Lab: Paul Miller

For nearly nine years, I have been listening to Quad's ribbon-hybrid S-1 speaker – the brand's smallest two-way box-type system – as part of my day-to-day desktop set-up. When they were launched, I revelled in the realisation that they were a throwback to Quad's first ever loudspeaker, the Corner Ribbon of 1949, and the all-new Revela 1 tells you that the company's boffins, based in the UK and China, haven't been sitting idle since 2015.

With its wide range of portable, battery-powered DACs and headphone amplifiers, few companies have done as much as iFi Audio to improve listening on the hoof. Yet the new iDSD Diablo 2, its latest range-topping model and a replacement for the iDSD Diablo of 2021, pushes the envelope of the mobile DAC/amp genre, both by being far from budget at £1299, and large enough for its manufacturer to deem it more 'transportable' than genuinely 'pocket-size'.

At Munich's High End show in May 2023, a rare appearance by Auralic founder Xuanqian Wang heralded the launch of G3 versions of its Aries streaming transport and Vega streaming DAC, destined to extend the company's reach into the high-end when they arrive later this year. Yet at the same event the digital audio specialist introduced new G2.2 iterations of the Aries (tested here) and Vega [HFN Nov '23], both now available priced £5299 and £6899, respectively. Somewhat confusingly, all four models – regardless of their generation number – use the same G3 version of Auralic's Tesla streaming platform.

Early CD players from Philips and Sony are considered by some collectors to be the most covetable vintage models because they came from the very companies that created the format. You can add to this list machines from Denon, whose Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) system underpinned the way analogue signals were transformed into digital data, recorded, played back and finally turned back into music again.