Innehållsförteckning för Summer/Autumn 2023 från Best Buys – Audio & AV

4K UHD ROKU TV Beware playing with this television, even trying it out. It will spoil all other televisions for you, because of one simple but defining trait — it’s so fast. If you’ve ever fumbled with your remote to get the big game or your favourite show on screen ASAP, only to wait through some start-up animation, then a home screen, and you’re still waiting for it… There’s none of that here. TCL’s Roku TV turns on like a phone. Press ‘on’ and it’s on. This might seem a small thing, and perhaps it is, until you use it. When we called TCL to confirm the product’s arrival, they didn’t say “Isn’t Roku great?” or “Isn’t is a great-value TV?”. No, they said “we all can’t believe how fast…

NETWORKED AV RECEIVER Choosing an AV receiver is just about the hardest job in the world of AV shopping. There’s so much that they do, even if you won’t need it all. It can be hard to separate them. You should, of course, do so by listening. And by listening not only to the movie mayhem they can throw around a full speaker system; listen also to their performance in simple stereo. This can more easily reveal the quality within. Because for all the bells and whistles and streaming and surround codecs, it’s the quality of amplification which is the fundamental requisite for an AV receiver. And here perhaps Marantz’s long legacy of excellent amplification can put you at ease. We’ve never yet encountered a Marantz amplifier that has underperformed.…

SURROUND SOUND SYSTEM How can you get surround sound in the lounge? Two choices, really: either you get the traditional home cinema system of big AV receiver and speakers all over the room, or the more convenient soundbar, a compromise solution that generally fakes the immersive element, One is too big for many modern lounges; the other is a sonic compromise. But now here’s a third option from Sony: a proper all-round surround system of identical speakers, and each speaker also containing a dedicated height channel firing up, to bounce Atmos content off your ceiling. What’s more, there are no signal cables: everything is wireless. No big receiver required either: Sony’s small control unit does it all. And no centre-channel speaker to accommodate: there are four speakers, plus an optional…

WIRELESS MULTIROOM SYSTEMS Most of our reviews examine a single piece of hi-fi or AV in isolation. But that’s hardly a fair approach when much of the existential value of a product resides in being part of an ecosystem that extends throughout the home. This is true of the various streaming multiroom platforms that burst onto the scene from the mid-2000s onward. The best of these have kept themselves updated, extending their ranges with useful new additions and abilities. One such, one of the earliest, and one of our favourites, is Bluesound, the product family built around BluOS, the wireless multiroom platform which underlies both Bluesound products and other ‘BluOS’ products such as those from NAD, PSB Speakers, and Dali. Blue benefits Bluesound offers an entire family of products which…

SUBWOOFER A pair of Magico’s latest top-of the-range M9 speakers will cost you around one-and-a-quarter million dollars, depending on the prevailing exchange rate with the US, where Magico loudspeakers are made. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Magico’s ASub subwoofer, while not entirely inexpensive, will cost you less than one hundredth of that figure, yet it has much of the same DNA of the M9s, which includes the fact that, like all Magico speakers, its enclosure is made from 10mm-thick sheets of solid 6061 T6 aluminium that has been internally braced and damped. Even better news: Magico’s ASub is a phenomenally good high-performance subwoofer, which has by far and away the best and most flexible room tuning and speaker matching circuitry we have ever seen. It’s also…

STANDMOUNT LOUDSPEAKERS Revival Audio is a new loudspeaker maker, from picturesque Mulhouse, Alsace, France. Its co-founders are industry stalwarts, and they are using technologies which they believe will allow it to find a place among the great many rival established speaker brands. The company’s only two models for now are the Atalante 3 standmount speakers reviewed here, and the significantly larger Atalante 5 floorstanders, at precisely double the price. Both are fully designed, engineered and assembled in France using all ‘in-house manufactured’ components: “We DO NOT buy off the shelves!”, declares the company. So what’s the story, and how’s the sound? Design & features It’s pleasing that Revival has not (yet) felt forced to follow the common trend to décor-friendly slim towers. We significantly underestimated the size of the Atalante…

UHD PROJECTOR BenQ headlines this as a ‘console gaming projector’, part of the company’s ‘X’ gaming series. And it has gaming features, yes, but it’s equally suited to more general entertainment, coming as it does with consumer 4K resolution, HDMI inputs, built-in speakers and even an Android TV stick to give it a smart streaming interface for standalone operation. But despite its friendly operation and appearance, this is a serious projector. Pictures of the X3000i often don’t suggest its full size: it is 27cm wide and 20cm high, reaching back 26cm in depth. This large cabinet gives it room to employ a 4LED light source, which adds a bonus blue/green LED to the previous 3LED ecosystem, thereby boosting brightness and colour luminance. And it has the very latest in DLP…

SOUNDBAR & SUBWOOFER We hesitate to even call this a soundbar — it’s not ‘bar’-shaped. Indeed Polk’s MagniFi Mini AX is full of surprises. Just be careful with the name, however: Polk also has a plain MagniFi Mini, and a MagniFi 2, a Magnifi Max, a Magnifi Max AX, and a Magnifi Max AX SR. We can’t vouch for all of those, but we certainly loved this MagniFi Mini AX. Equipment So this is a two-part system, with a small lozenge rather than a bar to go up by the TV. It’s just a ruler’s length at 34cm wide; we had thought it larger from pictures we had seen, and had wondered where we might put it to prevent it covering the bottom of our benched TV screen. But no,…

SOUNDBAR + SUBWOOFER Small soundbars can be very useful, and doubly so if they don’t need a subwoofer. They can then be the perfect thing for a bedroom TV or a rumpus-room TV: anywhere you want audible sound better than a TV, but not a full-on room-banging surround solution. Yamaha’s long history in soundbars has enabled it to deliver some excellent little lone bars, such as the little SR-C20 compact soundbar ($279), which we gave a Sound+Image award for its sheer value and remarkable competence for the size. This new SR-C30A, however, adds a wireless subwoofer to work in concert with the compact bar. Let’s dig into its secrets. Build & facilities So we have a small black bar 60cm long and just 6.4cm high, making it fine to sit…

STANDMOUNT LOUDSPEAKERS The 800 Series is Bowers & Wilkins’ flagship range, so that a new 800 Series heralds new flagship technologies and advanced materials that extend the art of loudspeaker making. A new 700 Series, on the other hand, shows how many of these new technologies have trickled down to the lower range which, after all, may be the loudspeakers that many of us can actually afford. So it is with the latest 700 Series 3, and with the arrival for review of the top standmount from the series, the 705 S3, we looked forward to enjoying the latest “cascading concepts and technologies”, as the company puts it, to reach the 700 Series from the company’s new Southwater Research & Engineering facility. Build & facilities The 700 Series is not…

STEREO POWER AMPLIFIER & LOUDSPEAKERS March Audio is based in Albany, WA, where it designs and builds electronics and loudspeakers. These already include the Sound+Image award-winning P452 stereo power amplifier — now updated as the P422, including a number of recent updates. A new power supply achieves lower noise with better voltage regulation. March has also updated its input buffer amplifier section, now lower noise, and has gain selection on the rear panel (see above right, opposite page) to optimise for either RCA or XLR sources. It was the amplifiers which first brought March Audio to our attention, because they were very fast out of the traps in their use of Eigentakt power modules from Danish company Purifi. These have since been adapted and adopted by NAD for its high-level…

SMART MUSIC SYSTEM Rather than review the Ruark R2 Mk4 Smart Music System in our usual listening rooms, we decided to set it up in a master bedroom. It’s that sort of product — ideal for a study or secondary space, and very much looking the part for either location, with its modern take on a classic radio design. We were glad we did this. It showed what an effect such a high-quality music maker can have on music listening habits, because the Ruark is just so easy to use, so easy to get playing with a single tap of the power button, that we reckon it must have quadrupled the amount of music we played in that space during its time. And that’s a recommendation in itself. Design &…

HOME CINEMA PROJECTOR As the last stage of a home entertainment chain, home projectors are a little like loudspeakers, turning an electrical signal into something you can perceive. So you need a source as well: a Blu-ray player or a digital TV receiver or some such, to provide that electrical signal. But the Epson EH-TW6250 home projector goes beyond simply that. It marries a high-quality semi-4K-capable home theatre projector to an Android TV. So it has its own source built in. Build & features We’ll get to Android TV shortly, but first let us describe this unit. It is smallish and clearly designed for ease of set-up and use. Frightened of lamp replacement costs? The brochure notes that the lamp should be good for 15 years if you watch one…

HOME CINEMA SPEAKERS It’s rare to encounter a new brand which not only brings fresh and competitive product to the marketplace, but which also suggests a way of doing things differently. But that’s the fundamental ethos behind this new Australian brand of home cinema speakers called Elementi. Designed specifically for home cinema use (though the largest of them could potentially service commercial applications), the Elementi brand has ranges of loudspeakers called ‘Fire’ and ‘Air’, plus an ‘Earth’ range of subwoofers, and an upcoming ‘Water’ range of Atmos speakers. The ‘Fire’ range (pictured above) uses compression drivers for high frequency delivery, while the ‘Air’ models share the cabinet and mid-bass drivers from the Fire range but switch to a pleated diaphragm ‘tweeter’ along the lines of Oskar Hail’s air motion transformer.…

STEREO AMPLIFIER / DAC / STREAMER Picture the experience. You’re relaxing on the sofa, with a tablet on your lap, and you’re scrolling through your favourite music. You find an album you want to hear, press the play button, and music emerges. This is an experience which is common to any headphone user, or to anyone that listens to music on a smart speaker, or a Sonos system: something like that. But here’s the difference: during this review, our streams travelled direct to a high-quality hi-fi amplifier, specifically the Electrocompaniet ECI 6 DX MkII. Then when the music emerges, it is no ‘lifestyle’ sound, no box-bound small-speaker performance. This is real hi-fi, made smart. Build & facilities Such a solution remains relatively rare. Smart amplifiers are certainly enjoying their day…

Why do some people buy standmount speakers while others buy floorstanders? Why do manufacturers make both? If the floorstanding versions are bigger and more expensive, is it just a question of having the budget? So many questions. But you’re right to ask. The question of whether to buy standmount or floorstanding speakers is one of the earliest and most fundamental considerations you will have to make when deciding to purchase speakers. It will direct the rest of your research, and so the subject is deserving of your in-depth consideration. We’ve put together eight questions here, the answers to which may hold the key to the dilemma, depending on your specific circumstances. More importantly, ignoring any of these may leave you wasting money on something that’s not right for you. What’s…

FLOORSTANDING LOUDSPEAKERS We’ve seen several pairs of standmounting speakers so far in this issue of Best Buys Audio & AV, but if you’ve just been been through our ‘floorstanders vs standmounts’ guide and have come down on the side of full-size cabinets, then please welcome, all the way from France, Triangle’s BR08 floorstanders, from its successful and well-regarded Borea series. Triangle (pronounced, of course, tree-ongle) has been making solid and sometimes radical speaker designs for more than 40 years. If you’re thinking that ‘Triangle’ is a strange name for a company making rectangular boxes, that’s because their debut model back in 1980 was a tower with a distinctive triangular upper enclosure — or actually a square-based pyramidal frustum if you want to be entirely geometrically accurate, but where’s the brand…