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From pen-knife engravings to felt tip pen, Adam Smith has become used to discovering traces of previous ownership on his secondhand hi-fi buys. If you must mark it, do it somewhere discreet...

The peaks and dips in any loudspeaker’s frequency response may contribute to its musical signature, say Barry Willis – which is why he prefers to trust his ears over his calibration toolbox

So prolific is Nagra of late that the catalogue now has five families. I realise that sounds like I’ve just described the New York mafia. They consist of Compact, Classic, HD and Reference in ascending order of price, with the brand-new PREAMP II-S reviewed here introducing the new Series II.

Seasoned audiophiles will remember MOON once being the name of Simaudio’s ‘reference-grade’ hi-fi hardware. But these days, the website for this Canadian marque is headlined ‘MOON by Simaudio’, and MOON, rather than Simaudio, is the branding that graces the front of its products. Moreover, Simaudio has also started curating new releases into ‘Collections’. The first of these, the North Collection, arrived in 2023 as a home for flagship models. Now we get the second-tier Compass Collection, led by the MOON 371 streaming amplifier on test here.