Innehållsförteckning för Issue 364 från Sound + Image

Epson has launched a new laser home cinema projector, the EH-LS9000B, which brings much of the technology of the higher EH-LS12000B to a more affordable price level. The lens is the same — a 15-element precision glass structure designed for zero-light leakage — and it shares the same 32-bit 4K image processor as well, able to handle real-time colour, contrast, frame interpolation and scene-adaptive gamma. This includes generating interpolated 4K frames to improve overall motion fluidity and sharpness. This is stated as a full 4K projector, though it uses pixel-shifting to achieve it, along with Epson's proprietary 3LCD technology and three individual LCD chips that display 100% of the RGB colour signal for every frame, ensuring that colours are delivered at full brightness — and the same brightness as whites,…

KEF has revived the Coda name, famed for bringing new affordability to the UK speaker brand back in the 1970s and 1980s, and now perhaps to do the same for the company's wireless active speakers, as the pricing is keen, below even KEF's junior LSX II LT active speakers; the new Coda W has an RRP of $1450 the pair. With amplifiers and Bluetooth, a pair of Coda Ws could serve as a complete streaming system, while physical inputs allow expansion, including HDMI ARC from a TV, optical digital, USB-C (for a computer, not for sticks or drives), one analogue line-level input, plus a phono input for a turntable. The main difference here is that the streaming is all via Bluetooth, whereas KEF's higher wireless models also use Wi-Fi and…

Most people give very little thought to how they connect up their TVs. As a rule, it's plug the cables into the sockets and then forget about them. But these cables and connections are capable of far more than simple signal transmission, and one type in particular is now being upgraded. HDMI 2.2 was announced in January 2025 at CES. It will replace HDMI 2.1 (or join it, given that previous standards tend to hang around), and among its various abilities are several features we're glad to see, in addition to the promise of better picture quality. When will we see devices that use HDMI 2.2? How is it better than HDMI 2.1? And what else can HDMI 2.2 be used for, besides TVs and projectors? Let's dive into the…

There were some unusual aspects to this home cinema installation by Wavetrain Cinemas, a company based in Taren Point, south-east Sydney. For a start this home is in a regional area of Queensland, so careful planning was required to minimise flights up from Sydney. And thinking ahead to the end of the process, an obvious inclusion from the start was the ability to later service the installation remotely, and to make any fixes without incurring 16 hours travel time there and back. Further, this home is in a tropical region, subject to heat and high humidity, creating special requirements for both ventilation and materials, such as the timber floor rather than carpet to limit any potential for mould — thereby making the ceiling design critical to getting the acoustics to…

Aurender makes servers. Its first product, some 15 years ago, was a hard-drive-based server designed by the company's founder Harry Lee, an engineer and music enthusiast who was dissatisfied with existing music server options then available, which were largely computer-based, and didn't take the needs of audio delivery into account, he thought. So he built one that did. Aurender's ongoing models added DACs and analogue outputs to the servers, and simultaneously developed the ability to stream from the new online music services, as well as from file storage within the home. One key to their claimed musicality has been Aurender's buffering of music: the caching of files to internal memory before playback, or via RAM for streaming services, with the goals of reducing jitter, latency and mechanical noise, even able…

SUMMARY Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 $699 + Full-bodied sonic character + Impressive levels of textural insight + Decent array of features – Can't fold them up – Some features still to come We had a full review of these remarkable headphones only last issue, and an EISA award for them too, but we could hardly miss them out of this group, especially as they shine so brightly even among these high achievers. And that's remarkable given that Bowers & Wilkins is a marque still relatively new to headphones — 15 years now, yes, but compare that with 36 years for Bose, 57 years for Sennheiser, and 61 years for Sony. Even Apple has been doing iPod earbuds since 2001. The Px7 model was first introduced in 2019, going from the…

How 1995 is 2025? Well, while the masses lob lager around Aussie stadia to nursery-rhyme sentiments, the sonic intelligentsia is clamouring for more fulfilling fare from the new Suede. The widespread critical rehabilitation of the 90s’ high-art heroes with 2022's punky ‘Autofiction’ album might have been baffling for those of us of the opinion that they've been consistently knocking grand-pop masterpieces out of the park since their 2013 comeback ‘Bloodsports’ (playing catch-up? Start with Barriers, It Starts And Ends With You, The Fur And The Feathers, Life Is Golden and Flytipping). But the respect they've been garnering as Britpop's finest ongoing concern is thoroughly deserved, and ‘Antidepressants’, their 10th album, proves there's plenty more magnificence where ‘Autofiction’ came from. Maintaining much of their recent garage-rock momentum, plus copious dollops of…

Being the sixth and final instalment in a reassuringly expensive series of extensive box sets covering Bowie's post-Gnome recordings in significant detail (which began during the artist's lifetime with 2015's ‘Five Years 1969-1973’), ‘I Can't Give Everything Away’ follows a familiar format. Offering a choice of either 13 CDs or 18 vinyls (each with hefty hardback book), the set comprises four remastered studio albums — ‘Heathen’, ‘Reality’, ‘The Next Day’, ‘Blackstar’ — a stunning unreleased 31-track set from the '02 Montreux Jazz Festival, a resequenced remaster of the ‘A Reality Tour’ live album (Dublin '03), ‘The Next Day Extra’ EP, the Lazarus stage musical-focused ‘No Plan’ EP and — the gold for hard-core fans still long-pocketed enough to remain completists — a 41-track ‘Re:call’ segment corraling non-album alternatives, B-sides and…

The one piece of information we don't yet have about Optoma's new UHR90DV is the price, making it difficult to assess exactly where the 4K projector is pitched. But the Taiwan-based company's press release prior to the IFA 2025 debut in Berlin calls it their new “flagship”, and the specs attest to its abilities. As a DLP projector it uses pixel-flipping to achieve its stated 4K resolution, but notably it uses not four flips of the usual 0.47-inch 1920×1080 Digital Micromirror Device, but rather a larger 0.66-inch DMD, which we'd assume to be the DLP660TE with its native resolution of 2716×1528 requiring only two flips to deliver the required number of pixels to the screen of 4K. It can also deliver 2K at up to 240Hz, and for gamers it…

REL is a subwoofer specialist, and it does some things differently, notably a preference for speaker-level inputs to blend seamlessly with your main speakers, rather than simply taking a LFE feed from a receiver. Originally founded in Wales by the great Richard Lord (REL = Richard Edmund Lord), it has been headquartered in California now for two decades, always expanding on the company's original design principles. Now comes an entirely new Serie S, reinventing one of REL's most iconic lines, re-engineering drivers and introducing the ability to go wireless with ‘Airship Direct’. The new subs rise (or fall) from the $6299 S 550 model with a 10-inch CarbonAlloy active driver backed by a 550W Class-D amplifier and a 12-inch downfiring passive radiator, up through the $7799 S 850 (12-inch active,…

SUMMARY TCL 65C8K miniLED TV Price: $2999 + Great overall picture + Stunning HDR performance + Google TV interface + Free ‘TCL Channels' – No headphone out Regular readers will know that in recent years we have championed MiniLED panel technology in televisions as providing first OLED-busting value and then increasingly OLED-busting performance as well. Brightness and dynamic range of MiniLED panels overtook OLED years ago, leaving OLED TVs as recommendations for dark rooms only. And who has a dark room in Australia? The leading lights in TV development long ago moved from Japan to South Korea, but in the last decade the biggest developments (and often, counterintuitively, also the best information) are coming from the big Chinese brands. As with MiniLED they began offering value, but they're now building…

SUMMARY Triangle Borea BR04 Price: $1100 / pair + Excellent value for the build & performance + Solid, well-balanced sound + Bright but not overbright – Too bulky for shelves Triangle introduced the Borea series some six years ago as a set of three floorstanders, two standmounts and a centre speaker, in which the French company (based in Soissons, about 100km from Paris in the direction of Belgium) aimed to bring the best of the sound and tech from its higher Esprit EZ range to a more accessible price point. The range has proven popular, and since its launch there have been some subtle tweaks to the crossovers, together with more finish options. The company has also released active versions of the two standmount models, giving them internal amplifiers and a…

SUMMARY Sennheiser Momentum 4 $579.95 standard; $639.95 80th anniversary + Clean, neutral, musical + 60-hour battery life + Effective ANC + Wired listening doesn't require battery – ‘Standard’ version boring aesthetics – Earcups don't fold inwards Longstanding users may find it surprising to find the Sennheisers at the lowest price in our group here, currently listed on the company's website at $579.95 for the standard version — although as with many headphones, discounts are widespread, large, and often variable over time. Also there are currently two possible price ranges we can apply to Sennheiser's Momentum 4 wireless noise-cancellers, because the headphones as pictured here are a snazzy special edition. The standard finish is, well, rather standard. We were moaning only recently about how dull design has become at Sennheiser since control…

SUMMARY Sony WH-1000XM6 $699.95 + Spacious musical sound + Detail & dynamism + Superb ANC – No aptX HD (but LDAC) – Case is still on the large side – No audio via USB-C Sony's overear noise-cancelling headphones have been among our favourite noise-cancellers back at least to the XM3 version. Indeed it can be easy to see each version since then as iterative improvements; sometimes features were even taken away and then brought back again — such as the hinges which make a return on this XM6. But on the whole, with every new headset Sony has thoughtfully revisited the design, features, sound quality, noise cancelling and call quality in an effort to keep one step ahead of the competition. So the XM6 obviously shares DNA with their award-winning predecessors.…

SUMMARY Audio-Technica ATH-R70xa Price: $499 + Music without restraint + Incredibly pure bass + Open wide highs + Super lightweight – Suitable headphone amp required for their 470-ohm impedance We recently reviewed the entry-level headphones in this range, Audio-Technica's ATH-R30x open-back reference headphones, which are priced at what we thought to be a remarkably low $219. This led us to wonder how much better the higher R-series headphones from the company might be, as they rise from the R30x up through the ATH-R50x at $399 to the rangetopping ATH-R70xa, priced at $499. The local distributors TAG very kindly volunteered a pair. Note that this top ‘R’ series model has ‘a’ on the end — there was already an R70x on the market; as we write it's still listed on Audio-Technica's website…

Dedicating There Is A Light That Never Goes Out “to everybody here tonight — and nobody fucking else” suggests Morrissey-tinged thorns may still prickle Johnny Marr's side, but overall this live album confirms how solidly he has established his own postSmiths identity. Recorded at Hammersmith Apollo in April 2024, its 22 tracks pump through so-so solo highlights, Smiths favourites, and slightly more pounding electronica than might be anticipated. Guest Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant lisps along to duet on a workaday Rebel Rebel and a spirited Getting Away With It, while Marr gets the audience la-la-la-ing to Iggy's The Passenger. Inevitably it's those old Smiths sad bangers that draw the wild whoops, though, whether the guitarist likes it or not. Marr seems Zen about that, and these days is comfortable…

Bad pressings, bad storage, bad previous owners: vinyl LPs can warp for a number of reasons — and of course a warped record makes a mockery of your turntable's carefully-adjusted VTA, azimuth and tracking force. Can you somehow flatten them out? Yes you can; there are a few flatteners on the market, but some are excessively bulky compared with the new Flat.Duo from Germany's AFI (Audio Fidelity Improvement), a “flattener and relaxer” also noted for its energy efficiency and the ability to select and maintain just the right temperature to ‘relax’ your vinyl depending on its specific material and degree of deformation. AFI notes that the process not only flattens discs, but also the tempering process “leads to an increase in the crystalline content of the vinyl; this makes the…

As with Revox, the Swiss company Nagra is most famed for its legendary tape recorders, but has also long offered a full range of hi-fi. Now it's shrinking things down while also providing a more affordable entry point, with a ‘Compact’ range including a Nagra Streamer, Compact Phono, and Compact PSU in neat CNC-machined solid-aluminium cases, along with a smaller version of the company's VFS acoustic isolation base, which is compatible with any of the three Compact models. Nagra notes that the new models match the size of the legendary Nagra VII recorder (but these aren't made for shoulder-slinging outdoor use!). Their diminished size doesn't restrict the Swiss engineering inside: the Streamer includes the Connect versions of Tidal, Qobuz and Spotify, AirPlay 2, UPnP/DLNA, vTuner internet radio, it's Roon Ready,…

We've been living with the High Dynamic Range of Dolby Vision for more than a decade now; it successfully found a place on discs and streaming services for its several advantages over the royalty-free HDR10, notably expanding HDR10's 10-bit colour range to 12-bit (each bit doubling the number of available colours), while also using dynamic metadata rather than static metadata. Static metadata meant that for HDR10, such overall parameters as brightness, contrast, and colour couple be optimised for a display device only once to cover an entire movie, which seemed useful when first introduced, until Dolby Vision's dynamic metadata made such adjustments possible for each scene, or in extremis, even frame-by-frame metadata. With these advantages for attention to detail, Dolby Vision content has often seemed to be also more carefully…

This is the mark two version of JBL's top-tier soundbar solution, making it the biggest and most powerful of a newly-released range which rises from simple solo soundbars through soundbars with subwoofers up to soundbars like this, with ends that come off and turn into real wireless rear speakers. And this rangetopping JBL Bar 1300Mk2 is the update of a product which won our Sound+Image Soundbar System of the Year for 2023. Much remains the same, or similar, in the new package. This is a good size of soundbar with a paired wireless subwoofer, and its very particular trick is that the two ends of the soundbar can be removed and resituated at the back of the room, where they instantly become battery-powered wireless rear speakers delivering genuine (rather than…

“In consideration of our hi-fi orientated readers, among whom we count ourselves, we have rarely included any iPod docks in this magazine…” So we wrote, rather snootily, back in 2007, when reviewing the first Zeppelin, while also citing the compressed 128k MP3 audio files being widely loaded onto iPods as having “entered the audiophile's crosshairs as leading hate-object, rightly so.” But back then we made an exception for the remarkable Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin. It was “the most ambitious and expensive standalone speaker dock yet released”, we wrote 18 years ago, though Australians may recall that at the time it was memorably rivalled by South Australia's VAF Research, which had a Microsoft Zune dock called the Octavio, which sounded fantastic. Alas the Zune did not survive, while the iPod went…

SUMMARY Bose QuietComfort Ultra $649 Gen 1; $699 Gen 2 + Folding design + Rich, full-bodied sound + Punchy, dynamic delivery + Exceptional ANC – Immersive Audio unconvincing – No USB-C playback on Gen 1 Next up are the rangetoppers from the company which first delivered commercial noise-cancellation: it was Dr. Amar Gopal Bose himself who came up with the idea while on a transAtlantic flight in 1978, famously sketching out the basics of a circuit before touching down. And remarkably, Bose has held its lead in that technology: the QuietComfort Ultra headphones live up to their name in providing one of the best cancellation experiences here, dramatically reducing background rumbles while out walking, or train clatter during our daily commute (though the sudden clunk of a door closing breaks through).…

SUMMARY Apple AirPods Max $999 + Superb audio and noise-cancelling + Cinematic spatial audio + USB-C lossless audio – Bizarre case – Effectively for Apple devices only – No cable, no in-flight connection When the AirPods Max arrived in 2020, they cost at least a third more than the flagship pairs from Sony, Bose and Sennheiser at the time. And they still do, at list prices anyway, despite staying the same for five years other than colour changes, a switch to USB-C charging, plus the fabulous September 2024 update that allows them to play lossless audio down the USB-C cable. Their release pricing back in 2020 gave a green light for other brands to go even pricier, with the likes of DALI, Mark Levinson, Focal and Bowers & Wilkins (with the…

This was our third visit to this UK show; its location at the prestigious Ascot Grandstand near Windsor makes it a very different hi-fi event, with demonstration rooms in boxes and suites overlooking the verdant green racecourse. It's a concrete-solid building more than 350 metres long, so that the four floors of demonstrations this year together extended more than a kilometre. Even with a careful plan of attack we still clocked upwards of 5.5km of walking during our day of listening. Other elements also lifted the Show: live performances included singer-songwriter Reema performing three separate concerts on the Saturday (recorded for a future release as ‘Reema at Ascot’), while on the Sunday the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performed a set of classical classics in the Parade Ring, also recorded, this time…