In 2012 Kudos introduced the £3500 Cardea Super 10 [HFN June ’12], a go-for-broke ‘supercharged’ version of the company’s 12 litre two-way standmount. Now the company has followed up with a ‘Super’ version of its Cardea C20 floorstander.
Kudos has worked extensively with SEAS in developing specific drivers for its various speaker models, the Super 20 employing the 29mm ‘Crescendo K2’ soft dome tweeter first introduced in the £13,000 Kudos Titan T88 flagship.
The bass/mid driver in the Super 20 is a newly-developed version of the SEAS 18cm unit with hand-treated paper cone.
Magico has wisely decided to ‘trickle down’ its Q series know-how into a new and mildly more affordable series: the S1 and S5 floorstanders. The latter is a good £11k shy of the similarly-proportioned Q3 [HFN Sep ’11] and yet it offers almost exactly the same sensitivity, an even flatter response but a measurably and palpably superior bass extension.
The S5’s body comprises three main sections – a thick alloy baffle plus two curved, 0. 5in-thick side extrusions that increase stiffness while minimising internal standing waves.
Peak Consult is a Danish boutique high-end loudspeaker manufacturer which can arguably be regarded as a Danish equivalent of Sonus faber. The engineering focus, lush aesthetics and fastidious attention to detail are certainly at one with the philosophies of the Italian speaker brand, and price points, from the entry-level Princess V to the six-figure Peak Consult Dragon, are up there too.
The Princess V is a compact yet extremely hefty speaker with superb woodwork and an all-Danish driver array. The tweeter is a custom Scan-Speak model with a 1in silk dome and the main driver a bespoke 5in AudioTechnology unit.
Customer and retailer reactions have suggested the need for a new Wilson speaker closer in performance to the universally-acclaimed Alexandria XLF [HFN Nov ’12], but one that swallowed no more real estate than a Sasha. With a footprint close to the Sasha’s, the Alexia hosts only a slight increase in height, due mainly to the necessarily larger woofer enclosure.
To provide a goodly portion of the XLF’s adaptability, precision and coherence, the smaller Alexia had to offer adjustability of the midrange and tweeter positioning with to-the-millimetre accuracy, according to room specifics and the location of the owner’s ‘hot seat’. That meant a head section with movable segments, but with a volume akin to that of the original WATT.
Campbell (26) fell in love with the sound of the piano as a child. Rather than training formally he decided to shut himself away with an instrument, playing and writing his own music. The 12 tracks selected for recording – some dating back to his teens – have titles, ‘Light on the River’, etc, which he says are not meant to be taken literally. But he sees Sketches as an integral work.
This debut album outing from California’s This Wild Life sees the duo Kevin Jordan and Anthony Del Grosso recording with Aaron Marsh of Florida-based indie rock band Copeland, performing a collection of heartfelt and melodic ‘acoustic punk-rock’ songs described as a melding of punk and folk. Indeed the band describes itself as being able to successfully perform softer music while touring with heavier bands that play the sort of hardcore punk and metal they spent the formative years exploring. The sound quality throughout is slightly hard-edged and in-your-face, the production ‘crowded’ and subjectively forward. Lacking air and space between instruments and voices, it soon becomes fatiguing.
192kHz/24-bit FLAC/ALAC*, Linn Records CKD 540 (supplied by www. linnrecords. com)
Linn has worked with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for a decade and marks its 40th anniversary with a new Usher Hall recording of Wagner'sSiegfried idyll and two reissues (Sibelius' The Tempest and Mozart's Symphony 41 'Jupiter'), upsampled from 88. 2kHz/24-bit (Mozart: producer James Mallinson) and 96kHz/24-bit (Sibelius: Andrew Keener) masters.
Previously featured in our jazz reviews [here], Last Dance is now available as a 96kHz/24-bit download as well as CD. To recap, back in 2007 pianist Keith Jarret invited bassist Charlie Haden to his Cavelight Studio where they spent four days recording. They’d met up during the making of a film about Haden and these intimate sessions were their first collaborations for 30 years. The result was the 2010 album Jasmine, the ECM label issuing a further collection of tracks for this year’s Last Dance which features the duo’s delightful interpretations of standards such as Monk’s ‘’Round Midnight’ and Cole Porter’s ballad ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’.
The 2CD set was released in February '14 while Kremer and his strings group were touring the States with music by Weinberg in their programmes. (ECM made the recordings at Lockenhaus and Neuhardenberg in Nov '12/Dec '13, the Sonatina for violin/piano at lower resolution, as noted on HRA’s web page. ) Music by the Polish composer – who went to Moscow but did not prosper – was admired by Shostakovich, and Kremer sees an affinity, especially in the 1968 symphony here, commissioned by Rudolf Barshai. This is a tough work, with brief respite found in (iii), Canzona.
For baby boomers the world over whose teenage years were spent living on a diet of what’s now termed ‘classic’ rock, Deep Purple’s Made In Japan represents one of the world’s most visceral and energetic rock bands captured at their pinnacle performance-wise. The 2LP set issued in 1972 contained tracks recorded across three nights in Tokyo and Osaka a few months after the band had released Machine Head. When the applause dies down following ‘Smoke On The Water’, singer Ian Gillan asks his engineer to adjust the foldback monitors to make ‘everything louder than everything else’. This remains one of rock’s immortal moments, as does the band’s virtuosity in this timeless memento.