Innehållsförteckning för February - March 2016 från Sound + Image

Panasonic ceased production of the long-running (since 1972, indeed) DJ-orientated Technics SL-1200 turntable back in 2010, and when the Technics brand was revived as a hi-fi marque at the IFA 2014 show, the most-asked question was whether the classic deck would return. The answer at IFA 2015 was yes, and the new turntable was shown at CES 2016 in two versions, a 50th anniversary limited edition (1200 units) Grand Class SL-1200GAE and an unlimited Grand Class SL-1200G. Both are based on a newly-designed direct-drive motor that lacks an iron-core and is said to eliminate the small speed variations and vibrations known as ‘cogging’; other features include the traditional Technics gimbal suspension construction, a three-layered construction, and a microprocessor control system using rotary positioning sensors to further eliminate speed fluctuations via…

There is currently no company in the world that manufactures reel-to-reel tape decks — consumer or studio machines. But the resale market of vintage machines is seeing strong and steady growth, and there’s a US-led resurgence in enthusiasm for reel-to-reel software that has also seen a small but growing collector base here in Australia. It makes sense — if you can get hold of an early-generation tape, you’re about as close to the mastering of the original recording as possible. Combine a good tape with a calibrated deck, and reel-to-reel can not only challenge vinyl or digital playback, it can torch it. In 2013 US magazine The Absolute Sound rather alarmed its readership by declaring a highly modified TASCAM Pro reel-to-reel deck to have “crushed” the magazine’s highest-ever-rated turntable-based system.…

It might be considered that Yamaha arrived a little late to the wireless multiroom party, its launch of MusicCast coming at the end of 2015 after a year that had seen this growing sector gaining new systems and platforms by the month. But credit where credit is due — Yamaha actually launched its first MusicCast system nearly eight years ago, spectacularly before its time, now widely forgotten by most outside the company itself. So it has been waiting for the market to catch up, before reinventing its concept for today’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth age. MusicCast was relaunched with the biggest ecosystem of products in town. Most rival systems have each created small collections of new products that can share their music around the house. Yamaha has delivered a platform that…

SUMMARY Zappiti 4K Player 4K media player Price: $490 without HDD + Stunning Zappiti interface + Cloud-based info gathering + 4K output - Video output settings deep in menu structure - 4K limited to 30Hz We are now living in a thoroughly 4K video world — all the top TV ranges from the major players lead with the 4K/Ultra HD resolution of 3840×2060 pixels. Of course there remain some persuasive arguments that the benefits of this quadrupled resolution is minimal on its own, particularly if viewing on 55-inch screens or below (unless you sit really really close). But it’s fast becoming the default — if you decide to stick with 1920x1080, you’ll likely miss out on the latest video processing, internet smarts and connectivity that go into higher-level tellies, because…

SUMMARY Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Wireless wireless speaker Price: $999 + Style and substance + Great with AirPlay or Bluetooth + Only one cable required - Initial set-up quirks We remember when the first B&W Zeppelin arrived back in 2006, sporting an Apple 20-pin dock. Its unique form factor impressed everyone, while the $999 asking price was considered mildly scandalous back then. How times change — these days you can easily pay significantly more for a one-box speaker (see the Mu-so elsewhere in this issue). So with the new Zeppelin Wireless arriving in Australia still at $999 despite the march of inflation, it seems far less fiscally startling. Equipment Some 66cm wide from tip to tip, and standing 19cm high, the latest Zeppelin leans back slightly on its base, and…

SUMMARY Sharp HT-SB602 soundbar + wireless sub Price: $549 + Good input selection for the money + Slim wireless subwoofer - Spitty treble - Soft bass - Hole in the middle There certainly seems to be plenty for your money on offer from Sharp’s soundbar. The soundbar is sleek, the subwoofer is wireless and usefully narrow, and there’s a good selection of inputs, including HDMI connectivity. Yet the price is remarkably affordable. Is this top value, then, or a case of bells and whistles outweighing the investment on basic sound quality? Equipment The HT-SB602 is wider than most at 137cm, usefully slim at 6cm deep, and low enough at 7.5cm to stay clear from blocking most TV’s infrared receivers. Should that happen, an IR blaster is included to forward your…

Having been delighted with the sound and relative value of NAD’s first headphone (the overear HP50, reviewed in our Oct-Nov 2015 issue), we were keen to review this smaller on-ear HP30, to see if the NAD family headphone tuner Paul Barton (of Lenbrook stablemate PSB Speakers) had once again woven his ‘RoomFeel’ magic into the sonic response here. RoomFeel is a transfer function (complex EQ) included to deliver the warmth and sense of scale normally added by room reflections when listening to speakers — the idea being that headphones normally miss out on this grounding of reflected sound because they are delivering sound straight into your shell-likes. Well, Barton may or may not have succeeded here — it was very hard to tell, because these on-ear phones just would not…

Wavetrain’s founder and managing director David Moseley has a somewhat unconventional approach to client liaison, yet he often ends up delivering something substantially more than the client might first request. “I do have a reputation that once a client meets me, it’s rare they don’t proceed with a design — and more often than not they do so at two to three times their initial budget,” Moseley tells Sound+Image. “But it’s not because I am a great salesperson — in fact I’m anti-selling. It’s perceived value for money. I will never ever engineer a product into a design without working out the exact engineering requirements of the design, and if a client’s budget won’t meet their desires, I work with them to get the best outcome.” And do his clients…

Over the past 15 years or so television has produced a remarkable number of TV shows that best the finest movies for sheer quality in story telling, and often in presentation. Except that instead of 120 minutes, you get 400 or more minutes with regularly-placed break points. You can binge from end to end, or stop after a satisfying number of episodes. But not every TV show can be ‘Game of Thrones’ or ‘The Sopranos’. Here I look at two which don’t reach that level, but are still highly entertaining, and at times quite intriguing. As you might imagine, ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ has something to do with the 1996 Tarantino/Rodriguez cult film of the same name. That movie, you will recall, starts off as an escape flick with two…

Is it just me? I assumed from the title alone that ‘The Leftovers’ would be a second-rate comedy about, perhaps, those not good enough to get onto a sporting team. Still, I did my duty and watched the first episode and discovered that it was actually an intense mystery drama. It is an example of a presently popular two-step formula. One: something unexplained, literally fantastic, and of great moment happens. Two: follow a group of normal characters as they deal with it. This can be done poorly — ‘Under the Dome’ jumps to mind here, with fine actors playing characters who do stupid random things. But it can also be done well — ‘The Walking Dead’, or ‘Les Revenants’ in which dead people start walking back into their French town…

In audio circles, hi-fi folk often bemoan the decline of critical listening, by which they mean the choice to sit and focus on music, to stop reading, if possible to stop thinking entirely and enter the three-dimensional time portal of music and performance that a good recording can cause to appear before you. Kids these days, they moan, they have a whole world of music streaming to their phone, they illegally download more albums than we’ll ever own, but it’s all for background — they don’t listen, they don’t focus. How else could it be, when half the time they’re listening using only half a pair of white earbuds? But I don’t think this is true. Stop a random teenager today and sure, they may already be slightly deaf in…

Panasonic had the CZ950 4K OLED television at CES (originally announced at IFA in 2015), plus a new premium range of 4K LED-LCD, the DX900 series. These address the limitations of LCD backlighting in delivering the high contrasts required for High Dynamic Range delivery by introducing a new honeycomb Full Array Local Dimming (FALD) system which allows a reported 512 separate dimming zones and, crucially, complete separation between them, reducing the haloing of light that can appear behind bright objects on dark backgrounds on backlit designs. It is the first LED-LCD TV signed off by the UHD Alliance under the new ‘Ultra HD Premium’ specification designed to help consumers see at a glance which TVs are fully equipped to handle the new 4K technologies.…

Vinyl fans may well say that their current turntable is already delivering high-resolution audio, thank you very much, but Sony has applied ‘Hi-Res Audio’ branding to its newly announced PS-HX500 turntable to emphasise that this is the world’s first disc spinner with digital output via USB as 24-bit PCM or as DSD in either 5.6MHz and 2.8MHz format. PC software is included. The turntable itself is belt-drive with electronic speed change, a straight tone arm and moving magnet cartridge, with an aluminium die-cast platter. In addition to USB, the HX500 has a built-in phono stage and offers the choice of line-level or phono-level output. We should note that any turntable output can be recorded at 24-bit to computer using a suitable interface and software, but the HX500 is certainly the…

The introduction of height-based channels for Dolby Atmos, DTS: X and others have spurred a new breed of soundbar — those claiming to extend their ability to approximate surround into the third dimension. Yamaha is one company well-placed to do this — not only has Yamaha had its own system of height channels for years prior to the emergence of Atmos, it also has a system of ‘Digital Sound Projection’ which should be equally suited to bouncing sound off the ceiling as it is to bouncing it off side walls. So enter the YSP-5600BSW (below), a $2299 soundbar that uses a 44-speaker array (46 drivers in total) — the most ever used in Yamaha’s YSP history. Six height channel drivers on each side aim to provide sound equivalent to 7.1.2…

Klipsch launched its Reference Premier series in Australia last April, and now it has announced a Reference Premiere HD Wireless version of the system. This uses WiSA technology to deliver high-resolution multi-channel wireless audio to each speaker, with an ‘HD Control Center’ smart distribution hub to connect up to four HDMI devices, as well as digital optical, analogue and Bluetooth audio inputs. One button on the rear of each speaker makes the connection to the HD Control Center at up to 24 bit/96kHz, eliminating the need to run speaker wire or connect an AV receiver. As with the original Reference Premier series, the speakers all feature Klipsch proprietary 90°×90° Hybrid Tractrix Horn technology coupled with Linear Travel Suspension (LTS) titanium tweeters, and those iconic copper-coloured Cerametallic woofers. Aside from the…

SUMMARY Panasonic Viera TH-65CX800A Panasonic’s current top-of-the-line 4K LED-LCD television Price: $6199 + Excellent picture quality + Excellent OS and TV Anywhere + Excellent 3D - No analogue audio output - Miscalibration at white end of scale - Needs a better ‘smart’ remote The very first 65-inch TV that I ever saw was from Panasonic. It was displaying its massive, bright picture at the same event at which Panasonic was launching Blu-ray. The size of it, back then, was astonishing. And it was, of course, a plasma. Since then Panasonic has left plasma TV technology and moved over to LCD (it has also announced it will release OLED TVs). While some small part of me wants to mourn the disappearance of plasma, there can be no doubt that the change…

SUMMARY Dynaudio Xeo 2 wireless speakers Price: $1999 + Style and substance + Great with Bluetooth + Great for TV sound as well as music + Many options to expand - Fiddly to connect Dynaudio delivered the original Xeo range back in 2012 when wireless was still something of a dirty word, seen as a sacrifice of audio quality to achieve the convenience of relative cable-free operation. Most wireless speakers then were one-box Bluetooth units incapable of holding up their heads against traditional hi-fi. The first Xeos proved that there was another way, as you might hope from a company which makes loudspeakers rising up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those first Xeos used a hub unit to which you connected your sources, with a dedicated CD-quality wireless…

SUMMARY Telstra TV 4200TL media player Price: $109 (or with contract) + Good overall performance + Good value for money + Supports Australian catch-up TV - Operates only at 60Hz - Local media streaming limited by codec and unnecessary audio conversions Telstra TV is a new device released by Telstra to replace the Telstra T-Box, kind of. As such it is designed for customers who subscribe to Telstra for their online services. Some of the streaming content it provides is unmetered, which is to say that it isn’t counted towards your monthly download budget. It is important to understand that Telstra TV is a TV in the same way that Apple TV is. Which is to say, it isn’t a TV at all. It’s a streaming box. Indeed, that unlike…

The staggering growth in the personal audio sector has seen a relentless tsunami of new headphone makers and products bobbing forth, predominantly from the mega factories of China. But Kennerton Audio, the luxury brand of headphone specialist Fischer Audio, hand-makes its Magister headphones in Russia. Before a single note is played you appreciate the craftsmanship here, the luxurious dark headshell of bog oak timber (simmered and hardened for millenia, we are told, at the bottom of the darkest bog pits in Russia). It’s not just the ancient timber that sets this headwear apart from the run-of-the-mill. The overall fit and finish is of the highest standard, while construction reeks of quality, from the Kennerton-embossed stainless steel headband to the large ear cups featuring soft lamb leather cushioning. The Magister’s 42mm…

SUMMARY D-Link Taipan DSL-4320L triband modem-router Price: $579.95 + State-of-the art speeds + QoS prioritisation + Easy set-up; fab looks! - Not inexpensive - Point-to-point glitches If you’re still awaiting that doorknock from the NBN, you most likely don’t have the internet download speeds required for streaming the small but growing samples of 4K video that are out there. But does your network even have the speed internally to pass 4K video files from one connected device to another — NAS drive to TV, say? D-Link’s ‘Taipan’ modem-router, aims to deliver such speeds. It may look more like an alien drone than a networking device, but it touts itself as the first consumer tri-band modem-router — and a quick scan of the current marketplace justifies its claims. Other modem-routers available…

Aside from some luscious new headwear, CES saw Sennheiser unveil “a strategic focus on 3D immersive audio” under the name of AMBEO. Of course we’ve never liked the term ‘3D’ applied to audio — any good hi-fi system is inherently 3D in delivering a sense of depth as well as left-right lateral positioning; the term is usually applied to soundbars and the like trying to fake a sense of surround. But this is Sennheiser, and with AMBEO the company is in fact championing recording and reproduction in true 9.1-channel surround sound. When we queried how this differs from existing cinema-style surround like Dolby Surround and DTS, Sennheiser answered our queries as follows. “AMBEO is a trademark for Sennheiser’s upcoming activities and products in 3D Audio, be it in the pro…

There’s a movement in the US to change the way houses are wired up for electricity. Instead of the standard AC power points, a new organisation called the EMerge alliance wants to see homes wired up with DC outlets instead — and they’re getting strong support from the home theatre industry. So is it a good thing? And could it happen here in Australia? Wiring homes for DC instead of AC is anything but a new idea. In the 1880s and 1890s, at the very dawn of the electrical age, one of the first (and in many ways the most vicious) format wars was under way in America. This battle was between proponents of direct current (DC) electricity and those who wanted to generate and distribute electricity to the public…

AURALiC’s streamers and the Bluesound family of wireless multiroom audio products will be among the first able to stream music using MQA encoding and playback technology which promises “authenticated” high-res audio quality. MQA, developed by Bob Stuart and his team at Meridian and now operating under a separate company MQA Ltd., aims to make possible streaming of authentic high-resolution Studio Master recordings in real time, by employing improved compression rates (designated lossless by MQA) and illuminating a specific MQA LED light on decoding which will guarantee to the listeners that they are enjoying true high-res audio from a file signed off by the original studio. At CES in Las Vegas, Bluesound demonstrated “proof of concept”, equipping one of its players with MQA technology. Of particular delight for current Bluesound customers…

“From the manufacturer side, I’ve never seen this type of caution with a new platform”, says ProSource’s Dave Workman of 4K UltraHD Blu-ray, but Samsung is due to ship in March, as is a surprise early entrant to the field, Philips (which in this context refers to the Philips branding of TV products licensed to Europe-based TP Vision, part of TPV in China). Panasonic has put its DMP-UB900 player back to the second half of 2016. Samsung’s player looks just as you’d expect (top image above), while the Philips BDP7501 looks more like a media player; it will feature built-in support for HDMI 1.4 and 2.0a, and the HEVC and VP9 codecs (so allowing streaming 4K from Netflix, YouTube and others). In the US it will be US$400, with Samsung’s…

ViewSonic used CES to debut the latest in its line of remarkably affordable 1080p DLP projectors using the company’s proprietary SuperColor technology, which aims to offer a wider colour range than conventional DLP projectors through an exclusive 6-segment colour wheel design and dynamic lamp control capabilities, creating a gamma curve delivering around 20% additional brightness over competing designs. The new ViewSonic PJD-7828HDL is a 1920x1080 native design in a sleek white chassis, and delivers 3200 lumens using a 0.65-inch Digital Micromirror Device for imaging. It has ViewSonic’s exclusive PortAll feature — a hidden compartment with an integrated and secure MHL/HDMI port that lets you stream multimedia content from a wireless dongle, or lets you connect to other devices via an HDMI cable. US price was announced at US$999. More info:…

The Internet of Things (IoT) was a key buzzword for CES 2016 in Las Vegas, if in danger of becoming diluted in meaning given such a broad swathe of possible applications for homes, cars, businesses and even city planners. Any connected product can be lumped under IoT, with so many hundreds of product entrants of dubious worth at CES that one wag reporter referred to this burgeoning market as the Internet of Sh*t. But as frequently highlighted in our coverage of smart devices for the home, the big issue is not the abilities of a single product, but the platforms by which they can be connected with others to deliver a simple but useful end experience. So it was interesting to see major TV manufacturers delivering a TV interface for…

Moon by Simaudio has announced a full just-add-speakers system solution in the Neo ACE (the ACE apparently stands for ‘A Complete Experience of musical ecstasy’). It combines Moon’s MiND (that’s Moon intelligent Network Device) module which allows app-driven access and control of three line-level inputs (including a front minijack), a moving-magnet phono preamplifier input, and eight digital inputs including USB, two coaxial and two optical digital inputs, as well as aptX Bluetooth, plus Wi-Fi or Ethernet networking. Inside is a high resolution DAC with DSD decoding up to DSD256 and 32-bit/384kHz PCM, so that as Moon puts it, “Simply hook up a pair of speakers, connect to the internet and you are ready for music, lots of music.” It also boasts the first OLED-type display used on a Moon product…

SUMMARY Sennheiser Orpheus headphone system Price: $75,000 (approx.) + Amazing design + Electrostatic clarity with ear-stroking smoothness - Well, you know... price They’re promoted as “the best headphones in the world”, handcrafted in Germany and priced at $75,000, not that you could yet buy a pair at any price. Indeed Sennheiser Australia wasn’t expecting to receive even a sample of the company’s new Orpheus design in the country until late into 2016 — as we write there are only three units yet in existence at all. One of those was used for demonstrations at CES 2016 in January… though as Sennheiser pointed out, the listening sessions at the end of that queue were measured in seconds, whereas those invited for a carefully curated time-slot in the arty environs of Sydney’s…

SUMMARY Naim Audio Mu-so wireless speaker Price: $1699 + One of the very best one-box wireless speakers + Hi-fi levels of stereo sound + A beautiful thing - Has a listening sweet spot Once upon a time, Naim Audio was a dyed-in-the-wool amplifier-centric hi-fi company that was regarded as something of an industry rogue in terms of ‘going its own way’. But in the last 20 years it has not so much reinvented itself as evolved out of all recognition, raising its core of truly hi-fi amplification to new levels (witness the $200k+ Statement pre-power amplifier) while investing ahead of the pack in streaming audio trends. Its merger with French speaker company Focal brought an injection of design flair to the latest Naim products, and now we find it producing…

SUMMARY aerialBox T2100 FreeviewPlus-certified set-top box... add a hard-drive for PVR functionailty Price: $169 + Fine implementation of FreeviewPlus + Built in Wi-Fi + Good - Single tuner - Longer post-padding times needed - So-so deinterlacing FreeviewPlus is an EPG and catch-up TV interface that we find exceedingly useful when it works smoothly. It now resides in the majority of mid to high-end TVs from HiSense, LG, Samsung, Sony and a few others, but several years on from its announcement, there remain exceedingly few personal video recorders or set-top boxes that carry the logo (see panel above right). This unit, the aerialBox T2100, is one that has Freeview’s imprimatur. Indeed, it’s advertised on Freeview Australia’s own website and in their TV ads. So let’s see FreeviewPlus the way it’s supposed…

SUMMARY Panasonic DMR-BWT955GL Blu-ray recorder/PVR Price: $849 + Extremely flexible + First-class picture + Excellent network functions - Dangerous ‘Guide’ and ‘Function’ keys - Needs gigabit networking - No gapless network music playback Three digital TV tuners. Two terabytes of hard-disk capacity. Blu-ray, DVD and CD playback. Blu-ray and DVD recording. Smart features galore. Wi-Fi networking. We weren’t even sure how to define Panasonic’s DMR-BWT955GL — call it a Blu-ray recorder, as does Panasonic, and you might miss its PVR functions. Call it a PVR, and you’d not realise it was a Blu-ray recorder. So we’ve called it a Blu-ray PVR. On paper at least, it’s hard to see how, if you had this Panasonic, you could ever need or want an additional video source device (short of the soon-to-come…

SUMMARY Stax SR-L700 / SRM-727 II earspeakers / driver Price: $2499 / $3399 + Divine, powerful, rapid reproduction of music + Great bass for panels + High-quality electronics - Plastic pivot point Every hi-fi category has its legendary products, and for headphones few would deny a place in that pantheon to the Stax Lambda Signature ‘earspeakers’ (as Stax still calls its headphones). The Japanese company had, after all, developed the world’s first electrostatic headphones at the dawn of the 1960s; the original Lambda came 20 years later, and the Signature in 1987 — it became a reference product for a decade. This reviewer remembers being once saddled with a test of 70 types of blank tape cassettes for a UK hi-fi title; this potential nightmare of comparative star ratings could…

Today I am typing to you from the UK — I’m not really there, I’ve just instructed NordVPN to shove all my internet doings through a secret pipe and connect to the world via a server somewhere west of Hounslow. Why? So that I can continue some background downloading from the BBC of a fine new series on China by Michael Wood, which would otherwise be denied me (in olden days, my mother would have recorded it and sent it over on VHS video tape). Such are the delights of a VPN, bypassing the geoblocks put on content by providers for perfectly legitimate reasons of licensing — e.g. the BBC sells its shows to the ABC and others, so if we could all just watch them down the wire from…

“Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is promising more than 30 4K Blu-ray releases with HDR during 2016, including ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ With 4K Ultra High Definition now bedded firmly into the consumer conciousness, the flow of TV tech has moved onto High Dynamic Range. We first encountered this some years ago in the early days of Dolby Vision, which introduced the concept of drastically increased luminance more akin to the levels seen in real life than those currently delivered to a TV. As Dolby puts it, our eyes may experience upwards of 20,000 nits of brightness from the sky on a sunny day — yet today’s TVs deliver on the level of a mere 100 nits, and cinema projections only half that. Today’s panels are capable of delivering more, but…

Nightcrawler 2014 – Madman Entertainment John Wick 2014 – Roadshow Entertainment ‘ Nightcrawler’ and ‘John Wick’ are movies about rather extreme individualists. For ‘Nightcrawler’, consider a story in which Mr Bean is articulate. What might he achieve, and how might he achieve it? Jake Gyllenhaal’s Louis Bloom brings to mind Bean’s entrance during the opening credits for each episode: Bean simply drops from the sky. In ‘Nightcrawler’ we are introduced to Bloom as a petty thief. He is as alien as Bean to our sensibilities. If he wants something he will nonchalantly steal something else in order to buy it. But like Bean, he has no history — it’s as though he also has dropped from the sky. He looks utterly inept, but speaks management and self-help platitudes with extreme…