Audio Esoterica

Stereophile magazine called Halcro’s DM58 “the best amplifier ever” back into 2002, and now this classic Australian brand is back, with the new Halcro Eclipse monobloc power amplifier and a stereo version promised to be the lowest distortion amplifie

PMC’s new Fact Series Fenestria loudspeaker is a six-driver, three-way design that uses four 165mm carbon-fibre flat-diaphragm bass drivers, a 75mm dome midrange driver and a 19.5mm Sonoflex-domed tweeter, all designed from the ground up for use in t

Both home cinema and stereo listeners can thrill to the first true update of the classic M&K Sound S150 speaker, taking the technologies developed in the recent S300 series, including new Danish-designed high-performance tweeters, extra-stiff fibregl

The McIntosh MA252 integrated amplifier is the first hybrid integrated amplifier this world-famous American company has ever built. That’s an important statement given that McIntosh has been building amplifiers for 60 years. So the McIntosh MA252 has

Generational change occurs in technology, as it does in populations. Linn, once described as “Scotland’s only leading cool brand”, provides examples of both. The company’s founder, Ivor Tiefenbrun, leveraged his father’s precision engineering company

It’s hard to believe today, but in the early days of hi-fi, there was little recognition of the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ philosophy. The signal was the signal, amplifiers just made it bigger, and it was your loudspeakers that made all the difference

As we lugged three boxes — two large heavy ones, and a medium lighter one — from the car up the many steps to the music room, we couldn’t help thinking that this seemed a lot of weight for a streaming source. The heavier boxes contained not one but t

Famous Swedish loudspeaker manufacturer Marten is a family concern. It’s run by three brothers. Jörgen Olofsson is Marten’s CEO, Leif Olofsson is Marten’s Chief Designer, and Lars Olofsson is Marten’s Art Director. So why isn’t the company called Olo

Yamaha’s long-awaited 5000 Series of two-channel audio is now complete, or will very soon be so, once the final element, the GT-5000 turntable, arrives officially on the market early in 2019. The combination of turntable, separate pre-amplifier and p

Audio Solutions in Mascot has just opened a shiny bright new B&W Sound Studio within its store, a renovated rethink of an earlier showroom. Its clean lines disguise a wealth of equipment — speakers from B&W’s 700, 600 and Mini Theatre Series, with st

Cary Audio’s new SI-300.2d Integrated amplifier/DAC is so retro-looking that for a while we thought that Cary must have gone back to its roots and built a valve amplifier… or at least a hybrid. But no, the SI-300.2d is a fully solid-state unit, with

GoldenEar’s Triton Reference has just won the top-tier loudspeaker award from our sister magazine Sound+Image — it is their ‘Loudspeaker of the Year over $10,000’. More specifically this flagship model sells at $17,995 the pair. So possibly some read

In the last couple of years it has become widely accepted that OLED provides the best image quality for today’s televisions. While LED-LCD may have advantages in heavily-lit rooms (and also in the lower price of the panels), OLED has the ‘wow’ factor

The last time we interviewed Brian Zolner, the ‘Bri’ in Bricasti Design, we learned a good deal, and were especially taken with his explanation of why hardly any digital DSD recordings are really truly DSD, and why most of the few that are, aren’t wo

Marantz has been building hi-fi components for sixty-five years, and for the last forty of them, Ken Ishiwata has been guiding their design, a task which was once the job of Marantz’s founder, Saul Marantz. Forty years is quite an achievement for any

The Colibri XGW Signature Stradivarius is van den Hul’s latest flagship phono cartridge, priced at $10,499, made from cross-grained Brazilian Pau wood (a high density wood often used in instrument bows), coated with a ‘Stradivarius’ lacquer, named af

Take the ‘wow’ picture quality of OLED and make it better with the nanotechnology of VistaVision. Use the largest 77-inch OLED panel available, and wrap it in a designer chassis with a range of flexible mounting options. Add high-tech operation and a