John Howes has been tweaking, modifying and restoring vintage hi-fi equipment long enough to have a healthy approach to the purity of spot-on restorations. It’s a philosophy he applies to the customising of Quad’s classic II mono valve power amplifier. Because he’s also a realist, he also knows how to recognise if a product is a basket-case, useful only as a donor for spares. As the original sold well over many years, there are sufficient beyond salvation.
An all too real fissure is developing within the specialist audio industry between those who embrace the emerging paradigm of hi-res music downloads and those who view the whole development, and the role of computer audio in general, with suspicion.
Well, here’s a product that bridges the divide. The PS Audio PerfectWave Transport and DAC can – or rather, soon will – meld optical disc replay with the streaming of audio files in a way that will quickly seem natural to anyone familiar with conventional audio components. Actually, each is a stand-alone unit that can be used without the other, but only when they are combined are all their features exploitable.
There’s something about the look of Wadia components that says, ‘This is mighty serious’. It goes without saying that at £6500 – which is a pretty penny for an integrated player – the 381 is indeed a serious piece of work. But then Wadia CD transports and DACs (and players) have always cost top dollar, much like the products from those cutting-edge British digital specialists dCS.
So this is actually Wadia’s ‘budget’ offering, a cost-down version of the £9800 581se CD/SACD player.
However hard they may try, proponents of multichannel music are not going to convince certain audiophiles that anything more than just two channels are needed for sonic bliss. Canadian company Classé, a manufacturer that also produces multichannel players, has taken the decision to produce a top-end two-channel-only CD player – despite its internals employing multichannel components. What it has done, in a breathtaking display of lateral thinking, is force-feed all this capacity into optimised stereo playback.
As a result, the CDP-202 has odd capabilities, such as DVD-Audio playback mixed down to stereo, and you can – if you’re the sort who doesn’t object to watching a feature film on a mobile phone – view a video DVD on its front-panel LCD control panel.
Valves and vinyl go together like the proverbial horse and carriage, so it isn’t too surprising that one of Italy’s best-known tube amplifier manufacturers recently decided to offer its own turntable, arm and cartridge. You could say that Unison Research has carved its own niche because, apart from the tubes, its amplifiers are notable for the use of real wood as a styling element.
When British manufacturers say ‘real wood’, they usually mean a thin slice of rosewood or whatever, glued to a thicker piece of chipboard. Not so the Italians, who still seem prepared to hew speaker cabinets out of solid trees, as Unison does its amplifier ornaments.
Actually, there is nothing new about the turntable, or indeed the arm reviewed here. What is new, and rather exciting, is the completion of the P9 package with Rega’s long-awaited Apheta MC cartridge and the just-released Ios moving-coil phono stage. On paper, this is the best the company has to offer.
A key feature of the P9 is the ceramic platter, as hard as ruby or sapphire, which first appeared on the preceding Planar 9 in 1997.
Let’s play a game of audio word association. If I say ‘Cabasse’, what’s your response? If it’s ‘What?’ because you’ve never heard of the French speaker manufacturer then shame on you. Its name may not be on everyone’s lips but Cabasse has been around a long time and even in not-always-Francophile UK the marque has staunch admirers.
If you replied ‘Bizarre’ instead then that is both linguistically and technically nearer the mark.
I’m a sucker for a bit of extreme hi-fi, so how could I resist the UK’s first review of what is billed as the world’s most powerful domestic subwoofer. Velodyne’s DD-1812 Signature Edition is a 176kg beast with two 1250W Class D amps driving twin drivers in a true two-way configuration. Low frequency duties are split between a 12in carbon-laminate driver at the top and a whopping great 18in version for the really deep-down stuff south of approximately 35Hz. The name 1812 is a rather dull reference to the driver dimensions and not Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece of that year, which would have been so much more appealing given the piece’s famous low frequency thunder.
Kevin Edwards, founder and managing director of Talk Electronics in Surrey, is introducing a new range of ‘budget’ products under the brand name Edwards Audio. Unusually for such an enterprise the intention is to manufacture everything locally in the UK rather than design it here and have it made overseas.
The manufacturer says this ensures better control of manufacturing quality. But as discussed before in the pages of HFN, the cost benefit of manufacturing in places such as China is fast reducing anyway due to increasing labour costs and the diminished value of the pound.
Having played with a number of PrimaLuna ProLogue products, I’m safe in saying that each and every one represents astonishing value because 1) they’re made in China, but 2) to European standards. They single-handedly established and provided credibility for the lower entry-level price point for rock-solid valve products, and showed that China was ready to compete with the rest of the world in hardware manufacture, if the proper structure was applied. With DiaLogue, PrimaLuna is attacking the next price point, with the same vigour.
That in itself should be enough to make the DiaLogue Two a fascinating prospect for those with up to £2000 to spend on amplification.
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