You could have knocked me down with a feather when, late last year, I received an e-mail from Adrian Walker, one half of the dynamic duo behind the original Deltec Precision Audio. I had used DPA’s 100S pre/power combination for the best part of a decade in my own system, and reviewed the inaugural product in HFN Oct ’87, but the company had dropped off our collective radar by the late 1990s. Rob Watts, the pioneering engineer behind the outfit, had moved on to other projects including a now longstanding relationship with Chord Electronics. Yes, Rob Watts ex- of DPA is the same Watts behind the WTA digital filter used in Chord’s Red Reference CD player.
Pioneer’s flagship Susano amplifier arrived amidst an unseasonable summer tempest that lashed the south of England with high winds and heavy rain. An auspicious start for an amplifier that derives its name from the ancient Japanese god of storms. Sadly, divine intervention didn’t go so far as helping me carry it to the listening room because it’s the size and weight of a small stone temple.
The SC-LX90 is Pioneer’s statement of intent at the upper echelons of the AV amplifier market, sharing the same piano-black fascia and cosmetic cues as the company’s top-end plasma screens.
Surfing the wave of new and innovative Far Eastern valve products, Emillé looks set to ride a tube of its own with the visually stunning KI-40L. The Far East has been producing quality components for many years (see boxout for company history). However in recent years, as the world has shrunk thanks to the internet, an opportunity has opened up for us to try exotic fare on offer from the likes of Shanling and now Korean company Emillé.
Part amplifier, part sculpture this physically imposing component is rated at just 40W/ch and forms part of a five-strong range.
Audiophile jewellery for the home’ is how Chord Electronics’ founder and CEO John Franks describes the company’s ‘Brilliant’ finish option available for its less costly – but still reassuringly expensive – Choral Series components. It’s an apt description sure enough, pretty much all of the brand’s products exhibiting a quality of fit and finish that is nothing short of immaculate. Nevertheless to describe them as somewhat ‘macho’ would be a considerable understatement. As our own Ken Kessler said in his description of Chord’s original RED Reference player [HFN Jan ’08], ‘… it oozes Chord-ness – that over-engineered, Terminator-meets-Rolex look’.
But that would take millions of tubes!’ said a puzzled high-end distributor back in 1986, on first hearing that an American company had launched a valve CD player. He’d have been right, if anyone had really envisaged replacing all the player’s integrated circuits with glowing bottles.
It turned out, of course, that California Audio Labs had just added a tube analogue output stage, with gentle passive filtering, to an otherwise conventional player. The CAL Tempest was the first of more than few.
Last year, an amusing VPI newsletter listed three important events of 1978. Coca-Cola reached China, and the Grateful Dead played at the Pyramids, ‘seeking perfect sound and immortality’. Finally, ‘VPI Industries, Inc, started its first year in business. ’ And 30 years on, VPI is still family-owned, building turntables in its small factory in New Jersey.
Very few western audiophiles speak or read the language, but there are a couple of Japanese pictograms familiar to all. They have appeared on every Koetsu cartridge since the 1970s, and they always tell you that you’re looking at one of the hi-fi world’s most enduring objects of desire.
When the original Koetsu MC1 reached the UK market in 1980, it was already a cult product in the USA and Japan. Here it cost about three times as much as any other top-of-the-range moving-coil available, but it quickly gained fervent devotees.
When Scott Walker famously sang ‘My Ship Is Coming In’ he could have been describing taking delivery of a pair of Focal’s £110,000 Grande Utopia EMs, surely one of the finest dynamic loudspeakers known to humankind. Standing over 2m tall and weighing 260kg (each!), the four-way ‘Grande EM’ with its electromagnetic 16in woofer and user-adjustable ‘Focus Time’ cabinet construction is a statement product that challenges the envelope of speaker performance. Privileged indeed are the audiophiles with adequately large listening rooms in which to accommodate them and deep enough pockets to afford them.
Focal is France’s largest and most successful speaker manufacturer, producing several series of hi-fi models ranging from affordable to, well, the price of a Bentley in the case of the aforementioned flagship.
Oh to live in a trendy warehouse conversion overlooking the Thames. Imagine the acres of glass, the polished floors and the designer furniture with the Habitat labels peeled off. One’s loudspeakers would need to offer equally stunning visual splendour, exude an air of bespoke affluence and leave your friends (probably called Tarquin and Jemima) green with envy. Clearly you would need Jamo’s sumptuous R 909s or if your City bonus has been a little credit crunched this year, perhaps the smaller but equally lush R 907s reviewed here.
These new Mission 792s certainly have kerb appeal, or maybe that should be curve appeal. With their contoured sides, wrap-around grilles and sculpted front, no one could accuse them of not standing out from the crowd – even if their looks are sure to divide opinion sharply. The shiny black finish is actually genuine piano lacquer, with seven coats applied to create a truly deep and lustrous gloss. This approach is both labour and time intensive, as each coating must be dried for 24 hours before it is rubbed down by hand and re-sprayed.
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