Innehållsförteckning för December 2017 - January 2018 från Sound + Image

For those who know AKG well from its 70 years of making headphones and pro-audio equipment, it may be a surprise to find Harman Australia relaunching the brand here in the consumer space as if it is a relative unknown — even though Samsung’s ownership of Harman has recently seen millions of AKG earbuds delivered in the box with Samsung smartphones. ‘AKG Lifestyle’ is the tag for the latest ranges, offered at retail initially exclusively through Harvey Norman in Australia, as well as via AKG’s website (below). The latest launch focused on two in-ears — the $399.95 N30 with high-res audio capabilities and the $299 N20NC with active noise-cancellation — plus two larger models, the N60NC model, and the remarkable Quincy Jones-edition N90Q. WIRELESS NC AKG’s N60NC Wireless (above right)…

No visible stand. No visible speakers. Just 65 inches of stunning OLED picture. Is Sony’s $7499 KD-65A1 now the world’s best television? We think it is. Our love of OLED screen technology is no secret — LG’s OLEDs stole our 2016 and 2017 TV awards because nothing else matched the blacks and relative wonder of its colours. This year other manufacturers have taken those panels (from LG.Display, the sister company) and added their own processing expertise and other innovations. The results have been stunning. Sony’s A1 scores on both that OLED delivery, and on other innovations that make this TV unique. Where other manufacturers are adding integrated soundbars to their premium TVs, we simply don’t want that — we’ll be adding a high-quality audio system of our own, thank you,…

Soundbar award number 2 for Samsung, here at the higher level of $1999. But for that you get not only the soundbar and a wireless subwoofer, but also wireless rears. And (see right) the soundbar and rears include upfiring drivers as part of the system’s 16-driver complement, and these add four height channels to the usual 5.1-channel surround count. So yes, this is a Dolby Atmos-enabled soundbar system, operating in true 5.1.4. And of course there is simply no comparison between systems that try to fake surround sound from a front-only bar, and a system which includes genuine rear speakers, let alone Atmosenabled ones. The level of immersion in a full Atmos soundtrack was impressive, and the K950 can process any input, even stereo music, to spread it across its…

This is the only repeat winner in this year’s Awards – we were almost ahead of ourselves last year, and since then Krix has shown its ‘wall of sound’ at various events, impressing all who heard and saw it, ourselves included. So double gonging for this innovative and unique modular system for behind-screen speakers — left, centre, right and two subwoofers together as a single front soundstage solution, to be installed behind an acoustically transparent screen. The five speaker modules in each of the two MX systems are the same height and depth, with acoustically absorbent material built in across the front baffle, so it’s ready to go out of the box, making installation and wiring “a breeze” – saving your installer a heap of time (and you potentially a…

The top level Sound+Image AV receiver award has been won for so many years by Yamaha’s Aventage rangetopper that we thought it was really time for a change – and this year we found a top-notch receiver with both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, plenty of power, an award-winning multiroom platform included but also high-performance audio DACs... the package just blew us away. The only problem – it was the latest Yamaha Aventage rangetopper, again. So there’s no helping it, we must give congratulations to Yamaha for the magnificent RX-A3070. We reviewed this in full in our last issue, but to summarise, there are the nine amplifiers, each with 150 watts, and preouts for two more channels, so with an additional stereo amplifier it supports a full 7.2.4 Dolby Atmos speaker…

Sony’s $799 turntable is quite the design understatement — low, black, no massive logo on the mat, a marked lack of bling, an exercise in restraint. But what’s this, front right of the plinth — a high-res audio logo? This is vinyl — analogue, not digital; how is it high-res exactly? The turntable itself is, of course, analogue. And it can be used like any other turntable, with its phono-level output playing through a phono stage or the phono input of an amplifier. But it also has an electronics section within. This includes its own phono stage, so at the rear you can flick a switch to deliver a line-level output instead of phonolevel, making the Sony suitable for any amplifier or speaker with an analogue input. But there’s more…

Oppo’s Blu-ray players have so comprehensively outperformed others that one high-end company was famously caught sticking an Oppo inside its own casing and selling it on. Now comes the company’s Ultra-HD Blu-ray, not merely upping the resolution but bringing a new custom mech, exclusive chipsets and rerouted mainboards that all combine to deliver flawless video and audio from the new breed of silver disc. And being Oppo, there’s also hi-fi audio performance, a useful HDMI input (insert your Chromecast here), plus network access and playback of a wide range of filetypes so the $949 UDP-203 can be a video hub, as well as disc player. (To take things even further, check out Oppo’s new $2199 audiophile UDP-205...) Info: www.oppodigital.com.au JUDGES’ COMMENT “The Blu-ray kings step up to Ultra-HD Blu-ray…

With increasing numbers of headphone arrivals pushing up towards the $2000 price break, one of them proved a particular surprise, as the previous version had won in the Sound+Image Awards last year — but in the category for headphones over $2000. Now the HIFIMAN Edition X has not only been improved in a Version 2, it’s cheaper as well, and that was quite enough to sway our judges here, because these are simply thrilling planar magnetic designs. We had been told the changes were primarily aesthetic, but in fact they’re also ergonomic, with a more versatile headband for fit, thicker and bevelled earpads, a switch to polyester from velour (still with pleather), and entirely new cables — previously braided, the new pair of cables seem rather medical in translucent white,…

The better your home headphones, the more likely they’ll benefit from a high-quality headphone amplifier rather than the relatively cheap circuits behind the headphone sockets on many amplifiers. Burson Audio is a Melbourne-based company internationally renowned for its discrete (as opposed to chip-based) audio op-amps, along with its own range of electronics, among which we were captivated by the $1699 Conductor V2+, which offers USB, coaxial and optical inputs to its Sabre32 -based DAC, which is good to 32-bit/382kHz and DSD256 streaming from USB, and 24-bit/192kHz from coax/optical, plus straight analogue inputs for other sources, all of which can be looped back out through pre-outputs to an amplifier for your speakers, while your headphones enjoy solid control over even the most difficult of headgear, with sensational sound quality from the…

Those long Norwegian nights perhaps encourage Oslo-based Hegel Music Systems into extended R&D and auditioning of its products, so delightful do they sound and how well considered their functionality. This $2995 H80 integrated amplifier enjoys a good dose of trickle-down tech from Hegel’s reference range — hand-matched FET transistor pairs under the delicate touch of the company’s patented error-cancelling SoundEngine output stage, using local and adaptive feed forward technology rather than global feedback, together with a preamp stage straight from one of the company’s separate preamps. The company’s DAC implementations have already gathered wide praise, and here the H80 offers two each of coaxial and optical digital inputs good to 24-bit/192kHz, together with a USB-B computer input, though the Class 1 status of this holds it to 24-bit/96kHz. Two unbalanced…

Marantz is on record as saying that it considers the new PM-10 to be the best integrated amplifier it has ever built which, when you consider the number of integrated amplifiers the company has designed and built over the years, is no mean claim! And we wouldn’t disagree. When you look at the circuitry of the PM-10 it’s essentially three components in a single chassis: a preamplifier and a pair of monobloc power amplifiers. This means the PM-10 is enormously powerful for an integrated amplifier, with Marantz claiming a power output of 200 watts continuous per channel into 8Ω loads and 400-watts continuous per channel into 4Ω loads. The $12,990 PM-10’s ability to deliver these high-power levels from such a relatively compact chassis, without visible heat-sinking, is because Marantz is…

The $22,995 Reference 6 is Audio Research’s flagship single-chassis preamplifier (the company’s Ref 10 offers a two-box solution), and encompasses the company’s latest thinking in circuit topology while also enjoying new industrial design flair courtesy of McIntosh Group’s Livio Cucuzza, whose design teeth were cut at Sonus faber, where design and art combine in that company’s gorgeous (and archetypically Italian) loudspeakers. Cucuzza has maintained the classic Audio Research front-on retro look while balancing contemporary elements, and round the back (see below) fully analogue connectivity includes four line-level inputs via both single-ended RCA and balanced XLR, plus both RCA and XLR also provided for the three output options – two main outputs and a ‘Record Output’ with a processor loop assignable via the menu. An RS-232 D-connector allows control, while trigger…

With vinyl so firmly back on the agenda we’re reintroducing this award after a few years of absence, and we’re recognising a full-width unit introduced a couple of years ago and proving itself a stunner in our review this year. The $2495 Audiant VP3 is highly flexible, fully customisable — 36 rear-mounted DIP switches are accessible to set resistive and capacitive loading to perfectly suit any moving magnet or moving coil cartridge, and to select between normal RIAA and IEC RIAA equalisation profiles. Indeed you can have two separate turntable or arm set-ups connected simultaneously, and can even use its balanced and unbalanced outputs at the same time, since each has a separate buffer stage. It’s an entrancing listen that will knock socks off anything but the highest level of…

Joint winners in this category – two pairs of speakers very close in price, both excelling in performance, but so different in approach that our judges wouldn’t consider dropping either of them to Highly Commended status. So here we recognise the extraordinary talents of GoldenEar’s Triton Two+, RRP $6995. We’ve used the ‘cutaway’ image for the left speaker here to simplify the explanation of the seven drivers used in each Triton Two+ tower – which are otherwise almost completely covered by the black cloth that has long characterised Sandy Gross’ innovative speaker designs. Each speaker has five drivers on the front baffle. The high frequency unit is called a ‘High Velocity Folded Ribbon’ driver by GoldenEar, though it is not what most people would regard as being a ribbon, owing…

A reference among references, the $41,900 ‘800 D3’ model itself was the last to be launched in Bowers & Wilkins 800 Series Diamond range, which continues the 800 Series legacy with a range that was so entirely redesigned from the previous collection that very few components made it through from one version to the next. One of the few survivors was the diamond tweeter dome that gives the 800 Series its current suffix. Diamond has a hardness factor of 10 on the Mohs scale, which means that whereas most other tweeters enter their ‘break-up’ mode well below 50kHz (and sometimes even within the audio band itself!) B&W’s diamond tweeter doesn’t enter its ‘break-up’ mode until nearly 70kHz. The result is that the dome is completely rigid, exhibiting perfect piston-like behaviour…

Describing the aural performance of a processor can be tricky because they are more manipulator than producer. But demonstrate what the Hertz H8 DSP processor is doing by momentarily bypassing it, and you’ll be astounded at the monumental improvement the H8 DSP makes to the listening environment and aural atmosphere of any system, no matter the quality of components. It’s a world of difference. And the ability to set things up via your PC through USB makes things a breeze to use – though you should have an installer do the job if the concepts are entirely alien to you. Processors are ever more important, and Hertz, with sister company Audison, leads the way. Info: www.clarion.com.au JUDGES’ COMMENT “A fine software-controlled incar processor that can take a good system and…

Drawing on one hi-fi classic to deliver a new one — Yamaha’s flagship speaker, the NS-5000, continues the company’s resurgence in stereo with a thrilling speaker that clearly owes its inspiration to the company’s classic NS-1000 and professional monitor version, the NS-1000M, but delivers the smoothest of sounds from a true three-way with internal reinforcing bars and a cabinet using not ebony but Hokkaido birch-laminated plywood, finished in a true piano black gloss (Yamaha, of course, knowing a thing or two about pianos). Zylon replaces the beryllium of old, but Yamaha’s trademark ‘Natural Sound’ remains. Our judges couldn’t let these awards pass without recognising Yamaha for this fine creation. Info: au.yamaha.com JUDGES’ COMMENT “Natural Sound, as Yamaha calls it, from a design inspired by the past, but now made timeless…

This remarkable soundbar solution returns to our Awards in its $2499 Mk2 form, winning in the same category as did the original. This front soundbar and subwoofer system delivers not only Dolby Atmos-enabled sound but DTS:X as well, yet does so without physically-placed rear speakers. We’re no fan of processing-induced surround, but with Yamaha we make an exception, because the YSP-5600 doesn’t phase things up to confuse the brain, instead steering the output of 46 separate drivers (the most ever used in Yamaha’s decade-plus of digital sound projection) to ‘beam’ genuinely discrete channels in the directions required to simulate a proper surround field. The drivers are organised into two groups of six 28mm drivers for the ‘vertical’ sound, and then 32 separate 40mm drivers for the horizontal sound – and…

The new 700 Series from B&W appears elsewhere in our Awards as winners in the hi-fi loudspeaker categories. What happens when you combine them into a 5.1-channel surround package? Wondrous movie delivery, that’s what, from a system of impeccably tonally-matched drivers that not only served to create immense volumes of precisely-placed sounds and effects all around the room, they even achieved a fine sense of real height on Atmos movies – even though we ran them without any height speakers. The subwoofer delivered a super deep underpinning, completely clear thanks to the lack of distortion. And of course with the 703 S2 speakers up front, you can enjoy the thrills of their stereo delivery with music, so that this system is a serious delight for both stereo and surround music.…

The slimline range of receivers from Marantz are regulars in our Awards — for good reason. Their raison d’etre may have been to provide more room-friendly dimensions for those wanting surround sound audio impact without quite the visual dominance of the usual hulking AV receiver design, but they have evolved year after year to offer higher power levels and improved connectivity until now, where this NR1508 delivers incredible value given it’s a dollar under a thou, and less on the street. The latest addition at this level is the inclusion of the HEOS wireless multiroom platform, which combines under neat app control a high degree of network functionality including online music streaming services such as Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, SoundCloud and TuneIn internet radio, while also allowing streaming within the home…

Sometimes you want more. More than even the best integrated home theatre receiver can provide. That ‘more’ might be more power, or more refined power. Or sometimes it might even be no additional power at all. In all these cases, high-end stereo systems show the way – separate the preamplifier from the power amplifier. Then you can choose each of those individually to better fit your needs: the ‘more’ that you want. So the Marantz AV7703 is the home theatre equivalent of that preamplifier. And being for home theatre it has not two, but lots of channels – eleven main channels, and two subwoofer ones. And this being 2017, it does a great deal more than a traditional preamplifier. It is itself a source device, delivering all manner of digital…

The Helix 2 is the second and smaller model to emerge from the tech posse which calls itself the Audio Union, following the Helix 1, a ‘blank slate’ no-holds-barred attempt at furthering the art of analogue playback. The design team is headed by Mark Döhmann, a charming Australian who has become recognised globally as a leading analogue specialist; he runs vinyl masterclasses at audio shows, and for his Helix designs he gathered an all-star team of scientists, engineers and designers from Australia and overseas, specialists across disciplines of materials, mechanics and turntable design, tasked with examining each aspect of turntable design on a mission to reduce noise, then extract and preserve every low-level detail inherent in the grooves. Döhmann’s strategies for the Helix designs involve elimination of electrical noise using…

Fiio X1 2nd gen If people ask us why they would want a dedicated portable music player rather than simply using their phone, our answer is easy — they enable the loading of a wide range of high-res audio file types, they use higher quality DACs and audio stages, and some of them can also double-up for use at home as a DAC as well. You can pay thousands of dollars for these things, but two releases from the same company this year impressed us by delivering excellence at more affordable prices. Especially notable in this regard is the new generation of the Fiio X1, at just $139.90. Unlike many high-res portables, including others from this Chinese company, this is not based around an Android OS, so that in its…

Viewers of live free-to-air TV may be dropping off as we spend ever-more evenings with Netflix and chilling, as they say, but recorded free-to-air is something different, an endless source of free programming through which we can rapid-scan past those pesky adverts. And our winning video recorder this year tops it off by including a Blu-ray player and networking as rather handy bonuses — plus it comes from the company which has so long dominated our video source categories through its longstanding imaging expertise. We congratulate Panasonic again, for the $599 DMR-PWT560. The hard-drive for TV recording could perhaps be bigger than 500GB (some price-competitive rivals are now slipping in a couple of terabytes), though you can have the recorder re-compress the content on recording so that it uses less…

If you happen to be in the market for $5499 headphones, you most likely already have the Focal Utopias on your short-list. As you should — the French hi-fi company has delivered something extraordinary in this premium design (and if you’re still shaking at the price-tag, bear in mind that the full-sized floorstanding speakers which bear the French company’s Utopia name retail somewhere north of quarter of a million dollars, against which the Utopia headphones barely register a dent in your wallet). One of the key cost elements here is the use of diaphragms of pure beryllium, taking full advantage of the element’s properties as a diaphragm material — lightness and strength, together together with a high damping factor, to allow high speed without distortion, yielding incredible detail and dynamics.…

It was our cover star earlier in the year, and held its own against all comers to take our award for Amplifier under $1000 (even though the RRP recently moved up to $1099). NAD, of course, is no stranger to high-value mid-level separates, though in recent years it has delivered some odd-shaped offerings at this level while also consolidating a new reputation for a higher-level of amplifier based on its ‘Direct Digital’ Masters series and more recently combining Direct Digital concepts with the innovative Hypex UcD ‘analogue Class-D’ technology. The result is NAD’s ‘HybridDigital’ amplification, as used in this C 338. In connectivity terms, too, the C 338 offers something special in having Chromecast inside — not full networking abilities, but Chromecast (and Bluetooth as well) give it a thoroughly…

The second Highly Commended in this category comes from a company which everybody knows, but which has been hiding its stereo skills under the proverbial bushel for a while. The $2099 A-70DA should serve as a reminder... though a quick warning on model numbers — don’t confuse the A-70DA with the Pioneer A-70... or the N-70. Both are different things, which we find rather confusing, so we reckon consumers may too. That aside, seek out this top-of-the-line from a range of five new two-channel amplifiers. It retains a ‘classic’ look barely changed since the 1970s when Pioneer amplifiers were the biggest-selling and most popular in the world, evidenced by gold ol’ rotary bass, treble and balance controls, and a ‘loudness’ control, if you, er, like that kind of thing. What…

Italians are famous for their idiosyncratic designs, and some of the design choices on the Audio Analogue Maestro Anniversary are definitely idiosyncratic — notably a ‘hard-to-turn’ volume control (though hey, you also get a classy remote). Besides, these are idiosyncrasies you learn to love, because the $12,900 Maestro is a magnificent amplifier in every sense of the word, a ‘classic’ Class-AB design using a linear power supply equipped with transformers and large storage capacitance. Our photograph does not really give a sense of the size and scale – it’s huge! – 45cm wide and 55cm deep, and weighing 31kg. The power stages use four pairs of transistors per channel in an inverted cascode arrangement that eschews global feedback and is held stable by d.c. servo circuitry. The Maestro has five…

In a category usually stocked with monobloc power amplifiers, both winners on this page instead offer stereo amplification in a single box – though with very different approaches to aesthetics! You can’t get more purposeful than Canada’s Bryston amplifiers, all black with etched naming rights on the front, while round the back you get the choice of balanced or unbalanced inputs, and also usefully the ability to switch between two gain settings of 23dB or a higher 29dB, to allow better preamplifier matching. In sheer wattage the 4B³ (pronounced ‘4B cubed’) is rated to serve 300W/ch into eight ohms, 500W/ch into four ohms, or if you bridge this stereo power amplifier into mono you can expect a walloping 900W. The 4B³’s input and filtering stages are based on Bryston’s patented…

The Torus AVR2 (the AVR stands for Automatic Voltage Regulator) is a power conditioner that removes voltage spikes and high-frequency noise from the mains power supply, stabilises the mains voltage so there are fewer fluctuations, and keeps that voltage to within ±10 volts here in Australia, with our nominally 240V supply, preventing voltage surges and brownouts. And in the event that the mains voltage exceeds 262 volts, or falls below 170 volts, the Torus AVR2 automatically disconnects your hi-fi components from the mains power supply to protect them. And that last feature alone could see the AVR2 paying for itself when saving a high-end system. It’s also rich with custom control features and sequencing options, and it comes with varying outlet numbers and current levels; the five-outlet AVR2 we reviewed…

The second joint winner in this category is a speaker that has already taken a few trophies back to its company HQ and its design team at Fink Consulting – not to mention non-crystal accolades such as Ken Ishiwata choosing the Concept 500s as the partnering speakers with which to demonstrate the Marantz 10 Series (see p68). Their beauty starts at the skin, from the curving aluminium bases to the rounding of all edges, and such a distinctive colour scheme, whether the combination of deep high-gloss blackness transitioning to a high-gloss rosewood wood-grain, as shown below, or the gloss white/pale oak combo shown on the right. The cabinets beneath use Q Acoustics’ ‘gelcore’ cabinet construction, which is mostly comprised of three layers of MDF, with non-setting ‘gel’ sandwiched between the…

The unusual waveguide here, which our reviewer was unkindly enough to call “the elephant in the room”, follows directly from acoustic principles of speaker design where, once you have delivered as linear a frequency response as possible, the next biggest improvement can come from controlling the lateral dispersion pattern of your drivers. Doing so (Krix ran nearly 100 computer simulations before prototyping six waveguides for listening trials) has here delivered an standmount speaker capable of outstanding imaging and delicious hi-fi performance. A Revelator tweeter built specifically for Krix by ScanSpeak joins a 165mm coated wood-fibre cone driven by a 38mm-diameter voice coil and a neodymium-iron-boron magnet much larger than one would expect on a driver of this diameter, mounted on a cast aluminium basket in a bass reflex design, the…

The functionality of incar head units has been transformed by the tighter integration of smartphones – first with the longstanding Bluetooth hands-free connection for phone calls and music streaming, but more recently through the processing power delivered through the Apple CarPlay and Android Auto platforms, bringing all manner of app right to the dash. On this $1099 Alpine iLX-107, the focus is almost entirely CarPlay – and in a first, enabling this to be performed wirelessly, where previously a wired connection was required. That’s a huge upgrade in convenience, since first-time set-up is as easy as pairing the wireless Apple CarPlay unit from your iPhone, or connecting the Lightning cable just for one time, after which the iLX-107 will automatically connect to the most frequently paired iPhone each time the…

The dimensions of the oval speaker cones here give their name to this speaker set from Alpine’s X Series — they’re rated at 9 inches by 6 inches (traditionally measured from their screw holes, not the size of the cone itself). And the ‘C’ stands for component — which is to say there’s a tweeter, but instead of being suspended in front of the cone of the larger driver, it’s separate, and so can be placed somewhere on the dashboard. As always, you’re going to get more treble if the tweeter is facing you, the listener, than if it’s firing into your calf from the door or under the dash. The tweeter is a 25mm unit with a carbon graphite dome and neodymium magnet, in its own enclosure, standing 34mm…

What we particularly like in this category is the kind of box that can easily upgrade an existing hi-fi to supply all the joys of streaming services and networked music. And given that our winning multiroom system for a couple of years has been Yamaha’s MusicCast, we’ve long thought there’s been a bit of a gap in Yamaha’s eco-system for just such a ‘squirter’, as we sometimes call them. Now it arrives, with the WXAD-10, nothing much to look at — not ugly, just fairly plain, and curiously with a few connection buttons positioned on the bottom. But then for most of its life it’ll be sitting away in a corner next to your hi-fi blinking quietly to itself, attached to the inputs of your hi-fi from one of its…

We have seen an unprecedented number of price reductions during the last month. This has always been a competitive industry, however we don’t recall a period during this time when good quality audio has been more affordable. Without doubt the most exciting of these reductions are the new prices for Krell, showing roughly a 15% reduction across the board. For example the Digital Vanguard integrated amplifier has come down from $9,995 to $8,495. This is one of the best-sounding integrated amplifiers under $10,000 on the Australian market. It is rated at 200watts/ channel, and features a Class ‘A’ preamplifier. It is one of only a handful of amplifiers on the market that doubles it power in to a 4 ohm load, something sadly overlooked by many in the industry. The…

Sony’s 4K projectors are native 4K and UHD, where lesser rivals are using clever but nonnative pixel-shifting methods to deliver the full pixel count. Until now the Sony option has been expensive, and the VW550ES we’re recognising here has an RRP of $23,799, though you’ll find better pricing available. At IFA in Berlin this year, Sony announced a trio of new models which will bring its native 4K down to as low as $7999 for the VPL-VW260E – but these haven’t reached us yet, and we can’t give Awards to products we haven’t reviewed. So this higher model gets the nod here, and if you see Sony’s true 4K projection in action, you’ll understand why – this is class-leading performance capable of filling the largest of home cinema screens with…

We have watched Zappiti’s collection of movie players evolve from full-HD to Ultra High-Definition and now to delivery of High Dynamic Range too, all the while maintaining their effortless and attractive user interface which rivals the world’s most expensive server systems, yet comes together at a fraction of their price (the mid-level 4K HDR player/server is $550). They can be used with internal hard drives to store and serve both movies and music, and Zappiti also has available multi-bay NAS drives to provide enormous storage capacities for media which can then be served all around the home, and which can also come with a disc drive to rip your DVDs and Blu-ray straight to storage. For movie collectors, or for anyone wanting to clear their shelves of movie boxes and…

The latest evolution of Denon’s mid-tier home theatre receivers also gains from the inclusion of the company’s HEOS wireless multiroom platform, bringing streaming online and networked music galore (see the previous Marantz award-winner on p37), while underneath a lot of established technology from preceding models has bedded in, supplemented by the very latest surround standards from DTS. Increasing the budget to the $1599 price-tag here brings both more channels of amplification, and increased versatility. So the AVR-X2400H delivers seven channels of 95 watts each, all capable of supporting four-ohm loudspeakers. The extra two channels allow either a ground-based 7.1-channel surround, or 5.1 channels on the floor plus two height channels to deliver the latest Dolby Atmos/Dolby Surround and DTS:X capabilities. (We find that two height channels can be almost as…

We might start here by mentioning something we should emphasise more often – that you shouldn’t just throw all our award-winners together in a system. For example, while this Yamaha multichannel power amplifier would pair just fine with the preamplifier opposite, Yamaha would be quick to point out the complementarities that might suggest instead pairing it with Yamaha’s own CX-A5100, with which, indeed, we reviewed it. Synergy is less an issue than back in the early days of hi-fi when quirky companies frequently went their own way, but we’d still point you at dealer advice to get a balanced system at this level. That said, the $3899 MX-A5000’s 11 channels of power can be fed from any preamplifier of your choice, offering both unbalanced RCA and balanced XLR inputs; the…

Ultra-HD Blu-ray launched properly only last year, yet already we have top-quality players at impressive prices. The RRP of this middle-tier spinner is $549, but it’s in stores well below the $500 price break of our award here, with the longstanding imaging expertise of Panasonic delivering the new paradigm of High Dynamic Range and wider colour gamut with the full glory they deserve — flawless, on both the audio and video fronts. If you want better than what this player delivers with today’s Ultra-HD discs, you’ll have to lobby for better movie making! Of course you also get top-notch replay of standard Blu-ray as well, plus an unexpected bonus (which is also true of the even cheaper UB300 model) — extraordinary upscaling of DVDs, limited of course by their much…

As you may note from our other headphone categories, there are few limits to what you can spend on headwear these days, but our favourite discoveries are always those that hit the sonic hieights without scaling the price ladder too far. 1MORE is a company that is building a solid reputation for its in-ear designs, but since Sound+Image doesn’t review in-ears (for various reasons), we requested these over-ears designs — and were thrilled by their combination of unusual design and delightful performance. For starters they use multiple drivers for each ear (a trait inherirted from the company’s in-ears) — an active 40mm aerospace-grade titanium-composite driver, and a piezo ceramic tweeter, plus a passive radiator, this last described as a “bass reflex unit”. The three drivers appear to be configured in…

Regular readers will know we’ve been moaning all year about various noise-cancelling headphones on which you can’t turn the noise-cancelling off (duh!) — so we were delighted to find that B&W’s new Bluetooth noise-cancellers are not only the company’s best-sounding headphones to date, they also tailor the level of noise-cancelling for different environments, while the app that accompanies them isn’t one to bugger up the sound with dozens of terrible EQ options, rather it lets you further tweak the NC (including turning it off) and also personalise the remarkably effective ‘smart’ options, such as auto-pausing your phone’s playback if you lift one earcup to talk with someone. A final pleasure came from the price of $549.95 — we were really expecting rather more. An easy win here. Info: www.bowers-wilkins.com JUDGES’…

Our winner here comes from a company that pioneered USB-equipped amplifiers, and which celebrated its recent tenth anniversary by moving production from China to Canada, not the other way around. It’s Peachtree Audio, which has stepped up the power ratings with its series of Peachtree 2.0 amplifiers, much larger and beefier than the originals, here an impressively-equipped sonic delight in the $2599 Peachtree Audio nova150 — the raised numerals indicating the power available: 150W per channel into eight ohms from its ICEpower modules, 250W into four ohms, and capable of driving anything down to two ohms. (These figures use the AES17 standards for measurement of digital audio equipment, which allow up to 1% THD+N, high by traditional hi-fi standards.) There are five digital inputs, two being optical, one coaxial, one…

Our winner in this price break for amplifiers is a beautifully-built $4990 Italian-made integrated, which has all the features and facilities you’re likely to want in an integrated amplifier, plus the option to incorporate a very reasonably-priced DAC addition and/ or an equally reasonably-priced MM/MC phono stage any time you want, while sonically it marries the best attributes of valves with the best attributes of solid state to deliver sound quality that will have you smiling with pleasure with every album you play… which is likely why they put such a big ‘smile’ on the front panel. Audio Flight is from Italy, where 20 years ago it released its first product, and its first integrated amplifier, the Flight One, four years later. This Flight Three S, like those very first…

Our second highly commended will thrill those who seek the joy of valves but wonder about the usual low wattage available – this is rated at a full 130W, thanks to the heady power levels of the KT150 valves (bias setting here is wonderfully simplified and safe); indeed Octave says this power amplifier enjoys excellent load stability so that “neither the impedance nor the efficiency of the partnering loudspeakers will affect the V 80 SE’s sound”. And for use with really tricky speakers, Octave offers two levels of ‘Black Box’ to boost capacitive reserves while adding $1699 or $3999 to the V 80 SE’s $14,999 price-tag. We tried the pricier of those two, but it simply wasn’t needed for our already relatively friendly reference speakers, the bare V 80 SE…

This $33,995 Progression Stereo Power amplifier matches the $33,995 Progression Preamplifier. It uses what the great Dan D’Agostino calls ‘Super Rail’ circuitry along with bridged circuit topology (D’Agostino prefers ‘balanced’ rather than ‘bridged’), the latter marking a major difference between this and D’Agostino’s top-line Momentum power amplifier, as the Momentum uses a standard (unbalanced) output stage despite being more powerful than the Progression Stereo. Not that the Progression is anything less than loaded, the output stage using 24 bipolar output transistors per channel, which Dan D’Agostino says deliver 300 watts into eight-ohm loads, 600 watts into four ohms and 1200 watts into two-ohm loads. The way in which the D’Agostino Progression proved able to reproduce sound was transformative, infusing one’s soul with wonder. It could rock out with the best…

It may share its digits with a bloomin’ great Boeing, but the Bowers & Wilkins 707 is the smallest of the company’s new 700 Series, just 28cm high (and about the same in depth with grilles and cables taken into consideration), available in B&W shiny white, shiny black gloss, or a stylish matt rosenut finish. Like the rest of the series, they have a 30-micron-thick aluminium-dome tweeter which has been stiffened with a layer of carbon deposited by vapour deposition process before bonding to a second section, a 300-micron-thick carbon ring profiled to match the main dome. And they have the 13cm Continuum midrange driver, here pressed into duty as a mid-bass woofer. Despite lacking the bass units of their brethren floorstanders, their frequency range is quoted from 50Hz to…

Two years in a row now, Kenwood has taken the higher of our head unit awards. And this year’s winner is deliberately designed to be king of receivers, capable of handling everything in audio and visual terms, its feature count nothing short of incredible, an amazing amount of technology packed into a double-DIN chassis. It’s a magnificent marriage of ability, flexibility – and sheer out-and-out performance. The disc mechanism remains a key element of an all-rounder, floating via a suspension arrangement able to prevent all but the nastiest shocks impacting operations. In addition to CD, VCD and DVD there’s compatibility with most common music and video file-types (for video MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV, H.264, MKV; for still images JPEG, BMP, PNG). Round the back are analogue and digital inputs including…

From the flagship Hex series of the Los Angeles-based Diamond Audio, the HX600.4 amplifier proves to be a bright and shiny stunner, successfully blending impressive power, efficiency and ancillary figures with a remarkably and usefully small footprint – and coming in at the modest asking price of $949. This is another amplifier delivering its power-per-pound wonders through the use of Class-D amplification, the HX600.4 rated as delivering 160 watts continuously from each of its four satellite channels when measured at 4 ohms, rising to 250 watts when loaded down to 2 ohms, while running the channels bridged will return you a mammoth 500 watts continuously for each pair at 4 ohms. And impressively it does this with a total harmonic distortion of just 0.06 percent – hi-fi level performance. When…

This award has in the past gone to HEOS, and to Yamaha’s MusicCast, both fine wireless multiroom platforms still expanding their ecosystems and abilities. But we have always hoped that a third-party system might take hold, to build a bridge between the different systems, or at least to allow interoperability between a wider range of brands. For a while it looked as if that might be DTS Play-Fi. However, another system has taken over by stealth in the last year, and looks set to positively explode this space wide open — Chromecast. We are not talking the physical devices called Chromecasts, the video and audio devices you plug in and stream to. We’re talking the platform which is increasingly appearing inside hi-fi and video devices by other manufacturers. In these…

It’s the award our readers decide — our most read or downloaded review on AVHub from the last 12 months. The top five this year included feature articles on Sony’s LDAC Bluetooth codec and on FireConnect by BlackFire, while the most popular online reviews came from Sennheiser, Yamaha, Dynaudio and Alpine. But the list was topped by Humax’s 4tune PVR (HMS-1000T) — several years in the market now, indeed a 2015 Sound+Image award-winner for its extensive recording capabilities and general all-round smartness, clearly still pulling in interest. You can see Humax’s latest innovative product on p28, the little H3 Espresso which pairs with yet another Sound+ Image award-winner, the 2tune PVR. And now a bonus ‘Most Downloaded’ award. www.humaxdigital.com/au SPECIAL AWARDS Lifetime Achievement Award John Martin…