LATEST ADDITIONS

Anyone who has followed Vertere's founder Touraj Moghaddam, all the way back to the early days of Roksan, cannot fail to have been impressed with his iconoclasm. A lifetime later, he's still making cutting-edge turntables from left-field. I knew he hadn't mellowed as soon as he dissuaded me from using a clamp or a weight on the LP, before removing the spindle with a flourish. That was my introduction to the SG-1 Super Groove, one model below the flagship RG-1 Reference Groove.

The trend for 'anniversary' products – witness the plethora of celebratory hardware on display at this year's High End show – continues with Rotel's new Diamond Series. Released to mark 60 years since the brand launched, it comprises the £3999 RA-6000 integrated amplifier and £1999 DT-6000 CD player. Not the hefty additions to the Michi lineup you might have expected, these are instead very much classic Rotel designs (fitting, as the traditionalist brand is not one to hop on every new fad that comes along) albeit with trickle-down technology from its flagship stablemates.

I'll let you into a little secret. Before no-one else did, and our world became all credit cards and phone taps, the rich stayed rich by never carrying cash. The Queen, for instance, was famous for never having any moolah on her at all, except on a Sunday when, if she was going to church, she'd have a tenner folded and ironed into a neat square so she could discretely slip it into the collection box.

Coming from Musical Fidelity's upper-tier M6 series, the M6x is the Austrian company's priciest DAC, and the latest evolution of a product that originated around a decade ago. Of course, there has been plenty of progression through the M6 [HFN Mar '13], M6s [HFN Jan '18] and M6sR models to where we are now, both outside and in, but a few things haven't changed, including the size of the hardware, and the absence of any network streaming.