This month we review and test releases from: Jordina MillÀ & Barry Guy; OTOOTO; Tomasz Stanko, Tomasz Szukalski, Dave Holland, Edward Vesala; Maven Grace and Beans On Toast
The Danish brand’s flagship floorstander mixes upgraded
in-house drivers with a sculpted ‘Directivity Control’ baffle
With more than 45 years of speaker-making under its belt, Dynaudio has a remarkably diverse range of product lines. There are no fewer than ten series, in fact, each featuring a stack of the company’s in-house technologies. And so it is with the Confidence 60, the £36,500 flagship of a range comprising one standmount and three floorstanders, and where ‘Everything is new, from the cabinet to the drive units’.
A new addition to MBL’s Cadenza Line, the C41 is a digital-only DAC/preamp that
boasts custom reclocking, digital filtering and a trick that side-steps ‘digital clipping’
Based in Berlin, German company MBL is perhaps still best known for its omni-directional Radialstrahler loudspeakers [HFN Jun ’21], spreading their output over 360o in the cause of creating sound that fills a room. The idea isn’t new – the design was first launched at IFA in Berlin in 1979, in the times when audio was a major focus of that show – but it has been developed and refined over almost five decades, and is still a mainstay of the company’s lineup.
The baby of Vivid’s five-strong Kaya range weighs just 6kg but employs the same custom tweeter and core technologies that define the flagship, floorstanding Giya G1
Were it not for the enclosure design, it might be tempting to think of the Kaya S12, the smallest speaker from South Africa’s Vivid Audio, as just another standmount. But as those eye-catching looks suggest, there’s something special going on here, and the price – £6000 a pair in a choice of striking finishes, with more available to order – certainly sets expectations high.
Focal’s inaugural DSP-guided active loudspeaker is a true flagship, both in style, sound and under-the-skin engineering. But is this a one-off or just the start of a new range?
The latest member of Focal’s Utopia loudspeaker family is clearly cut from a different cloth – and that’s before you lay eyes on its felt cabinet wrap. Sure, at £29,995 the Diva Utopia boasts a similarly ‘high-end’ asking price to the likes of the £34,999 Scala Utopia Evo [HFN Aug ’17] and its overall styling isn’t far off its siblings either. But this is Focal’s first active loudspeaker, the result of a collaboration with Naim Audio, its stablemate brand since 2012. In fact, to call it a speaker doesn’t really do the Diva Utopia justice. It’s more like a full system inside a loudspeaker enclosure.
The only standmount in Canton’s eight-strong Reference series includes the same driver and crossover tech found in its flagship Reference 1 floorstander. A chip off the block?
Although it’s relatively easy to build a large ‘cost no object’ loudspeaker worthy of a brand’s flagship, things get a little trickier when the requirement is for a compact model. Quite apart from the budget constraints – customers believe there should be a direct relationship between size and price – there’s the small matter of ‘you can’t argue with physics’ when it comes to delivering a big, room-filling sound from a smallscale enclosure.
Surely the most compelling of two same-priced preamplifiers in the McIntosh range, both equipped with its custom DA2 digital module. Why? Only the C2800 has tubes...
Think valve amplifiers, and the chances are the image brought to mind is that of a minimalist device, with little apart from a source selector, volume control and output stage. And when we're talking about valve preamplifiers, things might be even simpler. Well, clearly that particular memo went straight into the junk folder at McIntosh Labs' HQ in upstate New York, as the new £11,995 C2800 valve preamp is anything but minimalist.
The long-anticipated final piece in Exposure’s 3510 series has arrived – a CD player that leverages the 3010 S2 series electronics and XM CD’s top-loading transport mechanism
With a memory long enough to remember buying my first CD player, a Philips model, back in the mid-1980s, complete with a free copy of Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms, it feels a little strange to be considering the format, launched promising 'Perfect Sound Forever', as something of a niche proposition. Yes, CD has been a huge commercial success, with a 2007 press release marking 25 years of the format declaring that some 200 billion discs had been sold in that first quarter century, and many people having huge collections.
This unassuming little black box packs as much streaming technology and features as the biggest players in the audio biz - plus support for Google/Alexa voice control...
Every once in a while, the hi-fi industry encounters a disrupter - a brand or a product able to create waves and challenge established ways of doing things. Think the original NAD 3020 integrated amplifier , which entered an arena full of feature-heavy products, and became a best-seller thanks to its combination of price, simplicity and sheer performance.
Blow away the fog of acronyms and iFi Audio's 'mk2' NEO iDSD DAC/headphone amp boasts the latest 'hi-res' BT 5.4, aptX Lossless, an analogue input and a lot more power
Did Ifi Audio actually need to upgrade its Neo Idsd Dac/Headphone Amp? Well, change is seemingly inevitable in the fast-moving range of this Merseyside-based company, given the pace with which products - new and revised - seem to flow from its own factory in China. Indeed, there's an element of 'blink and you'll miss it' about iFi Audio's releases, which now encompass a wide range of hi-fi devices from pocket headphone amplifiers to products aimed at the pro audio market.