the speed stability of the AT-LPW50PB’s platter rotation and found it to be extremely stable at both fitted speeds. Tested with a 3kHz signal at 33.33 rpm, the speed of the Audio Technica AT-LPW50B varied such that the frequency of the test signal was measured as varying only between 2997Hz and 3000Hz, with wow accounting for the minuscule 3Hz variance, though…

BLACK SABBATH Sabotage: Super Deluxe Edition [BMG] Sabotage is the sound of indignant fury. From the opening battle cry of Attack! to the riotous opening pair Hole In The Sky and Symptom Of The Universe, separated by the brief flamenco interlude Don’t Start (Too Late) or the album’s twin epics The Writ and Megalomania — which at one point has Ozzy growling “Suck me!” like Satan himself. Even the lesser tracks - the ballsy boogie Thrill Of It All; Ozzy’s hit single attempt Am I Going Insane (Radio); and the choral Supertzar — top most tracks on subsequent albums. Disc 1, the original album newly remastered, now plays better than ever. The bonus carrot — the 100-minute, two-disc live album — is magnificent. This is the classic Ozzy line-up playing…

SLY WITHERS Gardens [Dew Process] Sly Withers have undergone a seismic transmutation. Gone is the loose ‘n’ livid shredding and abrasive DIY tracking — Gardens plays out with huge emotional stakes, captivating story beats and sevenfigure production. Instantly striking is how dynamic and three-dimensional the LP is; the band wade through peaks and valleys across its 12 tracks, ebbing and flowing between heartrending slow-burners and big, mosh-ready punk anthems. The guitars are tighter, brighter and more tasteful, and on the moodier and more emotive tracks — the strained Glad or poignant Turns Out — the lead work is prickly and warm, cutting turf for the pensive musings on the vocal front to really cut deep. But on My Bullshit or Constant Wreck, the riffs and ruminations are in mortal combat,…

BLACKBERRY SMOKE You Hear Georgia [3 Legged] Blackberry Smoke’s latest proves that they’ve perfected a winning balancing act between their two chief influences, rock and country. Opener Live It Down is a fine rocker. A lean, funky central riff and a muscular rhythm section set us off nicely, before Stonesy gospel backing vocals boost an anthemic, party-tonight, sleep-tomorrow chorus. Another up-tempo highlight is All Over The Road. Given the title, a classic high-octane stomper. Elsewhere, though, such as on the title track, the pace is more laid back. Lonesome For A Living sees Nashville star Jamey Johnson take the mic. The folky guitar ballad Old Enough To Know, is another down-home gem, offering choice cautionary lines such as ‘Don’t trust a grown man with a nickname’ and ‘Nothing worth a…