LATEST ADDITIONS

You gotta love a product that lives up to its name. With a footprint of only 185x166mm and a height of 41mm, the Nagra Compact Phono is just that: compact. It’s also about as far removed as possible from the all-singing, all-dancing, all-valve two-chassis £68,500 HD Phono [HFN Jun ’25]. The Compact Phono costs £4500, is solid-state, MC-only and as minimalist as a phono amp can be.

For a brand that’s a relatively new name to the hi-fi industry, Hana is already making big waves in the vinyl community. With four distinct cartridge ranges (moving-coil only) comprising the E, S and M models in both high- and low-output versions and topping out in the Umami series, it previously had options covering a price range of £419 to £3399. However, that selection has now been crowned by a no-compromise flagship, the £7995 Umami Black.

Co-founder, Bob Abraham, would surely never have guessed his classic figure-of-eight 79-strand speaker cable (now circa £2/m) would still be going strong some 50 years after its launch in 1976. The QED brand was formed in 1973 and despite dalliances with hi-fi separates and accessories has remained most firmly associated with cables. QED’s design theories were outlined in its 1995 ‘Genesis Report’, this informing the X-Tube (XT) cable range, and refined in the 2007 ‘Genesis Report II’ from which this latest Supremus Zr flagship is derived.

At the risk of making an inappropriate statement, size really does matter, at least in the realm of the loudspeaker. Being an owner of the smaller DeVore Fidelity O/93 [HFN Mar ’23], I learned this again after listening to the manufacturer’s larger DeVore O/Bronze (£28,998). It was a similar situation to hearing Quad’s newly launched ESL 2912X [HFN Feb ’26] right after spending time with its slightly shorter grandfather, the otherwise similar ESL63. But more about this aspect in a moment.