LATEST ADDITIONS

With no shortage of standmount loudspeakers vying for our attention, any newcomer needs to stand out from the crowd. And few stand out as boldly as Klipsch's £625 'Reference Premiere' series RP-600M, arriving from a company with an auspicious portfolio of exciting-sounding horn-loaded loudspeakers [HFN Jun '19], all dating back to the first ever Klipschorn model launched in 1946.

Carbon is one of the most common and versatile elements found on Earth. In its purest form it has the odd characteristic of being what chemists call allotropic. That is to say, it can appear in more than one distinct form of the same state.

Agood hi-fi system should invoke 'passion' in the listener – be that an urge to crank-up the volume, to play an air guitar or wave an imaginary baton. French brand YBA knows this only too well, bestowing this particular moniker on its penultimate lineup of models. Coming in below its Statement units, but above Design, Heritage and Genesis, the six-strong Passion range also includes the PRE550/AMP650 pre/power amplifiers [HFN May '18].

According to that top old egghead Brain Eno, 'The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band'. One of those is a weird young man from a place called Natick, some 17 miles West of Boston, Massachusetts. The little guy's name is Jonathan Michael Richman and he was once so obsessed with The Velvet Underground that he quit school and skipped off to New York to seek them out.