Australian HiFi Issue 539 - 2025

I had a bit of fun in the week leading up to Christmas – and I'm not referring to the beach barbecue or pavlova decorating kind of fun (although I might've indulged in a little of that… when in Oz etc.) With no hi-fi deliveries to accept before the new year, I time-travelled back to my childhood years, rewound my modernised brain and dusted off what remains of my physical music collection to spend some time with a CD Discman and a cassette player. And not decrepit machines I had found in a Salvos but devices launched just recently, would you believe, by FiiO. Indeed, Jack White, Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers and other fellow tape-backing artists, not to mention Disney with its best-selling ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy: Awesome Mix Volume’…

Healthy, five-figure budgets can buy a decent-performing haul of separates, but the attraction of going down the alternative integrated electronics route and minimising boxes is plain to see — particularly when giants of the high-end industry such as McIntosh are launching machines like the MSA5500. McIntosh has designed this streaming amplifier to become a “cornerstone” of your audio setup, built to fit into various spaces and systems while offering amplification, streaming capabilities and a host of physical connectivity options in a single premium unit. The MSA5500 delivers 100 watts per channel into eight ohms and houses the brand's “audiophile-grade” balanced 32-bit DAC for supposedly outstanding dynamic range and low distortion. A raft of established McIntosh technologies is predictably present and correct, including Power Guard, which prevents audio clipping, and Sentry…

Denon closed out last year by adding a brandnew SACD/CD player, the DCD-3000NE, to its Reference Series. It is no small secret that CDs and disc players are quietly but surely having a bit of a revival, so a dedicated, high-performing SACD/CD player from a brand such as Denon is cause for celebration for fans of the physical format. The new player has been meticulously tuned, says Denon, to “reveal unprecedented sonic detail in all of your favourite music”. The DCD-3000NE can play ball with a variety of digital audio, from CDs and SACDs to MP3 and FLAC files. It can also play CD-R/ RWs and DVD-R/RWs in addition to DSD files (2.8MHz and 5.6MHz). Outputs include one pair of analogue RCA, one digital coaxial and one digital optical. The…

PMC has launched a five-strong speaker series that sits above the acclaimed Prodigy range it launched around 18 months ago and sees the British company take a holistic approach to engineering and design. ‘Never has so big a sound been possible from cabinets so compact,’ is the promise for this new Prophecy series. The cabinets certainly are among the slimmest I've seen. While every element of the three floorstanders, single standmount and centre speaker is new, it comes as no surprise to find that they are all transmission-line designs; this has been PMC's way from the beginning. A transmission line takes the rearward output from the bass unit and sends it along an internal path that absorbs all but the lowest of frequencies. This redirected rearward sound is then used…

It's time for bank accounts all over Australia to prepare themselves because high-end Californian brand Magico has another set of fund-busting floorstanders to tempt you into bankruptcy. The new S5 loudspeakers slot between the S3 and S7 models of Magico's established, 2023-introduced S Series and retail at $145,000 per pair — a relatively inexpensive sum compared with the $750,000 asking price of the brand's ultrahigh-end M7 loudspeakers. The S5 take design inspiration and technology drawn from the flagship M Series, benefitting from some seriously impressive engineering tools. A Polytec Laser Vibrometer was used to measure the most minute vibration of the cabinet panels and calculate the soundpressure levels they generate so that Magico engineers could tackle them early in the design process. As a result, the S5's cabinet supposedly adds…

Integrated stereo amplifiers that deliver both preamplifier and power duties from one box are neat, space efficient and undoubtedly the most popular option when it comes to driving a hi-fi system, but the potential for optimum sound quality still comes from having a separate preamplifier and power amplifier. Audiolab offers one-box integrated amps across its entry-level 6000, mid-range 7000 and flagship 9000 ranges, but now it has decided to expand its top-tier offering with a dedicated preamp and power amp for the first time in years. The new 9000P is the first Audiolab power amplifier since the 8300XP, which launched in 2016, and is joined by the new 9000Q preamp. Together, they sit above the 9000A integrated amplifier as the range's ultimate amplification solution, and also alongside the 9000CDT CD…