Review and Lab: Paul Miller

Look at any multi-box component and you can usually work out what's going on: CD transport and DAC, preamp and power amp(s), for example. But just as often those two boxes are an 'audio product' – phono preamp, headphone amp, DAC or even a digital audio transport – plus an outboard power supply. The rationale for these latter two-boxers is clear, for by isolating the electrically noisy parts of the system away from delicate audio signals, interference is minimised and signal purity maximised.

Fortunately, the Reference 5 Meta is the £17,500 flagship of KEF's 'conventional' speaker range, bettered only by the striking-looking Blade designs [HFN May '22]. Fortunately? Well, yes, because this is an imposingly huge design, standing just over 1.4m tall, even if some of that impression of scale is minimised by the slenderness of the cabinets. Indeed, if the enclosures were any narrower than their 205mm, there wouldn't be room on the front baffle for the quartet of 165mm aluminium-coned bass drivers, arranged in pairs above and below the company's 12th-generation Uni-Q treble/midrange unit.

With its blue-tinged foil screen positively glowing through a tight, translucent PVC jacket, Supra's flagship speaker cable, priced at £1700 for a 3m terminated set (£300 per additional stereo metre), makes for a vivid statement. It's a world away from the speaker cables that helped Tommy Jenving launch his Swedish Supra brand in 1976. Its Supra Cable 4 and 2.5 used bunches of very fine copper strands in a standard figure-of-eight geometry. Its later 10mm2 Supra Cable 10, with 2562x0.07mm 4N copper strands, still has the lowest series resistance that I've measured (3.1mohm/m) when tested nearly 30 years ago [Hi-Fi Choice Aug '94].

While audiophiles might ordinarily associate the 'home of the brave' with Linn Products, Scotland is also home to the hand-made Atlas Cables. Its new Arran interconnects and speaker cables are a clear evolution, taking inspiration from its solid silver Asimi range [HFN Dec '18], utilising the same geometry but with OCC (Ohno Continuous Casting) copper.