Innehållsförteckning för November - December 2022 från Australian HiFi

And just like that, you are about to tuck into the last Australian Hi-Fi issue of 2022. It's been a year of recuperation for much of the world following the disruption of You Know What, though price hikes are seemingly everywhere you turn and, for many industries including hi-fi, supply hasn't fully recovered — as hi-fi dealers across the country are bearing witness to and determinedly grappling with. Fingers crossed that 2023 will be a year of more ‘normality’ in that respect. This year hasn't exactly been bereft of good times for the industry, mind you, or indeed of progress. Better from smaller’ has lately become something to strive for, as many manufacturers are realising (and smartly adapting to the possibility) that to survive in the future, at least some…

And here it is, the hi-fi product we've all been waiting for: the portable music player that matches our Rolex watches. Astell & Kern — who else?! — has revealed its latest high-end player, the A&ultima SP3000, which sports a striking design constructed of high-quality 904L stainless steel — yes, the same grade used for Rolex watches. This is the first of the brand's players to use AKM's new reference AK4499EX DAC chip, which uses a HEXA DAC structure that separates digital and analogue signal processing. And there is also independent dual audio circuitry with complete separation of balanced and unbalanced outputs. Astell & Kern says this all helps the SP3000 produce an authentic, noise-free sound. Powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6125 Octa-Core processor, the SP3000 runs an overhauled version…

Soundbites Bowers & Wilkins has taken the wraps off its latest 700 speaker series, which consists of eight models in total: three floorstanders, three standmounts and two centre channel speakers. This third generation of the 700 range has, according to the British brand, been reworked throughout since the last update in 2017, now integrating more technology than ever before from the flagship 800 Series Diamond range in a bid to squeeze higher performances out of lower prices. The entire 700 series has been redesigned with a slimmer cabinet and a subtle curve to the front baffle in an effort to reduce diffraction. This should mean you hear less of the speaker cabinets’ effect at play and more of the music itself. This is further aided by the drive units being…

It was only a matter of time before a pair of wireless noise cancelling headphones joined Focal's ranks among its established high-end wired models, which include the recently released Utopia featured some pages ago. The new Focal Bathys ($1,199 RRP) arrive as the latest Bluetooth headphones to belong in a newly evolving upper echelon of the market, also inhabited by the likes of the Mark Levinson No.5909 and B&W Px8. While the French brand has dabbled in lower-priced wireless over-ears before, the Bathys are its first pair with active noise cancellation. There are two ANC modes to choose from: ‘Silent’ which promises to block out sound in noisy environments, and ‘Soft’, a less intense isolating mode designed to help the wearer focus at home or in the office. The almost…

It's an exciting time for Australian importer and distributor Decibel Hi Fi, which is not only celebrating the 20th anniversary of its webstore but also launching Australian-made versions of Ohm Acoustics’ omnidirectional speakers. The first model, the W2000AU, which will be followed by others next year, are now completed and available for demonstration to Brisbane customers. Sydneysiders will get a chance to hear them at the Australian Hi-Fi Show next April, where they will be paired and demonstrated with Icon Audio amplification and an Origin Live turntable. Brian Maddern of Decibel Hi-Fi has long dreamed of having a workshop that would enable him to “manufacture speaker kits, hi-fi racks and especially Ohm loudspeakers”! — and that has become a reality for Maddern. The W2000AU cost $4,950 (RRP) per pair, which…

• Very high power • Great sound • Low noise • Protection circuitry • Standby mode $2,999 The Adcom GFA-555se power amplifier that is the subject of this review is an evolution of an amplifier that, shortly after it was released in March 1985, became not only Adcom's best-selling and most famous model but also one of the most famous amps of the last century. Reviewer Anthony Cordesman, who reviewed it at the time for Stereophile magazine, said: “It is so clearly superior to past amplifiers in the low-to-mid-priced range - not to mention most amplifiers costing two to three times its price - that I can unhesitatingly recommend it for even the most demanding high-end system.” That the Adcom GFA-555 should have been successful was no surprise to anyone…

On Test esotericq Pro-Ject X2 B & Phono Box S3 B • Balanced end-to-end • Outstanding sound • Superior adjustability • Different plug-pack voltages • Stylus replacement $2,699 (X2 B) $659 (S3 B) Although there is much debate over the origin of the phrase “last laugh”, it is a fact that the earliest recorded version of the various expressions that use it is found in the 1607 play ‘The Christmas Prince’ where one of the characters has the line, “He laugheth best that laugheth to the end”. A modern-day character who is certainly laughing very loudly is Heinz Lichtenegger. When he first started building Pro-Ject turntables in 1991, at a time when CDs and their players were in ascendency, he was told by all and sundry that his new project…

The Great Awakening POLYBORUS Probably the closest thing we'll ever get to an American Talk Talk, Texas's Shearwater are now fundamentally the deeply talented maverick Jonathan Meiburg, with friends and collaborators helping him to realise an auteur's vision. After their last album, he encountered despair, wrote a book, performed Bowie's Berlin trilogy in full and demanded the death of Donald Trump on stage. He now sounds much calmer - serene even - on Shearwater's tenth (not counting sundries), which floats where 2016's Jet Plane And Oxbow raged. This never means it's predictable; the gentle ripples of keyboards and dream-swept vocals are often sprinkled with field recordings and found sounds (notably, on the bewitching Xenarthran, a choir of howler monkeys). There's no straining to marry these contrasting impulses; the hushed, hymnal…

The Faust Tapes BUREAU B Quite how journalist and producer Uwe Nettelbeck managed to convince Polydor that Faust were Germany's next big thing is anyone's guess - especially when their first single was essentially a set of instructions on how to use a washing machine. Faust's self-titled debut LP (1971) was no less accessible - fascinating and occasionally brilliant but certainly not pop music. For a label whose biggest sellers were James Last and Bert Kaempfert, Faust's experimentalism must have seemed like either wilful sabotage or radical guerrilla art. Probably both. After the band was cut loose by the label a year later, following its slightly less impenetrable So Far, Nettelbeck took advantage of the UK's burgeoning interest in the new forms of music emanating from Germany in the early…

We Are Looking In On You CHERRY RED Dave Brock has helped steer Hawkwind for more than half a century now, weathering periods of derision and indifference while always remaining resolutely unfashionable. Nevertheless, We Are Looking In On You inexorably judders forwards with the same raw energy that marked them out during the ‘70s. This new double CD is further proof, if it were needed, that there is plenty of life in the old bird yet. Pairings of past and present are old bird yet. Pairings of past and present are to be observed with the classic Magnu from 1975's Warrior on the Edge of Time being nestled comfortably alongside tracks from last year's excellent Somnia. Hearteningly, their fanbase sounds just as pleased to hear the new stuff. While some…

The Sick, the Dying… and the Dead! UNIVERSAL MUSIC It's great to experience Megadeth returning to form with a reinvention of their classic ‘80s sound, from 2016's Dystopia to this, their latest release. The first instrument we hear is a grim electric guitar passage that segues into a sharp and bouncy riff. When Dave Mustaine's legendary snarl enters, it's great to hear his voice still in good shape as Megadeth's only remaining original member. Featuring the furious drumming, insane guitar soloing and verbal aggression that we've come to expect, standouts include war-themed singles Night Stalkers and Soldier On! Cameos from O.G. rapper Ice-T and former Van Halen frontman Sammy Hagar are bonus surprises, along with a vicious cover of the Dead Kennedys’ Police Truck. While one can't help but imagine…

LEN WALLIS AUDIO® NEWSLETTER NO.261 Following a couple of years of Covid enforced inactivity we are finally seeing some new, and exciting, stock hit our shelves Marantz Model 40n finally here After a long wait we have finally received the new Marantz Model 40n streaming amplifier. This conventional looking integrated amplifier features a high quality DAC, a raft of analogue and digital inputs plus Marantz's own streaming system - HEOS - on-board. The popularity of ‘just-add-speakers’ streaming amplifiers continues to gather pace, and this is not the first Marantz piece to fall into this category, but it is their premium offering to date. Being optimists we at Len Wallis Audio are holding our collective breaths that products like the Model 40n will herald a shift in the way consumers access…

Music management and streaming platform Roon is getting a big update in the form of Roon 2.0. The headline addition: the Roon ARC app, which lets you listen to your entire Roon library on your phone so that, when you are out and about, you don't have to rely solely on what streaming services have to offer. “Whether you're in your car, at work, or travelling, you'll have access to your library of artists, albums, playlists and tags no matter where you go, right from your phone,” Roon says. The new built-from-the-ground-up app is free to all Roon subscribers and available on iOS and Android devices. If you're using Roon to organise and stream all your music at home, the app lets you remotely access all music by artist, album,…

It's a nostalgic name for a brand-new manufacturer based in France, whose speakers are being brought to Australia by Audio Marketing. Please welcome to our shores, Revival Audio. Audio Marketing's Tim Wallis points out that although Revival is only a year old, the company's foundations are strong. After all, its co-founder, CTO and design engineer Daniel Emonts has a lot of industry experience, including stints with Altec-Lansing, Focal-JMLab and, most recently, nearly six years at Dynaudio, where he was the senior R&D engineer of acoustics. His Revival co-founder Jacky Lee was also a resident at Dynaudio, ultimately as its chief commercial officer, having previously worked with IBM in his home country Taiwan before leading the business establishment of Dynaudio China from 2016, after Chinese company GoerTek acquired majority shares in…

Feature On the 25th May 1983, I visited one of the two Kent Hi-Fi stores (remember them?) in Canberra and handed over $1,199 to purchase my first CD player. It was, I was led to believe, only the second CD player to have been sold in Canberra. May 1983 was less than eight months after the Sony CDP-101 CD player had been launched in Japan. That was, of course, a lot of money back then. The Reserve Bank of Australia tells me that in 2021 dollars, that comes to $4,050. Back then my salary was the equivalent of less than $50,000 in today's money. But I'd been into high fidelity for a decade and was almost dying for a format free from surface noise. I know, we're not supposed to…

Live at the Palladium METAL BLADE Considering Killswitch Engage have sat atop the metalcore mountain for over 20 years now, a fan-less livestream seems an odd choice as the Massachusetts band's inaugural concert album. That said, perhaps it actually makes perfect sense? After all, Live at the Palladium captures the quintet in ferocious form in a truly no-frills environment, which only accentuates their best features. Jesse Leach's caustic screams puncture the silence, while guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz's colossal, razor-edged riffs thrust everything forward. They're essentially this genre's Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Scorching airings of The Signal Fire and The Crownless King set out their stall early on, with the impassioned Take Control another highlight. No audience? No problem. As masters of melody and gutsy groove metal, Killswitch Engage has released…

Get F*cked BARGAIN BIN RECORDS Four years after going viral online with their song Smoko, Sunshine Coast shed punks The Chats have released their second full length album, Get F*cked. As the album's title and artwork demonstrates, these talented bogans seem intent on provoking whoever they can while protesting about workplace injustices (Paid Late), public transport hassles (Ticket Inspector) and rising costs on cigarettes (The Price Of Smokes). It's reassuring to see The Chats using the punk style as an outlet for lyrical protest. Meanwhile, they're often on the hunt for a good time through the social lubricant of alcohol, as crass belter I've Been Drunk In Every Pub In Brisbane goes to show. On a sonic level, Get F*cked is dry and airtight, with little-to-no reverb and effects. The…

The End, So Far ROADRUNNER RECORDS, INC. We Are Not Your Kind reset the bar for Slipknot albums, returning to the sheer intensity of the band's first two records to re-establish them as an 18-legged maelstrom of nihilism and fury. The End, So Far is a near-complete inverse of that, embracing their most experimental tendencies. There are apoplectic ragers (Hivemind, Warranty and H377), melodious anthems (Yen, Medicine For The Dead, Acidic and Finale) and even nu-metal revivalism (The Chapeitown Rag), yet the album remains cohesive throughout. Featuring symphonies, angelic choirs, and an opener that has overtones of Kid A-era Radiohead, it challenges expectations for Slipknot albums in 2022 while not losing any of the creative fire that made its predecessor so great. The End, So Far feels like the fullest expression…

En Ar For Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog MEXICAN SUMMER Anyone familiar with Sweden's Dungen will know the Stockholm band for its lush psychedelic folk-and-jazz flavour, late ‘60s/ early ‘70s analogue warmth, psychedelic, buzzing reverb and splashy drums. There might also be the awareness that super-fan Kevin Parker (Tame Impala) took their prototype in 2010 and bolted with it pretty successfully. But Dungen prevail; still singing in their native tongue after 23 years, now on album nine, they push for new routes. En Ȧr… dials back some of the fuzz, brings frontman Gustav Ejstes’ keyboards forward, and presents a sublime backing chorus through signature banks of harmonies. Wild guitar reverb bursts through on tracks such as Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus, with loops and epic drum breaks under Reine Fiske's colossal…

Beautifully crafted, conveniently compact, well connected — it really has been hard to find fault with Ruark Audio's all-in-one R2 music system over the years. For someone who wants a space-efficient, streaming-savvy, musical-sounding box for their kitchen or bedroom, it's been the go-to of its kind for years. But in a valiant effort to raise the bar even higher, the British audio outfit has announced a fourth-generation model. The R2 Mk4 dials up the sophistication with a Japanese-inspired slatted wooden grille and an ultra-strong “bonded glass” display. It's also 20% slimmer than its predecessor so should sit even more inconspicuously on a shelf. Streamers get built-in support for Spotify, Amazon Music and Deezer, while Bluetooth offers an offline connection to just about any smartphone or tablet. There's a proper headphone…

I've heard enough iFi products (and perused the spec sheets of a great deal more) to know to expect an all-encompassing features list from the British brand's launches. One of its latest, the mid-range Neo Stream, certainly doesn't disappoint. A DAC/ music streamer that combines proprietary technology with a slew of streaming smarts in order to play the highest of high-res audio from your digital library, it looks to be a versatile component that's as fit for the modern day as a Roomba vacuum. Just add amplification and, of course, speakers. The iFi Neo Stream has been built from the ground up, featuring the latest version of the firm's own networking streaming engine that has been designed and developed with the “sole purpose of high-quality audio streaming”. It is an…

Not everyone is as enamoured with Dolby Atmos as the music industry (and Apple and, er, Dolby) might have you believe. One notable voice of dissent, it seems, is Radiohead producer Nigel Godrioh. He has shared his opinions on mono, Atmos and everything in between on a recent edition of Jamie Udell's ‘Hanging Out With Audiophiles’ podcast (hangingoutwithaudiophiles.libsyn.com/howa-ep-100-nigel-godrich). In the all-encompassing interview (which starts around 45 minutes into the episode, if you're thinking of listening), Godrioh riffs on topics as diverse as streaming, parenting, The Pogues and airports. He reveals that despite having a father who was a BAFTA Award-winning BBC sound supervisor, it was a moment of recognition reading the liner notes of Regatta de Blanc by The Police and realising it had been produced by another Nigel (one…

On Test KEF LSX II Streaming Speaker System • Positively sings playing all music genres • Generous streaming and physical connections • Flexibly small, aesthetically striking • Remote is undesirable • Native 24-bit/192kHz playback requires a wired connection $2,195 per pair It makes sense that KEF is more prolific in the burgeoning stereo speaker system market than pretty much every other brand. After all, the British brand more or less single-handedly carved it out with the launch of its LS50 Wireless six years ago. Not surprising considering the success of that very system, it's a market the company has been very present in ever since. The LS50 Wireless II and even more innovative LS60 Wireless have stolen a lot of headlines of late (and rightly so), but we shouldn't forget…

On Test Grado RS1x Headphones • Clean, clear and punchy performers • Dynamically gifted and naturally musical • Exotic wood aesthetic • Leaky open-back design isn't always practical $999 Grado's relationship with wood is as unequivocal, if not as famous, as Lego's with plastic. The familyowned, Brooklyn-based brand was only a year into hand-building its first pair of headphones when, as the story goes, John Grado (son of the company's founder, Joseph) woke up one night with the idea of creating a wooden pair and went downstairs to start carving out what would become the RS1. That inspired further Grado wood creations during the mid-'90s, including Reference Series cartridges, never-released stereo speakers, and even a stereo amplifier that was housed inside a single block of wood. Today, just under half…

SeventyTwoHundredSeconds CHERRY RED Performed live for MTV's 120 Minutes shortly after the release of Where You Been, SeventyTwoHundredSeconds (in reality, only 26 minutes) comprises five tracks: one deep cut from each of the band's first five albums. What seems a niche completist release also serves as a curio from a time when a three-legged collie with emphysema could have been invited onto MTV providing it coaxed au courant Sabbath-inspired down-tempo distortion from a cheap guitar. No wheezing crippled sheepdogs, Dinosaur Jr. discharge their live set gloriously while, as ever, seemingly teetering on the brink of chaos. The languorous squalling of Severed Lips leads into an intense Budge, and as-sunny-as-it-gets Get Me is issued into a silent void absent of audience acclaim. Despite already having been round the block and witnessed…

The Mars Volta CLOUDS HILL Bouncing right back onto the alternative music scene after a ten year hiatus, The Mars Volta releases a seventh studio album that is an ethereal self-titled opus of quirky psychedelic pop and Latin American fusion. After the group's core creative duo, Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López, chose to part ways in 2012, The Mars Volta now offers fifteen new tracks, peppered with three flagship singles: Blacklight Shine, Graveyard Love and Vigil. Other album highlights are the upbeat pop funk of No Case Gain, the deep and hypnotic groove of Equus 3, and the jagged but rocking closing track, The Requisition. While fans of the band's older, heavier works like De-Loused in the Comatorium and The Bedlam in Goliath may miss their more organic prog-rock sound,…