Ed Selley

Leading from the top of this amplifier’s trump card specifi cation sheet is the £20,000 price tag, followed closely by the two-box design and claimed delivery of 1kW into an 8ohm load. Reading the spec-sheet alone does little to prepare you for the sheer size, weight and physical presence of the two-box Titan. It is massive, with a combined weight over 110kg, each unit boasting a footprint the size of a small chest of drawers. Sitting side-by-side you have two enormous works of art in milled aluminium – low, wide and deep.

Radford Electronics was set up in Bristol by Arthur Radford back in 1959. In some ways Radford was a late starter in the world of high fi delity, especially compared to Peter Walker of Quad or Harold Leak, and the electronics refl ect this. Indeed, Radford’s designs are often described as being the most ‘modern’ of vintage amplifiers. It was the Series Two amplifiers, soon changed to Series Three, that put Radford’s designs on the map, the Series 3 range comprising two monoblocks – the MA 15 and MA 25 – plus two stereo versions, the STA 15 and STA 25.

When Arthur Bailey first described the transmission line loudspeaker enclosure in the pages of Wireless World in 1965, and then again in 1972, there seemed every prospect that this new alternative to the familiar sealed box or reflex cabinet would come to enjoy widespread use. Yet it never did. Instead transmission line loading has remained a relative rarity, associated with a handful of speaker makers in particular: IMF in the early years and PMC more recently, although B&W has made perhaps the cleverest use of it in the form of its inverted horn Nautilus tubes, which had their ultimate expression in the snail-shaped speaker of that name. Although the transmission line is often classified as a form of bass loading, its modus operandi actually affects a much wider frequency range, as B&W’s use of it confirms.