Innehållsförteckning för March - April 2022 från Sound + Image

CEDIA is the global industry association for residential technology, with its annual Awards programme recognising technical excellence, product innovation and individual professionals succeeding in the home technology industry. The three CEDIA regions each have their own winners, which then go forward to be considered for CEDIA’s global awards. Australia is part of the Asia-Pacific region, and we’re delighted to be able to bring you all the finalists for the recently-announced CEDIA 2021 awards. The main project categories are for Home Cinemas and Integrated Homes at different levels; this issue we’re showing you the home cinemas, and next issue we’ll move on to the complete and invariably spectacular homes that have been vying for CEDIA recognition. With great thanks to Paul Skelton and the extended CEDIA team for their help, let’s…

Ditch the soundbar for true surround sound ▼ REVIEWED THIS ISSUE ▼ Q Acoustics 3050i 5.1 ELAC Debut 2.0 5.1 Triangle BOREA BR03 5.1 DALI Oberon 5 5.1 Dynaudio Evoke 50 5.1 JBL Synthesis HDI 5.1 Surround sound is pretty clear in its aim. Like it says on the tin, it is supposed to surround you. And a soundbar doesn’t do that. The marketers who write the claims for soundbars will use every tool at their disposal to imply that it creates immersive sound, that it bounces sound off the walls, that it has buttons labelled ‘3D surround’. But when it comes down to it, we’ve only heard a handful of soundbars that have ever sat in front of us yet came close to achieving the trick of fooling you…

Many surround speaker packages start with a solid pair of floorstanding speakers to go front left and right, then add standmount/bookshelf speakers for the rear. This seems logical enough — those front speakers will get additional use when playing stereo music, so there’s a concentration of your funds on those critical positions, while less can be spent on the rears, which do far less, being out of action entirely when running in stereo for music, and handling only the ‘effects’ channels even when blasting forth a full cinema soundtrack. But think again. What’s the point of having big front speakers when you’re running a subwoofer to take over the bass element? If you play stereo in 2.1 with the sub, you can not only save money by having standmounters all…

For the last speaker package in our rising group, we revisit JBL, a Samsung/Harman brand which is active, of course, across both the professional and hi-fi speaker markets, right down to little Bluetooth speakers, but right up to hi-fi speakers which sometimes have the full heft of that pro background, so that even their loving owners — and we use JBL Studio Monitors in a key reference system at Sound+Image — might be pressed to describe them as ‘decor-friendly’. That makes the recent introduction of the ‘HDI’ series a new direction for the company. The HDI range has been designed to be easier on the eye, less wide, with new finishes, and with cabinets where only their tops and bottoms have flat surfaces. The HDI title, meanwhile, comes from the…

Silent Angel Munich M1 streamer It would divert from other matters of more musical pleasure to harp on for too long about how very small the Silent Angel Munich M1 is... but its dimensions are inevitably going to be the first things that take you by surprise when you encounter this versatile little streamer and music server. It’s just six inches wide (that’s 15cm in new money) and two inches high. Yet it’s going to present all the world’s music from streaming services, plus all your accumulated music files at what, given the price, with various versions running to just over $2000, one might hope to be approaching audiophile quality. Can it deliver the goods from a box so teeny-tiny? Equipment We’re certainly not complaining about the size. While we…

LEAD BELLY Cotton-picker, blues pioneer, womaniser, convicted murderer, forefather of rock’n’roll… Lead Belly was born Huddie Ledbetter in 1885 in Mooringsport, Louisiana, close to Caddo lake, a tranquil spot far removed from the bright city lights of Shreveport, the nearest big town. His parents were farmers, and by all accounts Huddie was a tough kid who was able to pick more cotton than anyone else. He quickly came to like women, corn liquor and trouble in about equal proportions. He liked hanging out in Shreveport’s red-light area, and by the age of 16 he had not only gained an enviable reputation for his sexual prowess, but also heard the barrel-house piano players whose ‘walking bass’ figures would later become a trademark of his own powerful rhythmic style. By the age…

Forget the CDs and streams: these rarities remain available only for your turntable. Buckingham Nicks Buckingham Nicks (ANTHEM, 1973) How refreshing in this age of unlimited streaming that there exists a long out- of-print collectable album. Stevie and Lindsey have flirted with a possible re-release, but we reckon it would be better if they let it stay hard-to-get. Neil Young Time Fades Away (REPRISE, 1973) Alongside ‘Journey Through The Past’, ‘Time Fades Away’ has resisted all attempts to transfer it onto CD. Young’s own indifference is often cited as the reason, though it is in fact a crunching live document of a key transitional moment in his career. Various Artists Concerts For The People Of Kampuchea (ATLANTIC, 1979) It’s inexplicable why Paul McCartney’s stardusted benefit shows never made it to…

Key W = Sound+Image Award Product of the Year HC = Sound+Image Award Highly Commended WELCOME Our buying guide is based on the Sound+Image Awards presented each year, highlighting the very best value products at each price level. We list the latest winners from our recent 2022 Awards, along with the best winners still available from previous awards. For more details, see the full Awards issue. Projectors In a dedicated or darkened room, projectors deliver bigscreen images of which even the largest TVs can only dream. There are four ‘ranks’ in the market - portable models of relatively low resolution, full-HD projectors, those which deliver UHD by pixel-shifting, and those with genuine native 4K resolution. Here are our current award-winners. BENQ GV30 W2022 ∕ $999 ∕ www.benq.com.au Very neat, very…

SONY & SAMSUNG DEBUT QD-OLED TVs At CES 2022 in Las Vegas both Sony and Samsung brought the screen technology considered the major new competitor to OLED. Sony (pictured above) calls it QD-OLED, while Samsung, which has hitherto had a commercial stance competitive to OLED, is therefore understandably labelling the new panel technology as QD-Display. The new technology was developed by Samsung Display. The key difference from LG’s OLED panels, as used by all current OLED models, is the use of quantum dots to deliver true RGB without LG’s additional white pixel. That in turn allows a less aggressive colour filter. Samsung’s news broke early via a CES Innovation Award, which revealed the 65-inch QD-Display as “the world’s first true RGB self-emitting Quantum Dot OLED display... combining the contrast levels…

AV receivers have always been large components. Inside they need the room for five or more amplifiers, each requiring enough space into which they can ventilate heat. Outside, meanwhile, their rear panels dazzle with an often bewildering array of rear-panel socketry catering to audio and video connections both modern and legacy. To accommodate all this, and to do their job, then, home cinema receivers and amplifiers have always been full-width, double-height products that inevitably dominate an equipment rack. And yet we’ve long wondered if this was really necessary. HDMI has simplified AV connections, using one plug where five were once necessary. Meanwhile the rise of efficient Class-D amplification has reduced if not entirely removed the problem of heat generation by multiple amplifiers. So we were delighted to discover Canton’s Smart…

In an ancient land like the United Kingdom, home to so many famous and 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 16 years ago, and since receiving accolade upon accolade, as well as widespread consumer acceptance. It has carefully targeted the mid-priced high quality segment (when it first emerged, it was filling a perceived vacuum left by Mission loudspeakers), and has delivered both high-quality stereo speakers and complete sets of models able to be used in home cinema configurations. Here we have a package based on the ‘i’ upgrading of the 3000 series. The 3050i floorstanders which front the system, and the 3010i bookshelf speakers used for rears, have something in common —…

Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries was founded in 1983, before surround sound at home existed, but in time to benefit from the boom times that followed a decade later as 5.1 became de rigeur for the lounges of movie fans everywhere. The company has never looked back. Every one of DALI’s passive speaker ranges today has all the elements required for surround use as well as stereo, and this range, named after Oberon (originally a German dwarf before his promotion to King of the Fairies by Shakespeare), is no exception. Equipment There are seven models in the full Oberon Series, although there are also active Oberon speakers in a range called ‘Oberon C’. If you start from the top of these ranges, you’ll find the model number states the diameter in…

It would be remiss of us to depart the world of home cinema speaker packages without mentioning the myriad options available from the world of in-wall and in-ceiling speakers which, together with on-wall and on-ceiling models, are often called ‘architectural’ speakers — not that architects often like them much, nor anything else that breaks the lines of their minimalist white walls and ceilings. The attraction of architectural speakers is their relative ease of concealment, whether on-wall cinema speakers behind panels or curtains, or in-wall and in-ceiling speakers recessed neatly anywhere in the home and covered with a grille to match your decor. For most renovators such convenience is king, hence it’s no surprise that their success has accelerated since the earliest days of such designs, back when we didn’t recommend…

Blasphemy is still a crime in Australia, except in WA and Queensland, where they can, apparently, go for it, and quite right too. But what about heresy? “A temperate and respectful denial of the existence of God is not an offence against the law, ” says our Federal Court, and since this includes “propagation of doctrines hostile to the Christian faith” — aka heresy — Klipsch would seem to be off the hook. This time. Back in 1957, when the company released its very first Heresy speaker, things were different. For one thing, all the company’s speakers back then were triangular, to be placed in corners. Paul Klipsch intended his new speaker to be a centre speaker, between the corner-mounted Klipschorns. So it had a non-triangular cabinet. “Heresy!” declared one…

THE CHALLENGE In this new series of Dealer Systems, we ask a hi-fi dealer to recommend a hi-fi system. It can be a vinyl-based system, a disc-, file- or streaming-based system, or an all-rounder. The dealer can pick the price-point. This is, of course, unusual freedom for them. A good hi-fi dealer will ask about your musical preferences, your home, the way you listen, as well as budget, so that they can help you find the perfect hi-fi for the job. But here they have free rein to pick something that’s been impressing themselves. The Audio Tailor in Brisbane has chosen a streaming system which totals under $10k including connecting cables, with a German source, a Norwegian amplifier and Finnish speakers. “The system is based around providing a seamless match…

SOUND+IMAGE PRESENTS WORLD-CLASS AUSTRALIAN INSTALLATIONS This space was always intended to house a home cinema. Indeed the owners — Anthony, Marisa and their three children in Western Australia — already enjoyed a multipurpose room with a Sony TV and surround system of Yamaha receiver and Canton speakers, also a bar area, plus gaming via a full-size stand-up ‘Street Fighter II’ arcade game. “The original room certainly had a little bit of everything, but without a real cohesive purpose,” says Rogue Home Cinema’s founder and head designer Scott Rogan. “There was clearly scope to do so much more, so we set out to transform this room into a unique and exciting space which would deliver a truly big cinematic experience.” As you can see from the images, the final results are…

Elac’s original Debut series was released in 2015/6 to coincide with Elac’s 90th anniversary, and it was a true debut in more than one sense, not only the first series of its type from Elac, but also the first series designed for Elac by famous speaker designer Andrew Jones, brought in by the German manufacturer to be its Vice President of Engineering. Jones had previously been chief speaker designer at TAD and Pioneer, and had also worked for Infinity and, perhaps most famously, for KEF, where Jones debuted the Uni-Q transducer, now a KEF signature element refined over multiple generations. At TAD he introduced beryllium-and aramid-based drivers in the very high-end Reference and Evolution series of speakers, while for Pioneer Electronics (TAD’s parent company) Jones created the extraordinarily high-value SP…

A few years ago, when travel was still something people did, we visited Denmark and stood inside a huge chamber — a 13-metre cube — fitted with an in-house-designed speaker measurement system known as Jupiter. High up toward the ceiling hung a massive structure in a half circle bearing 31 microphones at six degree intervals (see overleaf), able to measures 180 degrees of sound in a single hit. This array encircled a lone Dynaudio floorstanding speaker perched high in a vertigoinducing manner on a small separate platform. This vast chamber is where Dynaudio tests its speakers. Denmark has a long and strong reputation for hi-fi, and loudspeakers in particular, but Dynaudio is no Danish enthusiast collective knocking together cabinets in an outhouse while chewing on strips of stegt flæsk. Dynaudio…

Many speaker brands well-known from domestic hi-fi have seen the attraction of the architectural speaker market. JBL has almost the same depth of range with in-walls as with its boxier speakers, with models like the two-way JBL 6IW shown above with 6.5-inch bass driver for around $350, rising to in-wall speaker arrays retailing at tens of thousands of dollars. Indeed it’s hard to think of a hi-fi speaker brand which doesn’t have architectural speakers. Every one of the six brands of speaker packages in this round-up also has ranges of in-wall and in-ceiling designs available, and often it is possible to find architectural models which directly correspond to their box speaker ranges: pictured right, for example, is ELAC’S DEBUT IW-DC51 IN-WALL CENTRE SPEAKER, designed to complement the Debut IW-D61-W in-walls…

English-born American Joseph Anton Hofmann once created an ‘Iron Law’ for audio design. Three important attributes of any loudspeaker system are inextricably linked, he said: low-bass reproduction, enclosure size, and sensitivity (or efficiency). Optimising any two of these attributes, he said, would inevitably compromise the one that remained, such that it is impossible for a single design to satisfactorily deliver all three. KEF, the 61-year-old UK speaker company, has clearly been tangling with this assertion. “When designing a small subwoofer, the choice has to be made between high efficiency and low frequency extension,” admits its white paper, issued to accompany the new and remarkably compact KC62 subwoofer. “To create a subwoofer that can deliver the maximum performance for the minimum of space, KEF R&D worked to push the compromises as…

In 1978, classic hard rock seemed a thing of the past. And then along came Van Halen. Singer Dave Lee Roth had learned a thing or two from Jim Dandy, frontman for Black Oak Arkansas, and in some ways, Van Halen were a throwback to a bygone era. But despite what appeared to be bad timing, they offered a classic rock’n’roll experience and a new ‘post-Hendrix’ guitar innovator. On their debut album for Warners, the contribution of producer Ted Templeman and engineer Donn Landee can’t be overstated, capturing the bombast and beauty of the band’s live performance by cutting virtually every track live, without overdubs (the exceptions were Runnin’ With The Devil and Jamie’s Cryin’). The sound had people sitting up and taking notice. Roth might not have had the…