Innehållsförteckning för October - November 2018 från Sound + Image

So Sharp had its 8K monitor at IFA 2018, which launched in Europe earlier in the year (pictured with Miss IFA above). Samsung had the Q900R QLED 8K TV range (above and right), promising it will be on sale “within weeks”, in four sizes from 65-inch to 85-inch (and the bigger the better with 8K). Toshiba had an 8K model at IFA as a concept, but Tosh Europe is not the same as Tosh Australia is not the same as Tosh America, so we needn’t worry about that one (see p9 for Tosh Australia’s latest model). TCL is another company promising an actual launch, aiming for April 2019 with an 8K QLED model branded to the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019. This seems an odd way to break into 8K,…

We were pleased to join all our EISA siblings for the Awards Gala which took place in Berlin during IFA 2018 — we have highlighted our Editor among the group shot above. In addition to the presentation of all this year’s awards (see last issue, or avhub.com.au/eisa18), EISA president Paul Miller highlighted the global expansion of EISA to include the US, Canada, Japan, China and, of course, Australia, and the resultant renaming of the organisation, changing ‘European’ to ‘Expert’, as in the new logo shown left. EISA is comprised of Expert Groups for AV Display, AV Sound, Hi-Fi, Mobile, and Photography, making the new name entirely appropriate. A good time was, we think, had by all.…

It’s been a long time coming, but the most impressive demo we heard at IFA 2018 came from Sennheiser’s AMBEO soundbar . This leverages the company’s AMBEO multichannel/VR concept in a soundbar which has no separate subwoofer, using six 4-inch woofers and seven tweeters, including two up and two sideways for 5.1.4-channel delivery. The dem played Sennheiser’s own AMBEO recordings using an Atmos codec, plus a gobsmacking sound delivery of a soccer match recorded with Sennheiser’s 3D mikes, and a standard stereo track ‘upscaled’ to AMBEO very effectively. All were fine recordings to be sure, so it’ll be interesting how it sounds with real-world material. The word at IFA was to expect an early 2019 launch “in selected markets”, priced somewhere between 2000 and 2500 Euros. Not…

We’d rather hoped the ‘Skybar’ might be a place for sipping cocktails while looking down on Darling Harbour, but TDG Audio’s Skybar is almost as exciting in being a new idea claimed as a world-first — an in-ceiling (or in-wall) soundbar, with associated satellite speakers. A full five or seven-channel surround system can be delivered by just three discrete boxes — one Skybar LCR and two Skybar Satellites. The $1599 Skybar LCR uses two 76mm heavy-duty drivers for each channel, so six in all, along with an additional 25mm titanium-dome pivoting tweeter to support dialogue from the centre channel. A 15-degree angled baffle directs sound towards the audience when mounted in-ceiling, or left/right towards the audience when mounted in-wall. The Skybar Satellite features two front-firing 76mm full-range drivers and one…

Klipsch has launched a new Reference Premiere series of speakers, and quite the collection of high-efficiency horn-happy stereo and home cinema speakers it is — a total of 16 new models, including the introduction of Atmos-enabled height speakers to the range. Klipsch’s Michael Buratto (below) was on hand at the Sydney launch to demonstrate the new range, which has been expanded to 16 models, with the iconic Klipsch Tractrix horn technology of course in evidence for both tweeter loading and in the port designs. “We’ve taken the successful foundation of our best-selling speakers and enhanced them to create the hands-down, best-sounding premium speakers on the planet at these price points,” said Buratto, who also gave a recap on Klipsch’s 70+ years in audio, its claim to be the world’s oldest…

Those who watch the annual refresh of AV receivers will know how incremental the changes can be — a new format here, improved calibration there. But the last few years have seen the increasing acceptance of immersive sound formats, and that has brought the need for more amplifier channels able to handle the new height channels. In the Denon review this issue we mention the AVR-X8500H which offers 13 channels, while here we have no lesser brand than Marantz delivering a full 11 channels, so able to provide all you need for 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos or DTS:X sound from a single box. Equipment And they are 11 very respectable channels. Each is rated at 140 watts output, full audio bandwidth into eight ohms at just 0.05% THD, two channels driven.…

The Dirac room calibration used here is a bit more complicated than the normal systems on AV receivers, because you have to run it on a computer — though either Windows or Mac is fine. You can not to use Dirac at all, and just set the distances and levels manually, but Dirac tunes the system for room and speaker anomalies — in part — and also adjusts phasing to ensure a coherent wave front. It also sets levels and time delays. The measurement microphone plugs into a USB audio device, and you plug that into one of the spare USB sockets on the hub plugged into the receiver. You download the Dirac Live LE for NAD software from the NAD website and install it (I had to insist to…

Yamaha’s MusicCast platform has proven one of the most successful at connecting together multiple devices in different rooms for multiroom music playback. With its receiver ranges this year, the company has extended the system to the movies, connecting together devices in the same room, to enable the AV receivers to connect with wireless speakers. Other multiroom systems, including Sonos and HEOS, have previously allowed the use of their wireless speakers to supplement the relevant front soundbar product, but Yamaha’s implementation of ‘MusicCast Surround’ with proper AV receivers will allow far more input flexibility, including full HDMI switching, a higher calibre of surround processing and a wider choice of front speaker solutions. For the rear speakers and subwoofers, Yamaha has released three new wireless speakers, the first to carry the ‘MusicCast’…

You might call it a home cinema, you might call it a media room. It’s certainly a unique space — combining two projection systems on the one screen — and also a successful one. But the project, part of a larger home renovation, was not without its challenges. “The primary goal was the cinema,” the owner tells Sound+Image. “I wanted a great cinema experience from the projector and the screen, and obviously on the audio side of things as well. But a secondary benefit was what I call an ‘art wall’ — something I thought would really enhance the space, if it was technically possible.” The idea of the ‘art wall’ was to deliver a full seven-metre-wide feature wall that spanned the entire width of the room from floor to…

Well, in one respect, this is rather dull. Sony’s A1 OLED last year was a spectacular television, a design statement, a slab of OLED leaning back on a giant picture-frame support. We loved it, gave it our Best Television of the Year award. This A8F — it looks like any other TV, or we should say like any other premium TV, being nice and low, less than a centimetre off the benchtop, its panel just 5mm thick, with another 85mm or so of electronics on the back. But the design itself is not a ‘wow’. Of course, Sony has done this purposely. The A1 has been called a ‘love-it-or-hate-it’ design. That lean-back stance made positioning impossible in many homes. This one can go anywhere, and can more easily wallmount. So…

A Swedish headphone reviewer, an American headphone reviewer and an Australian headphone reviewer walk into a bar. As the drinks evolve into dinner, talk turns, unsurprisingly, to headphones. “If you could have only one pair of headphones,” asks the charmingly elfin American reviewer, “what would it be?” All three consider carefully, before the Australian (your writer here) suggests the M4U 2, made by Canada’s PSB Speakers. “Yes!”, concur the Swede and American, who offer no further advance on this suggestion. So that’s quite the international recommendation. But times have moved on. The M4U 2 was — and still is, as it’s still available — a cabled headphone that can play in a passive mode, or with active circuits engaged, and thirdly actively with noise cancelling. With the market now firmly…

If your home is a wireless disaster area, with streaming video reduced to a trickle, then it might be time to open the floodgates with a mesh Wi-Fi network. Just because your home Wi-Fi network is good enough for checking your email and surfing the web, that doesn’t mean it’s up to the task of reliably streaming music and video around your home. Great Wi-Fi isn’t just about speed, it’s about dependability — which means eliminating black spots, dropouts and buffering in every corner of your home. What is mesh Wi-Fi? Rather than relying on a single Wi-Fi base station at one end of your house, a mesh Wi-Fi network spreads several base stations around your home to offer blanket coverage. The base stations talk to each other wirelessly to…

INFORMATION, EVENTS & ENTERTAINMENT ALL TIMES ON DISPLAY AT SHOW RECEPTION MARY WEBB LIVE PERFORMANCES In a Show Exclusive, songwriter-guitarist Mary Webb will be appearing live in the CHAPEL SUITE each day of the Australian Hi Fi & AV Show, performing songs from her latest album ‘Love Like Planets’. Mary is a shining light in Adelaide’s folk scene, combining her vocal delights with catchy, offbeat guitar picking and a swig of poetry. With ties to both Adelaide and Melbourne, Mary has spent much of the past few years travelling between the two, with her latest album Love Like Planets proving a spectacular body of work that explores the complexities of modern relationships and personal rediscovery. PLUS The making of ‘Love Like Planets’ After each Mary Webb concert, producer Mike Kirkham…

As this resurgence of vinyl continues, old records are being pulled out of storage and put on the platter only to cake up the stylus with years of gunk and mould. The Kirmuss KA-RCM-01 record cleaner is fast being accepted as an essential addition to any serious vinyl collection, and Len Wallis Audio has been appointed the exclusive retail outlet in NSW. Ultrasonic cleaning technology has proven to be one of the most effective forms of restoring a record to its best possible performance. The Kirmuss has three strategically located ultrasonic generators in the base of a large water basin, generating three ultrasonic waves oscillating at 35kHz. This creates ‘cavitation’; microscopically small bubbles which burst on contact with the record. This collapsing action dislodges then pushes the contaminants away from…

Arcam’s reputation was built on its amplifiers, and particularly this breed of high-quality midrange integrated amplifier. They remain instantly recognisable in this new HDA range, which was previewed back at CES in January as a replacement for the current A19 and A29 integrated amplifiers, and is now available in Australia. The range has had a pleasing spruce-up to update the aesthetics, alongside the continuity required for brand recognition. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, there has been significant change, this new range coming a year after the company’s acquisition by Harman, itself only then recently acquired by Samsung, and under Harman the UK-based Arcam brand sits alongside the likes of Mark Levinson, Revel, and JBL Synthesis. Not that there’s a need here to mourn the international ownership of another classic UK brand,…

One corner of TCL’s large hall had this 4000-nit display in operation. Nits are a luminance unit quaintly defined in terms of candlelight — your average wax candle produces one candela of light (candela is an SI unit) and your nits are equal to one candela per square meter. They’ve slipped into consumer tech parlance in recent years because of High Dynamic Range in Ultra High Definition TV signals — movies are mastered for HDR up to a certain number of nits, and this is then scaled down (intelligently, using a transfer function) to match the available nits from your particular TV. Not many TVs are advertising their nit levels, because most of them are pretty low, in the hundreds, with a few higher-end LCDs pushing over the 1000. Dolby…

At the IFA booth for the high-end desktop/portable specialist iFi audio, we enjoyed a briefing from their ebullient Head of R&D Thorsten Loesch (pictured), who was on hand to show us not only his fine hat, but also the early version of an all-in-one player, currently under the codename Project Glastonbury (the unit he is patting in the photo). The specs for this bamboo-encased powerhouse of connected audio are remarkable — 2 × 150W of power, able to play from Wi-Fi, AirPlay, USB, microSD, optical, RCA and Ethernet connections, up to 32-bit 192kHz (24-bit from some sources) and using a single clock throughout its processing running at a blistering 1.536MHz. One neat innovation is the inclusion of a set of ultrasonic sensors which automatically measure distances to rear and side…

Among the hundred-odd new products on show at the large but private-invite-only Harman complex at the IFA showgrounds, we reckon the one most likely to get attention quickly is the JBL Link View. This takes JBL’s successful Link product series of wireless Google speakers to another level, adding an eight-inch touchscreen and 5-megapixel front-facing camera. While the Link View doesn’t have a video Chromecast inside, it does have an audio Chromecast, and can access YouTube, with Voice Assistant onboard which can accept commands, make Google Duo calls and interact with other smart home Google-compatible products — for example we were shown how it could be used to monitor security cameras. It sounded pretty good too, from the limited demo we enjoyed. Originally shown at CES 2018, the JBL Link View…

Beyerdynamic unveiled a new corporate identity and six new product launches at IFA 2018, along with an interesting take on audio personalisation, called MOSAYC, which turned out to leverage the same Mimi Defined technology which Loewe is installing into its TVs. The dynamic CEO Edgar van Velzen (on the right above) even switched shirts mid-presentation at IFA 2018 to proudly display the new ‘y’ emblem which accompanies the modernised beyerdynamic logo, along with a host of brand-positioning statements and slogans which define a new era for the consumer market. But the new focus won’t neglect the company’s solid position within the professional market, said van Velzen, noting the company is now 94 years old, or young, as he said. Indeed part of the new approach was prompted by professional users…

While Alexa’s late arrival in Australia has given Google Voice Assistant the lead among consumer smart speakers here, the dominance of Alexa in the US market has given it pole position as the voice assistant of choice for smart-home solutions. This was evident at the recent Integrate Expo in Darling Harbour, Sydney. “Alexa is insane,” enthused Trevor Rooney from Crestron, whose new Pyng 2 platform aims to bring Crestron to a new level of consumer, while also incorporating Alexa’s new Crestron skills set. “The concept of being able to talk to Alexa and tell it, ‘Alexa it’s time for bed’ or ‘Alexa, good morning’ and have a number of things happen — lights all up, blinds up, or halfway, whatever you want. And it doesn’t need an integrator to do…

How much of an AV receiver do you need? If you’re shopping for one, it’s a real and fundamental question, together with your price level. Clearly we’d all love to have the very top-of-the-line stuff, like Denon’s delicious AVC-X8500H home theatre amplifier which we reviewed recently, and which I was using until a few weeks ago, or the Marantz and Yamaha range-toppers also featured in this issue. But the receiver sitting at the centre of my home theatre system as I write this is this relatively modest Denon AVR-X2500H. Price? Just a little more than one quarter of the cost of the AVC-X8500H. And you know what? I’m finding it strangely satisfying. Equipment That’s partly because Denon has been quite clever in recent years at choosing the most, well, ‘relevant’…

It looks like Astell&Kern is going affordable. Well, a little bit anyway. Rather than a portable media player priced at $5000+, this Astell&Kern SR15 is available in Australia for $999. Its full name is the ‘A&norma SR15’, presumably to contrast it more completely with the more expensive A&futura SE100. Equipment The A&norma SR15 is a smallish (10cm long) high-resolution music player. It has 64GB of storage built in, and supports a single SD card of up to 400GB for additional storage. It has a 3.5mm stereo output for regular headphones, and a 4-pole 2.5mm output for balanced headphones. Also built-in is Bluetooth, with support for the relatively high quality aptX HD codec (this is backwards-compatible with headphones which support only aptX) and Wi-Fi for things like firmware updates, and music…

Noise-cancelling (NC) and Bluetooth together of course deliver the ultimate in convenience — hands-free without cables, noise-free by cunning cancellation of lower frequencies. Yet it’s notoriously hard to achieve with distinction. As we’ve seen on many wireless NC designs, problems come when deciding how to ‘voice’ the headphones. Do you create the best possible cabled sound and then hope Bluetooth won’t muck it up too much? Or do you assume most people will use Bluetooth, voice it for that and let the cabled performance suffer? Or a compromise? Noise-cancelling adds a third effect on the sound, either cabled or wireless, so the designers are left seeking a solution between four separate set of sonics. Audio-Technica certainly has a headstart in delivering cabled headphone sound, having done so reliably for decades.…

The CEDIA Awards announcements drew a strong crowd for the evening event during Integrate Expo in Sydney, enhanced perhaps by the choice of venue, Beer Deluxe at King St Wharf! We brought you details of all the finalists last issue, so with a bit of cross-referencing we need only here list and congratulate the winners of this Asia-Pacific leg of the global CEDIA Awards. The winners here go on to the global event to be held later this year in London, UK. HOME CINEMAS Best Home Cinema Level I: A$70,000 & under Electronic Living electronicliving.com.au Best Home Cinema Level III: A$200k–A$580k Zene Private Theater Beijing, China INTEGRATED HOMES Best Integrated Home Level I: A$200,000 & under Electronic Living electronicliving.com.au Best Integrated Home Level II: A$200k-A$400k Argus…

Sometimes it’s troubling to revisit a loved movie from the past. Especially one that originally came out when you were yourself much younger, and when you first saw it close to its release. A competent movie will strike all the right cultural notes... for its time. But then things move on and too often they can become cringe-worthy. But not so with Die Hard. That’s why they keep on making sequels, I suppose, and probably will until Bruce Willis is too decrepit to move. The most recent one was five years ago, in 2013. A further one — McClane — has been announced. The source of all this activity first appeared 30 years ago. The story: it’s Christmas Eve and a superbly well-prepared crime team are out to steal some…

I am completing this issue cursed with a dreadful cold, so I’m away from the office, working down the wire from a room strewn with tissues and Lemsip sachets. Nobody likes a cold, but they can be particularly onerous for a hi-fi reviewer, because one of the first things affected is your hearing. Many is the time that I’ve been confused by a pair of headphones or a soundbar or an amplifier which sounded fine the week before, but which is suddenly sounding very curtailed in the bass. And then I realise that it’s my hearing which is curtailed, rather than the equipment — I’m getting a cold. This often occurs a day or more before any sign of the sniffles. So reviewing comes to a rapid standstill when a…

IFA 2018, “the Global Innovations Show” as it’s currently tagged, the leading showcase for the global technology industry, delivered on its promise of both more product launches than any previous event, and more digital lifestyle products in one place than any other show worldwide. The opening conference took place in the theatre of the dramatic ‘IFA Next’ hall, opened last year (and this year expanded) to highlight start-up companies and innovation. The three key presenters were Hans-Joachim Kamp, Chairman of gfu; Dr Reinhard Zinkann Jr, appearing in his role with ZVEI and CECED but also Miele’s Joint Managing Partner; and Dr Christian Göke, the energetic CEO of Messe Berlin. The latest regeneration of Ms IFA (see p12) was also in attendance. Mr Kamp was heavy on GfK statistics, with some…

They’re “disrupting the Hi-Fi space”, says Yamaha of its new 5000 Series components, which were on show and on demonstration at IFA 2018 in Berlin, along with two other new turntables, which include the radically wireless multiroom MusicCastequipped ‘Vinyl 500’. And while it’s the return to vinyl that has grabbed the headlines, the flagship pre-power amplifier combination also deserve their share of attention. BACK TO VINYL The GT-5000 takes inspiration from the GT Series of yesteryear (where GT stood for ‘Gigantic and Tremendous’!) but there are marked differences, notably in direct drive being replaced by a custom belt-drive system. The mass remains, however, with a 5kg aluminium platter contributing to an overall weight of 26.5kg, all in the aim of dampening vibrations to deliver improved performance. A short, straight 22cm…

We found Loewe’s stand at IFA 2018 all in a breakfast bustle just as the Show opened its doors, and the friendly and attentive staff showed us the German TV-meisters’ latest innovations, which included what it’s describing as “the world’s first television with integrated sound personalisation.” Loewe is not a company to change its TV models every year as do many competitors — the only hardware changes announced this year were that its OLED bild TV models will all be upgraded to the latest generation of OLED panels. It also showed a series of colour frame designs (pictured above) but told us these are, for the moment, a concept rather than a new product line. But of course Loewe does make a habit of upgrading the TVs already owned by…

At Sound+Image we always recommend buying from a proper hi-fi shop which can recommend the right gear for you. In the first of a new series of chats, we talk with Geoff Haynes from Tivoli Hi-Fi in Melbourne, which is celebrating its 45th anniversary. SOUND+IMAGE: So what’s exciting you at the moment in two-channel hi-fi? GEOFF HAYNES: Room acoustics! We’ve just done the room acoustics in our high-end room and it’s actually changed everything. It’s allowed us to hear everything better, add more bass in... we feel we’ve actually upgraded all our hi-fi. S+I: Something consumers may not often think about — a room’s a room… GH: Definitely not. And some people just look at it and say ‘what’s that ugly stuff on the wall?’, but it’s actually…

It’s been six years since we reviewed NAD’s T 757 receiver — has it taken so long for the T 758 to appear? That seems like a long time between models. But it turns out that this is not just a NAD T 758, but a NAD T 758 v.3. And apart from amplifiers that have similar specifications to that long ago model, very little is the same. Equipment You might call this a home theatre amplifier rather than receiver, since it has no real radio section — although it does have BluOS, which gives it access to the Bluesound multiroom platform, through which you can play internet radio… so we’ve called it a receiver anyway, as does NAD’s distributor here in Australia, Convoy International. In power terms the T…

“ included with Yamaha’s receiver here in Australia is an Echo Dot, the smallest smart speaker and microphone system that works with the Amazon Alexa ecosystem.” Yamaha’s latest top-of-the-line Aventage integrated AV receiver has now dropped. The Aventage RX-A3080 sees essentially the same performance as last year’s RX-A3070, but with some welcome enhancements. Equipment The amplifiers themselves here appear to be the same that Yamaha has used for a few years. There are nine of them and they’re rated at 150 watts per channel into eight ohms, two channels driven. Or 165 watts into six ohms, two channels driven. In both cases that’s across the full audible bandwidth at just 0.06% distortion. In the latter case you must select the lower impedance option in the ‘Advanced Setup’ menu. As is…

While talkative smart assistants can be handy around the house, smart speakers have always been underwhelming in terms of sound quality. The standard Google Home is enough to make an audiophile frown, as are Amazon’s Echo and Echo Plus. Meanwhile the sound from a tiny Home Mini or Echo Dot will turn that frown into a wince. Of those we’ve tested in Sound+Image, only Apple’s HomePod could hold its head high when it comes to decent smart speaker sound quality — and that’s a Siri-based speaker, so has a specifically defined audience of Apple users. The best performing Google speakers we’ve heard have been Panasonic’s SC-GA10, and JBL’s Link 10. So we have been waiting for the more substantial Google Home Max to land on Australian shores. Imitation, flattery etc…

In an old land like the United Kingdom, full of famous, longstanding loudspeaker brands, you’d think that it’d be hard for a newcomer to find any space. But Q Acoustics managed it, starting up only a dozen years ago, and since receiving accolade upon accolade, as well as widespread consumer acceptance. It has carefully targeted the mid-priced, high quality segment (it was filling a perceived vacuum left by Mission when it first emerged,), and here we have the ‘i’ upgrading of the 3000 series, its second-from-the-top range. This Q Acoustics 3050i is the largest speaker from that series, its only floorstander. Equipment So, yes, these are stereo floorstanding speakers priced at just under $1400 for the pair. That makes them quite affordable, yet they exude a sense of quality just…

It is very easy to get so smitten with OLED technology that one neglects to pay as much attention as one should to what remains the entirely dominant TV panel technology — LCD. Indeed with the price discrepancy between the technologies not likely to disappear any time soon, it’s clear that LCD is going to be around for quite a while. Here we have 65-inch LCD in the form of the LG 65SK8500PTA UHD TV, one of the company’s ‘Super UHD’ range. Indeed, it’s second from the top of that range. And it sells for $2200 less than the same-sized entry-level LG OLED C8 model which we reviewed last issue. How does it compare? Nanotechnology Let’s be clear, there is very little difference between this TV and that OLED except…

There is no dedicated line output as such on the SR15, but it doesn’t really matter because there’s a ‘line out’ mode using the regular headphone socket. You enable this in the settings menu and choose the preferred level — 0.7 volts, 1 volt, 1.25 volt and 2 volts are available. Then when you change the volume using the knob, a line out button appears on the screen (in addition to the volume changing normally). Tap the button and the SR15 switches to fixed output mode. (Why those levels? I don’t know. There are intervals of 3dB, 2dB and 4dB between the pairs above.) I measured the line output with the 2 volt setting into a 47.1kHz load, and it came to 2.01 and 1.99 volts RMS for the two…

SOUND+IMAGE: So what’s happening with Music Hall, what have you brought here today? ROY HALL: What we’ve brought here is our latest range of turntables, which is the .3 series. The series before was the .2 series — we come up with these fantastic names, you know. And basically we took the original series and upgraded them, by changing to DC motors instead of AC motors, we put better cartridges on, where possible we put a better arm on — we’ve moved up to carbon fibre in nearly all our range now, except for our entry-level turntables. Some have solid arms where it’s one piece to the headshell; one or two models have carbon then aluminium, as you call it — I now call it aluminum, the American way.…

I rarely go to movies at the cinema. A movie on Blu-ray, and better still UHD Blu-ray, looks better and sounds better on my home theatre system. Yes, the screen is bigger at the cinema, but it isn’t size that counts. It’s angle of view. The 65-inch LG OLED on which I watched this movie occupies a much bigger chunk of my field of view than the cinema screen does in most viable viewing positions. (Yes, you can move closer to the screen to increase its size, but then you’re lower and the screen starts to assume a trapezoid shape.) Contrast ratio? It’s a rare cinema that can manage more than about 2000:1 (my estimation, using home projector-style figures). Sound? Pretty good in the cinema still, but don’t expect to…