Innehållsförteckning för May - June 2022 från Sound + Image

EDLINES I nearly always put my LPs away immediately after playing them, but I left one out recently, and a visiting mate, seeing the neo-progressive rock band IQ on the cover, asked if that was the band for which I used to paint my ear blue when I went to their gigs in the 1980s. I said no, that was for Marillion gigs. For IQ gigs I wore a chequered suit about eight sizes too big for me. Really, it’s not something I choose to talk about these days. But that is the problem with old records. They do bring things up. A vinyl collection is inevitably also a collection of memories. That’s true for music in general, of course, but if I spent my time solely streaming from Spotify,…

BenQ X3000i UHD projector There’s an exciting first in this latest projector from BenQ, which is headlined as a ‘console gaming projector’ — part of the company’s ‘X’ gaming series — but which for our purposes at Sound+Image can also considered to be built for entertainment, coming as it does with consumer 4K resolution, HDMI inputs, built-in speakers and even an Android TV stick to give it a smart streaming interface. It also looks rather different. As with the recent roll-to-aim GV30 projector, BenQ’s product design team has worked overtime to deliver something notably novel but also practical, so that here we have a rectangular box with curved edges, rather than the usual bulging projector shape. A line of orange surrounds the black frontage from which the lens peers not…

▼ REVIEWED THIS ISSUE ▼ UNDER $1000Pro-JectPRIMARY E RegaPLANAR 1 Audio-TechnicaAT-LPW50BP Music HallCLASSIC YamahaMUSICCAST VINYL500 $1000-$10,000ClearaudioCONCEPT MM RegaPLANAR 6 OVER $10,000HolboMKII AIRBEARINGTURNTABLE SYSTEM Mark LevinsonNo. 5105 Vinyl remains the hero of the hour when it comes to physical audio formats. While CD is experiencing a mild resurgence in some markets (see News p14) and there’s the continuing ever-curious rise of ‘cassettes-are-cool’ at low quantity, it’s vinyl which continues to win new fans and bring a new generation to the joys of real hi-fi, to music shared on speakers, not headphones. And that’s been good for the whole hi-fi industry. You can find bargain turntables under $100, but we’d say that’s just too low. It’s no coincidence that the concept of ‘source-first’ in hi-fi was popularised by a turntable maker. As…

Audio-Technica is hitting 50 years in the vinyl business, having begun life as a maker of cartridges. In recent years the brand has become a go-to for high-value turntables from the lowest imaginable prices for a real deck, up to the AT-LP7 at $1399. That puts this AT-LPW50PB somewhere in the middle at $749, for what is a no-frills deck, belt-driven and designed for out-and-out performance with vinyl. There’s no USB output, no Bluetooth — though it does come with an in-built phono stage, great for the many potential customers who may want to plug their turntable into something other than a hi-fi amp that is either old enough or new enough to have a phono stage. The AT-LPW50PB will do them nicely. Especially as it comes in a rather…

As the prices rise in the world of turntables, something curious happens — the more you pay, the less you generally get in the way of facilities. Minimalism is de rigeur with such decks de luxe. Automatic operation is deemed to put all manner of strains on the arm, and generally you’ll be expected to bring an external phono stage, because of the advantages of separating low-level signal processing from potential mechanical and electrical interference. Germany’s Clearaudio has recently been marketing an ‘Active’ version of this turntable, which comes with built-in phono and preamplifier stages, plus a great rarity among turntables, a headphone socket at the front of the right-hand edge. But that model is now approaching end of line, so here we’re assessing the more traditional non-active Concept, the…

This Mark Levinson turntable closes off our group by virtue of being the most expensive to buy without cartridge, albeit only $500 more than the Holbo on the previous pages. On the other hand, it comes out cheaper with either pre-installed cartridge option. You can purchase the No. 5105 either without a cartridge, in which case the retail price is $12,499, or factory-fitted with an Ortofon Quintet Black low-output moving-coil cartridge, in which case the retail price increases to $14,499. With Mark Levinson having been in business since 1972, you might have expected them to have turntables on offer since the early days. But actually no, its eponymous founder, once an aspiring musician who (legendarily) built the stage mixer for Woodstock, never did turn his hand to the black arts,…

Sony WF-L900 LinkBuds Here comes Sony, widely-acknowledged leader in the upmarket earbud category, with a pair of wireless earbuds for people who don’t, er, like wireless earbuds. If you hate the feeling of silicone or memory foam burrowing into your ears, well, the LinkBuds are designed not to do that. Instead the ‘ball’ part of the WF-L900 design tucks into the concha section of your ear below the antihelix, leaving that curious circular section with its hole in the middle positioned right over your earhole. They weigh less than 4g each, and are secured in place by a small plastic earloop, smaller than the rubber wingtips of some rivals, but with five different sizes provided to find the right fit (based, says Sony, on four decades of ear data collected…

Bowers & Wilkins: new Panorama, new ownership Bowers & Wilkins has always delivered something special with its soundbars — the original Panorama in 2009 and the upgraded Panorama 2 in 2013. Now comes a complete redesign in the significantly cheaper $1599 Panorama 3, a 121cm-wide bar which again requires no supporting subwoofer. And for the first time Bowers & Wilkins has included Atmos height speakers among the 13-strong driver collection in the new bar. The new design eschews the curves and chrome of the original for a more understated (and dark-room-friendly) black bar with bulging angles and a central strip across the centre for indicators and control; these are capacitive-touch ‘hidden until lit’ buttons. The number of connections has dropped drastically from three HDMI inputs and one output on the…

TCL TS8132 soundbar + subwoofer TCL here promises a 3.1.2-channel soundbar and subwoofer package, where Atmos processing makes the combo capable of delivering genuine height information from upfiring drivers. And there’s pleasingly little apparent PR guff here: the channel count is genuine, TCL doesn’t make outrageous claims, and it has a good few useful extras given the price of $699 (and we’ve seen it going for $500). It can, for example, be linked with Google Home and thereby stream music via Chromecast. It can be set up as an AirPlay speaker and stream from Apple devices that way. And there’s Bluetooth. So in these ways it’s offering to double up as a system for your music, as well as fulfilling the fundamental soundbar purpose of delivering television and movie sound…

Pro-Ject’s most affordable turntable may come with a ‘Primary’ moniker which implies it resides in some ‘My First Turntable’ category. And yes its price puts it first among the vinyl spinners in our group here, thanks to the Primary E being traditionally designed and entirely no-frills in terms of facilities. Of course there are a good number of lesser turntables which you may be able to find cheaper — turntables in a box with speakers, the kind you might stumble upon under special offer in an Australian Post outlet, capable of making sound with a cheap ceramic stylus, but not capable of making real music. This Pro-Ject Primary E, on the other hand, nails the fundamentals so effectively that its performance sails levels above such toys. It has the look…

It takes a bit of chutzpah to name a new turntable a ‘Classic’, but then anyone who’s met Music Hall’s founder, owner and highly outspoken spokesperson Roy Hall, will already know that he was not only at the very front of the line when chutzpah was being handed out, but that he circled back for a second helping. Mind you, he’s pretty much on the money when it comes to his latest creation’s name, because it has all the features that were most prized on the ‘classic’ turntables of yesteryear, built by the likes of Garrard, Acoustic Research, BSR and others — features such as a removable headshell, and also the inclusion of automatic stop and tonearm lift at the end of an LP (known then as ‘semi-automatic’ operation because…

Rega’s entry-level decks — Planars 1, 2 and 3 — are justly renowned as top choices for those re-entering the vinyl world, or for those building what used to be regarded as a sweet spot for hi-fi separates systems. Many are the homes and student digs which saw the 1980s through with a Rega Planar 3, perhaps a NAD 3020 amp variant and some Wharfedale or Mission standmounters. But the company’s Planar 6 offers a jump to a higher level, a halfway house to Rega’s reference turntables. Yet when first launched the Planar 6 hosted technologies and materials that led the way for Rega, rather than merely offering middle-ground for upgraders. Technology & equipment Philosophy first. You might think this looks a fairly bare bones kind of turntable for the…

Special editions can make for some classy kit, but there’s always that aphorism regarding ‘lipstick on a pig’ to warn against buying mediocre product that’s been tarted up. No danger of that here. These Klipsch special editions are based on established and successful products: ‘The Fives’, indeed, are active speakers which we applauded in our #340 review of their conventional version, setting them up for a 2022 Sound+Image Award as our Active Loudspeakers of the Year. Now they’re back in our system, freshly peppered with papaya highlights and special badging that marks Klipsch’s official headphone and portable audio partnership with McLaren Formula 1. ‘Welcome to the Speed of Sound’ says the exterior of the high-class branded packaging, and when you open the flaps you’re greeted with a cable set rebraided…

Last issue we had a viewing of the finalists and winners of CEDIA’s Home Cinema award categories — now it’s the turn of the complete Integrated Homes, representing the finest smart homes delivered in the Asia-Pacific region during the challenging year of 2021. These homes aim to bring lighting, distributed audio and video, temperature control and potentially dozens of other systems under intuitive smart-home control. CEDIA is the global industry association for residential technology, with its annual Awards programme recognising technical excellence, innovation and individuals 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. With great thanks to Paul Skelton and the extended CEDIA team for their help, let’s peer into the finest…

Hisense U5120G soundbar + subwoofer Of the two soundbars which came our way coincidentally simultaneously for review this issue, both from Chinese brands, the bar from Hisense is by far the larger. Stretching a wide 120cm and weighing a full 5kg, the U5120G reminds us greatly in its external attributes of the first Samsung soundbars from the company’s Californian audio lab: solid, purposeful, covered in a black metal grille, through which shines an easy-to-read LED alphanumeric display with large white letters. But it differs radically from those early Samsung bars in both the channel count and the profusion of technology ‘ticks’ it brings to your table (or wall-mount, if you prefer). The input bay is extremely well-stocked, as is the bar with drivers — a grand total of 12 in…

It might be a reasonable assumption to think that the Rega Planar 1 would hark back to the company’s first design. But as with so many things about this UK engineering company, this history is not so predictable. Its first tables back in the 1970s were the Rega Planet in 1973 and the unnumbered original Planar in 1975, the latter a rarity since only 200 were ever produced. Despite the introduction of the legendary Planar 3 and the Planar 2 while still in the 1970s, it wasn’t until June 2005, in a period when Planar had been abbreviated to a mere ‘P’, that Rega introduced the P1. With the vinyl revival just beginning its upswing, it proved a perfectly-positioned entry-level deck to attract those coming back to the black stuff,…

When this ‘VINYL500’ turntable launched a few years ago, we rather rudely called it a ‘freak’. Not because it’s ugly — quite the opposite, indeed: it presents an immediately eye-pleasing gloss black finish, everything either black or silver or (in the case of the Audio-Technica cartridge) white. No, our name-calling addressed the less visible abilities coming from electronics hidden within. Because this a turntable that can receive Tidal... and Spotify... and internet radio and high-res network streaming. A turntable that has AirPlay and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and Ethernet. You can plug it into an amplifier, but you can equally send its output wirelessly to speakers all around the home, and have everything under app control. So it’s, er, unusual. All the extras come from Yamaha’s streaming and multiroom platform MusicCast,…

We find ourselves curiously compelled to pronounce ‘Holbo’ in a cod-Swedish accent rather than a Slovene one, but then we confess to being a little short on Slovenian background information until our research prior to the arrival of this turntable from that Central European locale. We might surmise that one national characteristic is an innovative way of doing things differently, as this is the first turntable we have reviewed which arrived with an offboard box that is not an isolated power supply, nor an offboard phono stage, but an air pump, proudly branded “Holbo Air Pump”. Which of course means we can chuckle as we insert the following amusing subheading... Pump up the volume What precisely is Holbo pumping up, aside from the volume? Bostjan Holc, the founder of Slovenian…

AlAlAl TMA-2 Studio Wireless+ Bluetooth & Wi-Fi headphones AIAIAI has been making primarily pro-orientated music gear out of Denmark since 2006. Its headphone range today is notably different from most competitors, not least in supplying modular build-your-own headphones that arrive in pieces. But some of the technologies on offer are also unusual. Modular design For most of AIAIAI’s headphones, the modular self-construction idea allows you to upgrade, swap or replace speaker units, the headband and earpads, cables and cases. However, the TMA-2 Studio Wireless+ from AIAIAI is a specific configuration in a fixed package, though it nevertheless arrives in pieces, individually packaged in the box, and you need to assemble them yourself. Don’t worry, the process is simple, and even satisfying. So here the modular design more allows you to…