Indholdsfortegnelse for August - September 2017 i Sound + Image

At the recent Australian Hi-Fi & AV Show, one kind Sound+Image reader stopped by our stand to put in a request for “more reviews”. And I’m with him — I love reviews, always want more of them. Mind you, going through our back issues in preparation for this special 30th Anniversary Souvenir Edition of Sound+Image, I was struck by the fact that back in the permed-hair blue-jacket era, you’d be lucky to find five or six full reviews per issue, whereas sometimes these days we hit 20 in a busy issue, and twice a year we publish our sister publication Best Buys Audio & AV, which has absolutely nothing but reviews (bar a few extended focus pieces and the usual rant from me at the front). But OK, we’ll try…

Dynaudio was always going to be a company that took control of sound quality by developing its own drivers. It was founded in Denmark in 1977, after Ejvind Skaaning and Gerhard Richter left behind a driver manufacturing company called RMS and established Dynaudio, soon joined by Wilfried Ehrenholz, who is still with Dynaudio as a special advisor today. In its very earliest days Dynaudio’s products used in-house crossover designs but relied on OEM drivers. It was a situation which clearly wasn’t going to last. “Using OEM drivers you are always dependent upon the development level of your suppliers,” says Ehrenholz, remembering those early days. “But we had ideas that were a long way ahead of the products we could buy, and it was always our intention to aim for the…

Marantz has been making audio equipment continuously since 1952, when the first Marantz product, the Consolette pre-amplifier (above), went on sale at Harvey Radios on 6th Avenue in Manhattan. Needless to say, this makes the Marantz brand one of the longest-enduring in the hi-fi industry. And it is one of the few brands that has achieved ‘cult’ status amongst audiophiles and engineers while at the same time being a mass-market multinational manufacturer. Yet Saul B. Marantz started the company almost by accident. He just wanted to play his records at a higher quality than the playback equipment of the time allowed, hampered especially by the large number of different equalization characteristics being used by record companies at the time. So he spent four years designing, constructing (and then reconstructing) his…

We are gradually coming to accept that it’s legitimate for TV companies to bring us to their TVs, rather than the TVs to us, in certain circumstances. In particular, when the TVs are 65 inches in size, they use OLED technology, and there are two of them. That’s what Panasonic presented to us in mid-July in a nicely isolated theatre room at Len Wallis Audio, Lane Cove, Sydney. The two Panasonic Viera 65-inch OLED TVs from its two new ranges, were side by side. Both conform to OLED conventions, which is to say the top 40-50% of their screens have a thickness of only a few millimetres. Being so large, and so very thin, they are fragile. I have no doubt that a not-too-extreme twist of the glass would see…

Sony still seems to be the only serious supplier of front projectors capable of natively delivering Ultra High Definition video at a range of frame rates. Despite the lack of competition, the company has expanded its range into something rather unexpected: an ultra-short-throw model. Indeed, an ultra-short-throw model with a laser phosphor light engine. Let’s dig in, shall we?? Equipment First: Ultra HD. As is Sony’s wont, the resolution is actually 4K rather than UHD. That is to say, 4096 (the 4000-ish number that fits comfortably into the binary system) × 2160 pixels, not 3840 × 2160 pixels. If for some reason one were using this as a computer display, perhaps with custom graphics in a public arena, one would use the full 4K. In a home, the projector would…

The most anticipated release for any product in the industry for some time has been the new Uniti range from Naim. This range was announced – with some fanfare – during the last quarter of 2016. The range consists of four products. At the time of writing we have begun to receive stock of some models. The good news is that if this first release is any indication, the wait will have been worth it. This model – the Uniti Core – is a hard-disc server/ streamer. This is well-built, simple to configure, intuitive to use and, above all, sounds great. Also in-store by the time you read this, is the Uniti Atom. This is a compact amplifier/streamer, ideal for smaller listening environments where performance is of high importance. In…

Something new and pleasingly affordable compared to some rooms at the Australian Hi-Fi & AV Show was Riva Audio’s demonstration of its one of its WAND series multiroom audio speakers, the Riva Festival. This $749 unit has drivers on three sides — three actively driven woofers, three tweeters, and four passive radiators in an enclosure 36cm wide, using what the company calls ‘Trillium audio technology’ with the result, according to Riva’s local team, of delivering a wider frequency spectrum than any comparable product. The Festival can be controlled from the company’s WAND app and certainly offers excellent connectivity, with Bluetooth, AirPlay, Wi-Fi, DLNA streaming from network shares, Chromecast, Spotify Connect and more. For those seeking physicality there are also minijack and optical inputs, plus a USB-A slot for both charging…

Ever dream of having a large screen display in your room, but then wonder where it would go? WONDER NO MORE! Now you can have an immersive experience with over 100” of 4K HDR picture quality in any room – with no limits on the design or layout of your home. Going from living space to theatre has never been easier. FEATURES ❙ Native 4K resolution (4096 x 2180). ❙ Ultra-short throw lens can project an image of up to 120 inches from only 10 inches from the wall. ❙ Z-phosphor laser light source for up to 20,000 hours of maintenance free performance. ❙ Supports High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) through four HDMI HDCP 2.2 inputs. ❙ 2500 lm of brightness. ❙ 3D transmitter for use…

Jacobsen and Mortensen — Ja-Mo. Preben Jacobsen, a Danish joiner who was designing and producing loudspeaker cabinets in a hen-house on the shores of the Limfjord in Jutland, invited his brother-in-law, one Julius Mortensen, to turn his export sales experience in the fishing industry to the wonders of hi-fi sound. Founding the company in 1968 and two years later building their first factory in that same fishing village, Glyngøre in Denmark, their highly successful collaboration in loudspeakers was notable for its clear division of labour, with Jacobsen in charge of making the speakers and initially owner of the Jamo manufacturing organisation, and Mortensen using his marketing ability to build up an ever-expanding export business for his international marketing and distribution company AJM Agency. Initially the company produced speakers on an…

Richter began back in 1986, under talented Australian speaker designer Ralph Waters, who launched Richter Acoustics with three home-made pairs of speakers and capital funds of $2250 — which he expended on good-looking packaging, warranty cards and business cards, some drivers, and badges to make the speakers look more impressive. “The 1970s had seen an explosion in the number of hi-fi shops in Sydney,” he later told homeentertainment.com.au. “In just three adjacent streets you could count 12 or 13 shops. Initially these were stocked with the best English, Japanese and American brands, usually fully imported, though later the loudspeaker cabinets were often made in Australia and the complete speaker was assembled and packaged. But the loudspeakers had zero design input. Some of the better cabinet-makers imported driver kits from reputable…

Sony’s A1, announced at CES in January, has gone on sale in Australia, priced at $7499 for the 65-inch and $4999 for the 55-inch. Any new UHD OLED is welcome, but Sony’s has something genuinely different in its Acoustic Surface technology — instead of having conventional speakers wedged into its thinness or attached as a superfluous soundbar, instead the entire screen resonates under excitation from a transducer at the rear. This wouldn’t be possible with an LCD screen, only with the front-emissive nature of OLED, and it has the advantage that the sound comes directly from the picture, rather than from speakers around or behind it. Meanwhile Sony aims to maximise OLED’s capabilities with its 4K HDR Processor X1 Extreme incorporating object-based HDR remastering, Super Bit Mapping 4K HDR, and…

As with so many great hi-fi and technology companies, it all began in a garage. Scott Krix spent his teenage years tinkering in the family garage with kit amplifiers and experimental speakers using scavenged parts from old radios. In that garage in Hawthorn, Adelaide, he established ‘Krix Speaker Systems’ in 1974, and began making speakers for his friends. His first commercially available design was the LF-1, which incorporated a Plessey Rola two-inch bass unit and a two-inch cone tweeter. “I had a passion for building loudspeakers, and with a lot of Australian academia like Mr Thiele producing new ways of developing loudspeakers, that inspired me to give it a go. I couldn’t see why an Australian manufacturer couldn’t succeed against some of the other brand names like KEF and Celestion,…

NAD’s audio equipment today is sold in over 80 countries. The company is recognised for pioneering work in amplification from the budget mid-range to the highly-regarded series of Masters series products, among them the M2 ‘Direct Digital’ amplifier recognised in our Sound+Image Ultimate 30 this issue (see p26). With its sister brand Bluesound delivering what is arguably the best experience available in wireless multiroom audio, NAD today is also positioned to lead the new wave of smart streaming audio equipment. And as it pushes to these new heights, its success remains built on core values established by Martin (Marty) L. Borish, who passed away this July, aged 89. Even back in 1963 when he was a humble national high-fidelity sales manager, he was making these views clear, in a “disagreement”…

Well here’s a turn-up for the books — the missus, who has never to our recollection complimented any headphones before, like ever, announces that those gold headphones I left out last night? They look really nice. High praise, and we’re inclined to agree. Our art team also gave them an rare thumbs up for a design which sits on the right side of the bling borderline, pronouncing them “slightly nautical” and identifying them as copper rather than gold. And we reckon there’s a hint of cyberpunk in their shiny coppered headshells and Allen-bolt construction, with those alternating black and copper rings running down to their circular earpads and the supplied cable’s gold-plated copper-ended microjacks that slide obliquely into their connection points. The cable is braided below where these separate wires…