Innehållsförteckning för February - March 2018 från Sound + Image

AVID LISTENING! We have been singing the praises of AVID turntables for some time, but this is the first time that we have had an Acutus SP on our showroom floor. AVID is different to most companies in that they initially set out to make the very best turntable they could, resulting in the Acutus. They then trickled this technology down to less expensive models. Most manufacturers produce an initial offering and then work to improve on that, releasing consecutively more expensive models. The fact that the Acutus turntable – released two decades ago – still forms the basis of AVID’s premium offering (and still remains competitive in a market where the ‘flavour of the month’ seems to change on a weekly basis) bears testament to the fact that they…

CES in Las Vegas remains a major launchpad for the latest TVs and general technology — floors abuzz with big screens and tech. But the hi-fi section of the event, held in the towers of the Venetian Hotel, has continued to decay into a condition that would seem to indicate imminent demise. “I have walked once again through empty corridors of the Venetian Hotel...” our EISA correspondent wrote to us. We feature highlights from the Venetian hi-fi portion of CES in pages overleaf. For the majors, however — LG, Samsung, Sony and others — CES retains its position of hot competition, announcements of the biggest, brightest and best product launches, new tech and new tricks. And this year the excitement was positively heightened by the now-infamous Day 2 power black-out…

SUMMARY Amazon Echo Plus Price: $229 + Reasonable sound + Audio out and Bluetooth out + Zigbee simplifies some smart-home operations - Mono - Limits on abilities in Australia Amazon’s best-sounding smart speaker, with a few smart home tricks up its sleeve, the Echo Plus is looking to win Amazon Music Unlimited a place in Aussie homes. Amazon’s Echo and its Alexa voice assistant became available in the US back in 2015. Plenty of Echos found their way here to Australia unofficially, but it’s only with the recent launch of Amazon Australia that we now have proper retail and support for three Amazon smart speakers in Australia: the small $79 Echo Dot, the standard $149 Echo, and this tall $229 Echo Plus. While all share the same 8cm-diameter footprint, each…

SUMMARY Pioneer N-70AE Price: $2499 + Great conversion & sound + Many paths to music + Great high-res delivery - Couldn’t link built-in Chromecast to Google Home You know a good DAC the second you hear it. Here we were listening to a very good DAC. We had attached a hard-drive of high-res music to the N-70AE during set-up, but our first experience of its output came from an accidental selection of a 320k MP3 of Leonard Cohen’s Going Home, and we froze in outright wonder to hear such a thrillingly rendered Leonard, the gravelly richly-edgy vocal, his interstitial lipsmacks and swallows audible, the simple arrangement and outright divine backing vocals laid out across the soundstage in a flowing carpet of loveliness. Divine divine. We were almost immediately further seduced…

SUMMARY Octave V 80 SE Price: $14,999 + Sensational-sounding output stage + High power for a valve amp + Headphone output - No digital inputs If Octave is not a brand you know, you’re probably not alone — yet it has been making amps under this name since 2000, and for a quarter century before that under a previous generation, having been founded as a transformer winding company in 1968 by the father of the current Executive Director and Chief Designer Andreas Hofmann. Octave’s products are hand-built in the village of Karlsbad in Germany, where each amplifier gets not only quality control but a 48-hour durability soak before leaving the building. It’s not hard to like Mr Hofmann’s designs. A fundamental philosophy is that while valves have that speed advantage…

SUMMARY Dynaudio Music 7 Price: $1599 + Large musical sound + Innovative & versatile app + HDMI socket plays ARC audio from a TV - Only one analogue input Not merely a wireless music system, this is an “intelligent” wireless music system, or so the packaging of the Dynaudio Music series declares it. The large Music 7 certainly presents itself as something different as it emerges from its long box, the unit itself a wide 82cm from angled edge to angled edge, or 74cm across its button-laden brushed aluminium top, which looks from the side like a walkway across some mountain dam with the outward angles of the Music 7 extended out below. This is the largest of four models in Dynaudio’s new range, all of which offer multiple paths…

Colour blindness is the umbrella name for a range of conditions that affect a surprising number of people. Many individuals with moderate forms of this condition remain undiagnosed, and there is currently no treatment for inherited colour blindness. But two recent technologies are offering fresh and surprising possibilities — a new window on the world for those with this condition. In Australia, around one in 12 men and one in 20 women will have some impairment in their ability to distinguish the full range of colours. Worldwide, it is estimated that around 300 million people may have colour vision deficiency (CVD). CVD can prevent people from entering certain professions — pilots and commercial drivers, for example, need to be able to interpret colour correctly to react to everything from traffic…

SUMMARY Apple HomePod Price: $499 + Best smart speaker sound, and by far the most dazzling driver array + Apple HomeKit makes it great for smart home control - Not so connected to third party services - Single account only - Priciest in this group At $499 the HomePod is playing in a rather higher speaker space than any of the others reviewed in this issue. Of course you can pick up the entry-level Google Home Mini or Amazon Echo Dot for a mere $79, and they’ll do you OK for spoken word content. But they offer cringeworthy music playback, especially the Echo Dot. We’ve seen what you get for stepping up to a better Google-equipped device, or the Echo Plus, each with an improvement in sound quality. But they…

It sounds easy enough — use four flashes of 1920 x 1080 to make the UHD resolution of 3840 x 2160. The numbers are easy. But the geometry is less obvious. After significant debate between author and Editor over the possible implementations, we came up with three potential answers. The first is the simplest. The DMD could deliver 1920 x 1080 to four entirely separate quarters of the screen. But this would require moving the entire DMD around significant angles, and might also create borders or potential time-smearing as the separate sections appeared. So unlikely. Second: the pixels on the DMDs might occupy only a quarter of the micromirror area, so they can be shifted half a mirror in each direction to deliver four adjacent pixels. But this would make…

SUMMARY Questyle QP2R Price: $1999 + Super performance + Stylish looks + Supports just about every audio type, even 11.2MHz DSD - Gapless performance could be improved Eighteen months ago we looked at the first portable audio player from Questyle, a prestige Chinese audiophile company. We were very impressed with the sound of the QP1R, although it had a couple of usability issues. Now the QP2R has been released, and not only have all those issues been addressed, its performance has been enhanced by support for even more audio formats. Equipment To recap, this is an iPod Classic-style music player. Unlike many of the competitors, there’s no Android in there (although the specs say its operating system is based on Linux), no Wi-Fi, no apps. It plays music — that’s…

SUMMARY Naim Uniti Atom Price: $3795 + Many ways to play + Choice of control methods + Chromecast, AirPlay and Bluetooth streaming - Only one analogue input UK-based Naim Audio has been famous for its amplification since its first products back in the early 1970s. Three decades later Naim was also quick to recognise the future of file-based and streaming music, and most recently it has enjoyed great success with its Mu-so and Mu-so Qb wireless speakers, acclaimed for both their sound and their styling. Meanwhile that early strength in amplification has been maintained and extended by the extraordinary $325,000 Statement amplifier. Now comes the New Uniti range, which in one way is an update of the company’s previous all-in-one system solutions. But in another way, the new series brings…

For Bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones that are so very clever, their manufacturer, Sony, doesn’t go out of its way to walk you through their operation. In the box is a reference guide, which has no instructions at all, and a set of operating instructions that are entirely pictorial, folding out into a large A2 sheet covered on both sides with pictures and arrows among which you may, once you adjust to picto-language, find the answer to any question you’re pondering. Why, for example, is the word ‘ambient’ marked on the NC button? What are the bunch of test tones in your ears followed by the announcement ‘optimised’ when you hold the NC button for too long? Answers give they none at all, while only a separate slip of paper and a…

Mark M. describes himself as ‘detailorientated’, so when he embarked on a plan to build a dream home theatre in his family’s Western Australia home, he did his research first. “I knew broadly what I wanted in the room design — I wanted it to look like a boutique cinema”, he tells us. “I discussed it with several hi-fi buddies and they all agreed that I needed the dimensions of the home theatre room to be right, to avoid lots of room treatment down the track. So dimensions — on the list. I wanted two rows of seating — point two on the list. And number three, a constant image height screen. List coming together nicely.” Locking down the dimensions for the room at 6.15 × 5 × 3.25m, and…

We first heard from Mark Thomsen in mid-2016, when his new speaker company M8audio was under early development, and we invited him to contact us again when the company was launching to the general public. Which it now is doing — based out of Airlie Beach, Queensland, and debuting with three models named the Sweet Maxwell, the Rocket 5.1 SuperResolution, and The Sub OneTen. You can read full details on these speakers via the M8audio website, and to learn more about the company’s philosophy we threw him a few questions... SOUND+IMAGE: So what differentiates M8audio in what is, after all, a crowded loudspeaker market? MARK THOMSEN: Well there are usually heavy trade-offs between sound, price and aesthetics. Do you want a great sounding speaker, or do you want a speaker…

SPECS Sony LF-S50G $249 Drivers: 1 x 48mm, 1 x 53mm Wi-Fi: 802.11b/g/n/ac (2.4/5GHz) Bluetooth: yes, with NFC pairing Battery: no Dimensions (h x diameter): 162 x 110mm Weight: 750g Contact: Sony Australia Web: www.sony.com.au A last-minute addition to our group, Sony’s $249 smart speaker again uses Google Assistant, which operates identically to those in the Google Home and JBL Link 10, as detailed in the previous article. So what else does Sony bring to the party? You get a strangely vertical digital clock display (you can dim this or turn it off, but we thought it very useful), and as with the JBL Link it adds the ability to play via Bluetooth, here with NFC tap pairing. This is a mains-power device, with no battery for portability, and…

SUMMARY BenQ W1700 Price: $2499 + True Ultra-HD resolution + Excellent value for money + Long lamp life - Cadence issues due to 60 hertz lock The disappointing thing about Ultra High Definition is how long it has taken to become available at a reasonable price in the application for which it provides the greatest benefit — the large front projection screen. Several companies have been nibbling at the edges of affordability, including BenQ with its W11000 Ultra-HD projector. But now it’s jumped right in with the W1700, a projector which claims to deliver true Ultra-HD resolution. The price? Just $2499. Equipment This is a much smaller projector than the W11000 (or the X12000), and it weighs a modest 4.2kg. Inside it achieves the 3840 × 2160 pixel resolution of…

SUMMARY Panasonic DMP-UB400 UHD Blu-ray player Price: $449 + Excellent value for monty + Fine disc performance + Good local network media performance - Network service interface well out of of date In our 2018 Awards we recognised two Ultra High Definition Blu-ray players able to deliver the ‘4K’ resolution of the latest TVs from the new generation of optical disc. The winner over $500 was Oppo’s UDP-203 at $999, and we mentioned also the company’s $2199 “audiophile” UDP-205. Clearly this desirable pair will deliver sensational results. But our winner below $500 — the Panasonic reviewed here — is perhaps the more exciting product. After all, if every UHD Blu-ray player cost $2000, the format wouldn’t have a hope of surviving to become even close to mass market. That was…

SUMMARY Micromega M-150 Price: from $9800 + Many ways to play + Choice of control methods + Chromecast, AirPlay and Bluetooth streaming - Only one analogue input Gotta love the French. As a nation they celebrate their joie de vivre, and in hi-fi there is certainly a soupçon of vive la difference to their creations, a penchant for that je ne sais quoi which lifts their products above the crowd. French loudspeaker companies famously favour the sphere as an acoustic enclosure, and more recently French audio electronics companies have delivered wild levels of innovation, notably Devialet’s sleek Expert amplifiers and rather less sleek (some might say bonkers) Phantom active speakers. From a first glance at the new M-One amplifiers, you might think that Micromega has been watching this development closely…

Roadshow Entertainment MOVIE PICTURE SOUND EXTRAS It was inevitable that the Harry Potter movie series would receive the Ultra-HD Blu-ray treatment. This multi-billion-dollar-box-office series deserves it. So we’re doing a very deep dive into this release of what I (and many others) now consider to be an eight-movie masterpiece. The story The first time I watched the Harry Potter film cycle, I kind of liked the first one — I’m a sucker for origin stories — and then was somewhat ‘meh’ about the next few. Of course, I had watched each of them around the time of its release on disc, which means in dribs and drabs over a decade or so. I appreciated the general excellence of many of the special effects, but I’m not really much of a…