The ‘ultimate version’ of B&W’s 700 series flagship gets the Signature treatment, including two bespoke colour options
It’s only about two years ago that Bowers & Wilkins introduced the S3 generation of its 700 series. A major overhaul of the venerable British brand’s popular midrange offering, its attention-grabbing improvements included a notably curvier front baffle with protruding drivers (housed in ‘pods’) and an elongated tube for the ‘Tweeter-on-Top’. This was all quite familiar for anyone who saw the earlier revamped 800 D4 series, so B&W isn’t being untruthful when it claims to deploy trickle-down technology.
This Slovakian brand’s premium phono preamp is an all-tube design – with transformer step-up for MCs – and one of the latest to jump aboard the ‘balanced bandwagon’!
Canor Audio has been around for nearly three decades, but it’s only in the past few years the Slovakian company has stepped fully into the limelight. If you asked how the brand would describe itself, Canor’s founders would likely say ‘tube specialists’. This is fair, considering how much effort it puts into validating and testing valves before pressing them into its many tube products – and those it builds for other major brands, too. But if that might ...
This boutique brand from China’s technology hub squeezes a truly high-end DAC and
analogue headphone amp into a bijou, alloy enclosure. It puts the ‘mini’ into minimalism
Okay, so let’s get the ‘death ray’ jokes out of the way right at the start: what we have here is a high-aiming DAC-equipped headphone amp from a Chinese-based company that’s new – to me at least – but has a growing range of digital products, all with slightly odd names. High-aiming? Well, the rather literally-branded Listening M1 might be tiny, but it sells for a punchy £2599 alongside the £399 Pegasus SG1 Bluetooth headphone amp and Prelude DTR1+ portable music player.
EISA, or the Expert Imaging and Sound Association, is an organisation representing 56 of the most respected special interest publications and websites from 27 countries that cover Hi-Fi, Home Theater Video, Home Theater Audio, Photography, Mobile Devices, and In-Car Electronics. Every year EISA's Expert Group members, including editors from this publication, test a very wide range of new products from their field of expertise before comparing results and voting to decide on the cream of every product category.
German marque’s flagship B series floorstander offers smart bass-tuning potential. Is this the speaker for every room?
Although the largest and most expensive member of Burmester’s B series loudspeakers (which are ranged below its BA and BC models), the £22,700 B38 doesn’t – when viewed front on at least – look quite like the all-singing, all-dancing range-topper you might expect. Yes, it’s marginally taller than the step-down B28 (£17,600), at 1165mm versus 1144mm, but it’s also slimmer, its 210mm width shaving off 13mm. And then there are the drivers, with the B28 having four cascading down its front baffle, while the B38 features just two…
The hi-fi world’s most powerful amplifier – the aptly named Relentless – has spawned two new offspring, but the ‘baby brother’ of the duo still weighs in at 145kg apiece
Lame analogies – both banal and obvious – spring to mind when one is directed to review an amplifier which is a little over half the power of its predecessor. One thinks of cars offered with engines of half the horsepower of a dearer sibling, of second growth wines, and other half-pint offerings. But the D’Agostino Relentless 800 Mono Amplifier – a heady £236,000 per pair – delivers the wattage that provides its model name: 800W per chassis. And that is conservative.
Rarities, remixes, outtakes and alternate tracks... Ken Kessler picks his way through the latest single-artist compilation albums to bring you the perfectly curated must-have sets
Compilations primarily used to mean ‘best ofs’ with, say, all the hits for those who just weren’t invested enough to crave an artist’s or band’s complete catalogue. While more focused than ‘various artists’ collections like the interminable Now That’s What I Call… series, they were just as variable sonically because the track selection might span several decades.
The BBC isn’t just a creator of content – since the early days of hi-fi it’s collected and archived commercial music. But has its operation become too big to continue, wonders Steve Harris
When you’ve got a million records, some of them might have to go. In January the BBC began a series of online auctions to dispose of unwanted vinyl from its fabled record library. In a tweet, Omega Auctions said it had spent a productive few days clearing out thousands of LPs from the BBC’s archive. You wonder whether this was just another job to them, or whether they thought they’d died and gone to heaven.
They’re everywhere, says Peter Quantrill, but let’s dispel dyspeptic indignation and instead see young and gifted conductors as a sign of hope when it comes to the future of classical music. Tarmo Peltokoski is among the most youthful and gifted products of Jorma Panula’s conducting class at the Helsinki Conservatoire in Finland
As a follower of cricket and football, I got used years ago to seeing professionals at the top of their game (sorry), who had been born within the current millennium. But conductors? DG has lately been making a song and dance about their latest signing, Tarmo Peltokoski. Born in April 2000, he is now principal guest conductor of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, and DG has recorded and filmed them together in a trio of Mozart’s mature symphonies.
Our hi-fi history is often passed over by academics and museum curators, believes Jim Lesurf, which is why books such as Stephen Spicer’s celebration of Leak are so worthwhile
I was recently delighted and excited to hear that a new edition of Stephen Spicer’s book on the history of Leak – Firsts In High Fidelity – has been released. The original edition appeared as a large-format paperback in the year 2000, and it’s a fascinating account of the story of the people involved, the company, and its products.
This boutique brand from China’s technology hub squeezes a truly high-end DAC and
analogue headphone amp into a bijou, alloy enclosure. It puts the ‘mini’ into minimalism
German marque’s flagship B series floorstander offers smart bass-tuning potential. Is this the speaker for every room?
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