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Welcome to the AVTech Awards for 2016/17, where once again the UK’s trio of premium AV magazine brands – Hi-Fi Choice, Home Cinema Choice and Hi-Fi News & Record Review – come together to celebrate the very best hardware you can buy. Collectively we test and review more hi-fi, TV and home theatre equipment than any other organisation in the UK, with hundreds of pages of editorial content published every month! Our Awards are informed by this pool of experience, stretching from headphones and portable music players to flagship floorstanding loudspeakers; from 4K TVs to projectors and Ultra HD Blu-ray players; from media streamers, USB DACs and headphone amps to turntables, integrated and pre/power amplifiers and every black box and cable in between. So whether you’re a two-channel music fan or home cinema enthusiast, or someone seeking the best of both worlds, let the AVTech Awards be your guide. .

The cover bears the name of pianist/synth player Motschmann alone, but here he’s joined by Boris Bolles on more synths and violins, and percussionist David Panzl, with Bolles also recording and mixing the album. The opening is all very ‘Berlin’, hitting you with a burst of white noise sufficient to convince you that your digital playback has gone skew-whiff, then continues into washes of electronica. However, by the second track, ‘Parhelia’, we’re into a juddering, compelling rhythm, echoed in ‘Flow Expansion’, and on we go – a foot-tapping bass line here, a swirly wash of synthefication there, sometime meditative, sometimes jarringly atonal. The sound is certainly powerful when it needs to be, with some evil bass in there, and clean even when it’s pushing hard, meaning the album rewards at least a second listen.

Ummm, yes, so it’s a children’s album – and one the Canadian jazz singer (and high-school French teacher) says she made because some of her fans were already playing her music to their kids. So you have a set that’s pitched at the younger end of the ‘kids’ brief, and featuring the likes of Muppet favourite ‘The Rainbow Connection’ (which arguably Kermit performed better), ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’, a setting of A A Milne’s ‘Halfway Down The Stairs’, and the lullaby ‘Hushabye Mountain’, from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. There are probably ad types already getting misty-eyed and visualising Christmas campaigns while listening to this album, as Panton has just the right fragility and breathiness of voice. However, for all the lushness of the sound here – and it is beautifully recorded – I found the whole saccharine enterprise sleep-inducing.

Borich has four decades of work behind him, including supporting the likes of Jeff Beck and Buddy Guy and appearing with Bo Diddley, Taj Mahal and Joe Walsh. What’s on offer here is a no-nonsense mix of mainstream rock/blues, and if that has you thinking you know what to expect, you’re probably bang on the money. There’s something very old-fashioned (classic?) about this set, from the content to the recorded sound, which is all great swathes of grumbling bass, distorted guitars, tub-thumping drums: one minute it’s all a bit ‘Smoke On The Water’, the next it’s attacking weasel politicians and bankers on the revealingly-titled ‘SoapBoxBitchinBlues’. If you’ve a hankering for an album sounding like it was recorded in the ’70s, this is it – just don’t be too confused by the last three bonus tracks as it all goes at turns jazzy and then gets deeply, oddly New Age.