Innehållsförteckning för November - December 2021 från Sound + Image

If you were fortunate enough to have a home in a stunning ocean-side location such as this, wouldn’t you want the best in home entertainment to supplement the natural environment around you? This home’s owner had recently purchased the three-bedroom property when they contacted Len Wallis Audio’s custom installation team to gain their input on a major planned renovation. High-end architectural fittings and finishes in the interiors were to be handled by a renowned local design firm, complementing spectacular uninterrupted views of the local surf beach. So while the client wanted high-performance audio available throughout the home, space was going to be relatively limited. He preferred the entertainment to be ‘hidden’, rather than detract from the stunning location or design. While large displays were requested for every video zone, these…

Here at Sound+Image we are great fans of standmount speakers. It’s true that if you have a vast room that needs filling with sound, there’s no substitute for the sheer air-shifting abilities of floorstanders. But they do tend to dominate a room, and their sound is often harder to control. Many is the time when we’ve actually preferred the standmounters in a range for their tighter sound and their ability to weave beautiful soundstage images. They are also, inevitably, cheaper, even when you account for the price of a good pair of stands. And you’ll note that we have titled this group test as ‘standmount’ speakers, rather than the often-used ‘bookshelf’ speakers. If bookshelf space is all you have, then OK, better a good pair of small stereo speakers on…

There’s an interesting comparison between these Q Acoustics and another brand out of the UK – Wharfedale. Both come from titularly British companies (though both are unsurprisingly manufactured in China), and both have employed the design services of a modern-day shaman of audio design, KarlHeinz Fink. They are remarkably different designs visually, though they do share certain characteristics which show the overarching goals of their designer-in-common, notably his emphasis on cabinet rigidity. One thing worth noting is that in the UK, these Q Acoustics standmounts are significantly pricier than, say, Wharfedale’s Diamond 12.1, and yet here there’s less than $50 between them. That makes a difference in value terms, given that the performance of the 3030i is more in the territory of rivals up at the $999 price they originally…

We began this group of standmount speakers with ELAC’s little Debut B5.2 models – here we move up a size, but also a level, as the German company has extended its Debut ranges with a selection of ‘Reference’ versions, an arrangement just repeated wth its higher Uni-Fi range. It seems likely that all this is the result of having eminent designer Andrew Jones onboard – ex-KEF, Infinity, TAD and Pioneer, and always brimming with ideas. So the more premium Debut Reference series – these DBR62 standmounters, the DFR52 floorstanders and DCR52 centre speaker – aims to take things further, especially in terms of improving the cabinet, both in looks and performance. The most obvious visual change is perhaps the reflex port. It’s still on the front, but instead of the…

And here’s yet another speaker brand now to be found under the auspices of Sound United. Definitive Technology is best known for its high-level black tower speakers, notable for their inclusion of bass radiators and active drivers in their lower portions, adding to the normal drivers driven by your amplifier power. It has been less known for standmount and bookshelf designs – until 2018, when the Demand series first arrived. This D9 sits in the middle of three standmounts in the series. The D7 below has a relatively conventional two-way configuration with tweeter mid/woofer, but things get more interesting with our D9. It has the same 25mm annealed-aluminium tweeter mounted in a shallow horn and fronted by Definitive Technology’s new 20/20 Wave Alignment Lens’, promising smoother high frequency response and…

It’s immediately obvious how much KEF’s LS50 differs from the vast majority of standmount speaker designs. First introduced in 2012, the fundamental design hasn’t changed, yet looks every bit as modern in its latest incarnation as the original did when it arrived to great acclaim. The cabinet shape and size still works well, and the curved front panel – made of Dough Moulding Compound: a polyester resin combined with glass fibre and calcium carbonate – continues to make for an impressively rigid and well-controlled foundation for the Uni-Q drive unit array. The rest of the box is made from MDF, heavily braced and carefully damped to minimise any resonances. The new version has four finishes available – white, black, grey, and a Royal Blue Special Edition. The only obvious changes…

The KEF R3 is a rare three-way standmounter – there is only one other in this entire group. It doesn’t, however, look like a three-way, because its tweeter and midrange co-inhabit the top space, in the form of the distinctive Uni-Q driver array, an arrangement KEF has used and refined since the late 1980s. The R3 uses the 12th iteration, with a 25mm aluminium-dome tweeter within a 12.5cm aluminium midrange unit. While this version of the Uni-Q brought with it a host of detail refinements to the motor assembly, suspension and drive unit structure – reducing distortion and improving performance over earlier versions – the R3 hasn’t yet been gifted the ‘Meta’ frequency-absorbing puck behind the tweeter, the advantages of which we heard from the LS50 Meta a few pages…

This is the BBC, calling the world from – well, in this case, Harbeth’s headquarters in Haywards Heath, West Sussex. Harbeth was founded in 1977 by Hugh Dudley Harwood, who had worked in the BBC’s Research Department (Engineering Division) for nearly 20 years and was instrumental in the design and development of many loudspeakers for the BBC, including the famous LS3/5 and LS 3/5A broadcast monitors, the commercial sale of which the BBC subsequently licensed to various famous British speaker manufacturers, including KEF and Rogers. While at the Beeb, Harwood patented (in his own name) the use of polypropylene as a cone material, and it was to commercialise this discovery that Harbeth was founded, and the original HL1 produced. Cone material is still a critical unique selling point for Harbeth,…

Our second pair of standmount speakers from Sonus faber raises the stakes from the company’s Lumina 1 at $1595 (back on page 58) to the larger of the two standmounts in the company’s luxurious Heritage Collection, the Electa Amator III. These are, as you can see, more than 10 times the price of the entry-level speaker, so they represent the heights to which the Italian brand, as well as our group of speakers this issue, can rise. What components, what construction and what sound might justify such pricing? It was, we can tell you from the off, a pleasure to find out. The Electa Amator IIIs were originally released in 2018, designed to commemorate Sonus faber’s 35th anniversary, because despite all the loudspeakers the company has built since that time,…

Now flushed with success in the EISA 2021-2022 Awards featured this issue (see p30), this Evo 150 smart streaming amplifier is the more powerful and the better equipped of two new all-in-one solutions from the UK’s Cambridge Audio. The lesser Evo 75 looks exactly the same as its pricier sibling from the front, with the same 31.7cm-wide black anodised aluminium chassis fronted by a 17cm full-colour LCD panel, the same luxurious two-section knob available for control on the right of the fascia. But moving up to the Evo 150 doubles your available power from the Hypex Ncore Class-D power modules within; it also adds facilities around the back – the Evo 150 has a phono stage where the Evo 75 has none, a USB-B computer connection too, a pair of…

Bowers & Wilkins 800 Series grows wings The 800 Series Diamond range is the iconic height of the UK-based brand: “everything we know, and everything we are”, as the company says. The new D4 incarnation continues the 800 Series’ reputation since John Bowers introduced the original 801 back in 1979, with the ‘D4’ indicating the fourth set to employ the company’s diamond tweeters, which sit in the decoupled ‘Solid Body Tweeter-on-Top’ housing. In the new series this has a longer tube-loading system, while the aluminium, milled from a single solid block, now has an anodised finish, either dark or light depending on the cabinet colour. There’s an extra one of those too — a new satin walnut finish (shown on the 802 D4 above, second from left). This joins the…

It’s the big one – Yamaha’s very toppermost one-box model in its latest Aventage series of AV receivers, with the company also celebrating 10 years of Aventage, or spilling into 11 years given the trials of the last 18 months. Yamaha has one of the longest track records in modern surround sound, and has consistently topped awards listings, including the Sound+Image Awards, with previous models. No pressure, then. Inputs & layouts The Aventage RX-A8A offers 11 channels of amplification, the first Yamaha model to do so since the RX-Z11 back in 2007 when the whole Aventage concept was still a twinkle in the eyes of its engineers. With all 11 channels and two subwoofer feeds available via pre-out sockets as well as via 13 sets of speaker outputs, that’s vast…

As we’re running our group in ascending price order, our first two standmounter pairs show how much can be achieved with a relatively modest outlay. And they’re hardly budget brands – Germany’s Electroacustic GmbH has been dealing in sound delivery (originally sonar) since 1926, making hi-fi electronics through the golden age of hi-fi, and speakers since the 1980s. It recently celebrated its 95th anniversary. No newcomer then! The.2 in the name here indicates the recent 2.0 update of the company’s Debut speaker range, which changed pretty much everything. They’re now taller (34cm), thinner (18cm) and deeper (23cm) in an aim to look smarter, less visually obtrusive, more modern. The 13cm mid/bass unit uses a new blend of aramid fibres for the cone, and a revised shape to improve stiffness and…

We travel now over the English Channel – or la Manche as they’d call it on the other side – to these French-designed standmounts from Triangle, a company of some 40 years standing, located in the ancient town of Soissons, halfway between Paris and the Belgian border. Triangle builds many of its speakers entirely in France, including drivers, of which its famous horn-loaded tweeter, with its distinctive gold-coloured phase plug as used on the company’s top Magellan, is best-known. But at this price local production is near impossible, so here Triangle leverages the cost advantages of production in China. The BR03 uses a new ‘EFS’ tweeter design from Triangle, short for ‘Efficient Flow System’. Triangle has partially horn-loaded the tweeter’s 25mm silk dome, which improves its efficiency and reduces baffle/grille…

An interesting comparison across this spread at prices $100 over the thousand, with an Aussie legend opposite, and here the American Polk, another brand now under Sound United in Australia, alongside Boston Acoustics, Bowers & Wilkins, and Definitive Technology. The Polk Reserve series sits just below the company’s own ‘Legend’ series and uses the same custom-made drivers, including the proprietary Pinnacle tweeter and ‘turbine cone’ midrange. The Polk Reserve R200 standmounts arrived in their purposeful matte black finish; there’s also a brown walnut finish, and we’re told a satin white finish will follow. They are a substantial size – Polk describes them as ‘bookshelf’ speakers, but at 36cm high and 35cm deep that would be a fairly mighty bookshelf! It uses the company’s high-res-capable Pinnacle ring radiator, with its distinctive…

Another interesting page-to-page comparison here, as we have an all-Italian sound-off between Sonus faber and a brand that is rather lesser-known here, Chario. Both make much of the Italian art of handcrafting – just look at those cabinets! – with Sonus faber doing so from its Vicenza headquarters in the hills of Veneto. Its success over recent years in continuing the mantle of founder Franco Serblin can be gauged by the elevation of its designer Livio Cucuzza to become Chief Design Officer for the whole of the McIntosh Group of which Sonus faber is a part. You can see the heights to which Sonus faber rises in the last of this group of standmounts (see p74), which is from the company’s Heritage collection, though there’s still some way even from…

Revel is the brand-name applied to high-end loudspeakers made by Harman International, and given that this company also has brands such as JBL and Infinity, that puts the Revel designs on a pretty lofty pedestal. The M105 is the smaller of two standmounts in the Performa3 series, which sits pretty much dead centre of Revel’s various ranges, with only two groups above – the flagship Ultima2 series, and the PerformaBe, which built on the success of the Performa3 series by adding beryllium tweeters instead of the aluminium-dome tweeters here, and a variation to the mid-bass drivers too. That Revel chose to ‘soup up’ the Performa3 series is itself a sign of their regard for these originals. The cabinets, for example, are unchanged, made from the same materials and formed in…

First came the L100 ‘Classic’, an all-new design with fully up-to-date components within, yet sporting those classic white woofers and black, blue or orange Quadrex foam grilles as key DNA from JBL’s original L100 design back in 1970. More recently, JBL followed up with these L82 Classics, around half the size (though still the second largest standmount in this whole group at 47 cm high) and a driver down, but fully maintaining the nostalgia. The L82 models still look every inch a JBL Classic, wide yet relatively shallow in their genuine walnut-veneer enclosures, distinctive white paper-pulp cone still to the fore, now on a reduced but hardly dinky 20cm (eight-inch) mid/bass pure-pulp woofer, compared with the L100 Classics’ 12-inch woofers and separate midrange. These smaller standmounts still weigh a healthy…

Fyne Audio is a relatively new brand, forged in fire back in 2017 after the drawn-out and painful departure of Tannoy from its Scottish facilities at Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire. A host of key personnel departed Tannoy to create Fyne Audio — just 10 minutes down the A725 in Bellshill — so that while the company may be new, the folk at Fyne have been working together for a decade or more, and together boast “over 200 years’ experience” in the arts of musical reproduction. Working from a clean slate has obviously proven a boon for the Fyne team, which found success from their first outing with the F501 floorstanders and F500 standmount, and rapidly expanded to the heights of its high-end F1 range. The F700 floorstanders and these F701 standmounters…

On the block, in the street, as it were, there are two questions that we get asked more than any other. The first is “should I buy a soundbar?’ – which requires a bit of questioning to clarify their intended use, before we generally answer ‘no’. The second question is “Can you recommend a turntable?” This also requires clarification, as surprisingly often people don’t realise that they will also require an amp and speakers, let alone a phono stage. But more often than not they mean a turntable under $1000, often well under $1000, and among our brief list of recommendations, we nearly always say “check out audio-technica’s range”. That’s not only because audio-technica is hitting 50 years in the vinyl business (having begun as a maker of cartridges), but…

Jimi Hendrix, session guitarist turned solo superstar, was primed to explode when he landed smack in the middle of London’s burgeoning psychedelic rock scene in September 1966. Former Animals bassist Chas Chandler had imported Hendrix into Britain, impressed with his performances in New York, and it had been decided that his first single would be Hey Joe, a traditional song whose authorship was and still remains unclear. You’ll have heard the stories of such how British guitar potentates as Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton were awe-struck by Hendrix’s otherworldly abilities when they saw this new American kid play his first low-key shows in London. Now imagine what the public at large, most of whom couldn’t tell the front end of a Fender from the back end of a frying pan…

Back in the earliest days of soundbars, they were made exclusively by audio companies – Altec Lansing, Cambridge, DefTech, Yamaha, and the outlying specialist ZVox. It was, after all, a sonic challenge to redesign a large traditional speaker box into a long thin enclosure that could fit below or under a TV. But as time moved on, TV companies themselves saw the benefit in making their own, able to offer package deals, and to guarantee compatibility in both connections and styling between TV and bar. Today many best-sellers come from LG, Samsung and Sony, although the audio companies are hardly letting go – JBL, Klipsch, Sonos, Yamaha and many others are also vying for a slice of a healthy soundbar market. There’s no clear divide in sonic success between the…

Over the border in Denmark, where you can’t throw a block of Lego without hitting a loudspeaker manufacturer, the company known by its acronomic initialism of Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries offers these Spektor 2 standmounters, available in Australia for $599 (though as with a great many others, you may be able to find them at a little less than the RRPs we quote). Like Elac, DALI also started making speakers in the 1980s, and has since proved to have a penchant for high-value bookshelf speakers. There’s an even smaller Spektor 1 model available, but the larger cabinet volume of the Spektor 2 makes this the model where the series really takes off when it comes to music-making. They’re still pretty compact – shorter than the Elacs at 29cm high, though…

The 607 has always been the smallest and lowest-priced model in Bowers & Wilkins’ 600 Series, and to our minds it has also always offered the best value for money of any loudspeaker in the company’s range, particularly when the ground-breaking Series 2 version was released. The reason for it being such value is that it incorporates technologies that were originally developed for the company’s more expensive models. Over the years, that tech has been ‘trickled down’ to benefit lower-priced models. Equally importantly in value terms, the 600 S2 Anniversary series uses exactly the same drivers as the larger and more expensive models in the 600 S2 Anniversary range. By way of example you need look no further than the 607 S2 Anniversary’s tweeter. It’s exactly the same as the…

Richter’s own ‘Legend’ series is now in Series 6, a complete redesign while maintaining the goals of this Aussie brand currently celebrating its 35th anniversary. And its success can be gauged by the fact that three of the four new models have won our Sound+Image awards, including these standmounting Merlins. The design brief for the latest Merlins was established after two years of research to make sure the new version would, as Richter put it, “pass the pub test”. The research established, for example, that peg-and-socket grille attachments are not much loved, partly because they can break, but also because they leave holes showing on the front baffle for the many Australians who don’t use the grilles. So the new Merlin has a magnetic grille. There’s also a badge under…

If you haven’t heard of Chario, be not ashamed – we hadn’t either, until Audio Dynamics began bringing them into Australia. Yet this Italian company was founded back in 1975 – longer ago even than Sonus faber. It professes to being “in the very small world of handcrafting companies that totally make their loudspeakers, drivers and cabinets”, doing so from a variety of locations around Italy, and while it has in recent years produced various lower quality ranges, its higher classics are classics indeed. We were so surprised by the performance of the first model we heard, the Constellation II Delphinius, that we gathered a group of pricecomparable big-name speakers, put them on a comparator switch, and blind or otherwise proclaimed the Charios to not only win, but pretty much…

While Spendor has two ranges with more modern styling, its Classic line harks back to the earlier days of Spendor in their looks, a heritage that leans on BBC research carried out half a century ago, but now updated, of course, to incorporate all Spendor’s latest technologies and research. This flagship range includes standmounts rising to the titanium-baffled Classic 100Ti at $21,999, but these Classic 4/5 models are a relatively affordable $3499, and if you want your speakers to be small, unfussy in nature and sound great without being pampered, Spendor’s Classic 4/5 could be for you. They’re the smallest speakers in the Classic range, 31cm high, available in light cherry or slightly darker walnut real-wood veneers, and with a classic style of grille, magnetically held. The old BBC influence…

Many of our standmount reviews so far have noted how the tweeter waveguides are an important element in assisting high-frequency dispersion. Well, clearly in the Esoterix Altum, South Australian loudspeaker legend Krix considers the waveguide to be extremely important! Krix engineer David Murphy says he went through nearly 100 computer simulations before narrowing the design down to the six he thought would work the best, after which he constructed all six for full ‘real-world’ testing and auditioning by the complete Krix team. It’s significant to note that Krix is actually one of the few companies in the world, let alone Australia, that could do this, not simply because of its access to the necessary test equipment, but also because it has its own wholly-owned R&D facility and factory south of…

Bluesound is part of the Lenbrook Group of Companies, the Canadian-based group which also brings you NAD and PSB Speakers. And the complementarities between Bluesound and NAD in particular are obvious, and useful. NAD has adopted the BluOS streaming platform from Bluesound for its own smart streaming amplifiers, while Bluesound has gained substance from its stablemate from the very beginning – the great Marty Borish, the founder of modern NAD who passed away in 2017, had early input into the goals for the new streaming brand, and the development of its powered products has gained greatly through successive generations from the expertise of NAD’s amplification engineers. But the Node streamer – here in its third (really fourth) generation – has no amplification; it’s designed mainly to plug into an existing…

It’s been around a month since we started using Yamaha’s YH-L700A headphones – not to be confused (though we’d quite understand if you were) with the similarly-named YH-E700A headphones that we reviewed a couple of issues back. Those E700As were conventional enough wireless noisecancelling headphones, which we liked very much for their sound balance, at least when ANC was engaged. The L700A headphones are also wireless noise-cancellers, but in contrast, they are really weird. They are loaded with options we’ve never seen or heard before, and which do very odd things with your choice of audio. Download the app, and you can do still more strange things. To explain, we’ll run through the main options one at a time, and tell you what they do and why they do it,…

From the very unboxing, there’s no doubt that the Klipsch T5 II True Wireless ANC ‘earphones’ (as Klipsch calls them) are a premium pair of buds. The charging case feels like a fancy Zippo lighter, with considerable heft, a metal casing and side-hinged flip-top lid. For context on this solidity, the Klipsch’s case and buds together weigh 82.4g – 77g of that being the case. That’s almost exactly twice that of the buds-and-case combo for Sony’s WF-1000XM4. They’re available in a stylish array of finishes – Gunmetal, Silver, Copper, and a limited McLaren Edition – with each upholding the classic chic the brand is known for. The finish on the case feels nice to the touch, though it’s also a fingerprint magnet. We like the integrated rubber foot on the…