Gamut by name, gamut by nature. Danish audio company Gamut (it writes it GamuT), not content with offering eight models of loudspeaker, of which the Phi7 is top of the four-model Phi range, also manufactures a CD player, preamplifier, two integrated amps and four power amps plus interconnect and speaker cables. So it can supply you with an entire hi-fi system, wires included.
Phi in the context of this Gamut speaker and its siblings is the golden ratio, 1:1.
The LS80 speakers by JBL are no shrinking violets, standing tall in the room at just over a metre high and weighing over 35kg each. The veneered sides are gently curved, as is the front. The wood finish for the side panels looks a bit dark for my taste and, as Henry Ford offered, there are lots of colours – provided you choose Dark Ebony, which is polished to a high gloss finish. The front, top and back are all in dark grey to black, so these speakers are quite sober in appearance.
Since 2004, PMC’s entry level DB1+ has been one of my reference speakers. Put another way: since reviewing it for the November 2007 issue of Hi-Fi News that year, I’ve regarded the DB1+ as one of the best speakers available for under £1000 per pair. How far under? Enough to allow that figure to include decent stands and cables.
Part of this love goes back to my unshakeable admiration for transmission line speakers, since I first heard IMFs.
As inescapably all-pervading as swine flu or the taxman, Apple’s iPod is now the most popular source component of all. The generation gap is bookended by Those Who Like Physical Music Carriers and Those Happy To Use Music Files. And, as this is a transitional period, there are those who use both. We are in the middle of a revolution that will render wall-filling libraries of discs about as desirable as typewriters or cathode-ray TVs.
One of my less endearing traits, of which I have several according to my long-suffering wife, is that I’m inclined to show off now and again. So when chatting to an acquaintance on the telephone recently I simply couldn’t resist dropping into the conversation that my living room was currently ‘cluttered’ by two outrageously expensive CD players: the £8000 Wadia 381i [see HFN July ’09] and the new £10,000 Oracle CD2500 MkII.
Moreover I was going to have to spend several days listening to music on them, using the familiar Wadia as a point of reference, and subsequently write a critique on Oracle’s new baby. Such is a reviewer’s lot.
Unruffled by the conflicting diversity of the turntable world, Clearaudio has carefully evolved its own design precepts with little regard for peer pressure or pseudo-technical fashion trends. The result is a model line-up that offers a convincing hierarchy of performance and price.
So if you start at the bottom of the Clearaudio Solution range, you can upgrade with a thicker platter, a doubled-up chassis, and so on. You might never reach the top of the line, which is the three-motored, parallel-tracking-armed Master Reference.
Some turntable manufacturers seem to make one model last for decades, but Pro-Ject is not so inhibited. Even without counting all eight colourways for the Debut III, the Austrian company’s website lists no fewer than 21 different turntable packages. The very latest of these is the Pro-Ject 6 PerspeX.
Visually, this is one of Pro-Ject’s happiest creations, certainly far more elegant than its earliest antecedent, the Pro-Ject 6, which I think was the brand’s first subchassis turntable.
One of those recurring fallacies is that a hi-fi component should be like a musical instrument. Really, it should be something quite the opposite. An instrument amplifies the vibration of a string, for example, adding its own tonal character in the form of complex harmonics. A hi-fi component, by contrast, is not supposed to add its own character, but is meant to reproduce the signal that it receives, without adding or taking anything away.
Like Audio Physic’s Sitara model recently reviewed in these pages [see HFN June ’09], the latest incarnation of the Audio Physic Tempo – the sixth, no less – catches the eye by being notably slim, deep and tilted back at 7º to provide time alignment of its small midrange driver and soft-dome tweeter.
As the grilles on either side of the cabinet hint, a pair of opposed bass drivers handle the low frequencies, an arrangement which facilitates the narrow front baffle and reduces vibration through cancellation of their magnet reaction forces. The only puzzle is why Audio Physic didn’t take the opportunity to mount the two bass units at the bottom of the cabinet, a disposition pioneered by Roy Allison to help reduce low frequency power output variations caused by interaction with the room boundaries.
Its narrow footprint makes the Tempo cabinet relatively unstable, so Audio Physic provides aluminium outriggers which screw to the bottom of the cabinet to carry spikes outboard of the base at either side.
I admit to double-checking the price of the CM9 because it appears to offer such a lot of hardware for the money. As well as being one of the largest speakers here, it has four drivers including B&W’s highly regarded FST midrange unit whose woven Kevlar cone, rather than having a conventional roll surround, is swaged at the edge and rests on a ring of foamed plastic which operates in compression. This novel arrangement improves the dissipation of cone vibrations but limits the available cone excursion, making the FST unit unsuitable for reproducing bass frequencies.
So here the CM9 hands over to twin 165mm bass drivers (effective diameter about 132mm) which are reflex loaded via B&W’s familiar dimpled Flowport.
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