Ken Kessler

Leave it to Tim de Paravicini to come up with something so deliciously twisted that no tube crazy can resist it. The new EAR Yoshino V20 integrated amplifier, despite costing a not-unreasonable-by-today’s-standards £2495, looks like nothing else and sports a quantity of tubes rivalled by few. Hell, the only items I can think of off-hand with similar numerical appeal – more tubes than any sane person would deem necessary – are high-enders like the GRAAF GM200 OTL with its 16 output tubes per channel, and the recent Silvaweld design with 48 per monoblock.

This month we review: The Beatles, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Joni Mitchell, and Van Halen

No, I don’t know what ‘Meracus’ means, and I stopped playing around with anagrams after I reached ‘rum case’. How about ‘US Cream’? No way: Meracus is so decidedly, unabashedly a German company that it couldn’t possibly apply. If you’ve ever studied a hi-fi magazine from the Fatherland or visited the Frankfurt or Berlin audio shows, you’ll know what I mean: staggering build quality, weird shapes, bold colours, lots of glass, wholly unique operational procedures. And the £4000 Meracus Imago is almost deliberately ‘unexportable’, because the customer has to be on some Teutonic wavelength to get to grips with it. Study the photos. You’ve never seen another CD transport like it, right?

This month we review: Neil Young, George Martin, Atomic Rooster, Little Feat