Sound and Image

EDLINES It’s time for our annual festival of all things audio and AV, the Sound+Image Awards special issue; cue fireworks, dancing, hugging in the street, etc. Here we celebrate all the finest gear currently available to Australia in categories from

Two new NAD amplifiers bring their streaming smarts in different ways. They’re all to the fore in the C 700 BluOS Streaming Amplifier (above), with its modern design and five-inch colour display that shows album artwork, track status, and system sett

The P452 is March Audio’s first Purifi-based stereo amplifier. This elegant product is milled from solid aluminium with a tough anodized treatment. Exceptional fit, finish and build quality. Featuring the new Purifi 1ET400A technology and Bruno Putze

Our very first winner, then, epitomises our search for value in all award categories low or high, although it is perhaps a surprise in being neither brand-new nor, really, pushing the limits of technology. It is the $399 entry-level vinyl-spinner fro

For 33 years now, since 1989 A.D., the Sound+Image Awards have celebrated the very best in audio and AV, recognising the products which have wowed us over the previous 12 months of our magazines Sound+Image, Australian Hi-Fi, Best Buys Audio & AV, an

A new entry to the list of cost-effective and high-value turntables from Audio-Technica, the AT-LPW50BP offers a package which should equally satisfy audio lovers returning to the vinyl fold as well as those getting their first deck and wanting somet

With something of a 25-fold price leap between the previous turntable category and this one, you’ll realise that this deck from Harman’s Mark Levinson brand is something else entirely, reaching into regions where vinyl replay becomes a desirable comb

You can, of course, always go a level above. There are many high-quality phono stages available, but most of them are difficult and inconvenient to use, or lack a full range of load, gain and filter options, so you have to choose a stage that adequat

When we reviewed the SC-2, we described it as “the vinyl accessory you never knew you needed”. The Sugarcube range hails from SweetVinyl in Mountain View, California, and this CS-2 is described as a ‘vinyl recording system with click removal’, and th

The compact disc market may be in decline when it comes to new releases, but there is no cheaper way of purchasing music to own than to head to your local thrift store and load up on CDs going for a mere buck or two. Indeed there are signs that the v

Such a small unit, the $1699 element i, at just 24cm wide and 45m high, yet with so much going on that it qualifies as a bit of a category buster. It calls itself a streamer, being able to stream from the high-res capable music services Tidal and Qob

A second appearance by Harman brand Mark Levinson in the sources categories of our awards, and from the same 5000 Series. At $9999, the № 5101 is clearly a serious CD player, also an SACD player thanks to its precision dual SACD/CD laser and combinat

Naim Audio’s three levels of Uniti all-in-one player in a way brought together everything the company knows — the streaming, multiroom and control elements of the Mu-sos, and the solid hi-fi amplification developed over decades. This last year saw th

A product with a respected lineage of high performance back to Cambridge’s first DacMagic back in 1996, the 200M is an excellent DAC at the price, both measuring impressively in Australian Hi-Fi’s bench tests and delivering overall heart-lifting clar

Designer Daniel Weiss has spent his life at the creative end of audio engineering, and this year won a Technical Grammy for Special Merit (Technical). Given this, and the $15,500 price, it’s perhaps no surprise that this DAC, described by Weiss as a

It’s 60 years since the first Rotel audio products appeared, and five since the 14 Series was launched to significant acclaim. Now we have this MkII edition of the A14 amplifier, with no radical changes to the aesthetic, but revisiting output filters

The UK’s Cambridge Audio has been on a roll with our amplifier awards: two years ago hitting high with its no-holds-barred Edge pre-power combination, then last year scoring an award for the solid trad hi-fi CXA81 priced rather lower. This year there

It nudges the top of our price category at $9900, but there was no ignoring this magnificent valve amplifier from Copland in Copenhagen, Denmark. Copland’s founder and designer Ole Møller began his career working in cartridges and vinyl cutting heads

As the extended product name suggests, the Electrocompaniet ECI 6 DX MkII has it all! It’s not only a hugely competent $11,945 integrated amplifier with a rated output of 125W continuous per channel into 8 ohms, it’s also a full-featured digital-to-a

Daniel D’Agostino, founder of D’Agostino Master Audio Systems, formerly of Krell, continues to deliver some of the world’s highest-performing amplification. We reviewed this Progression integrated amplifier fully optioned at $47,985, while the base m

Why consider a pre-power combination rather than an integrated amplifier? It was long the default presentation of classic hi-fi — one box to switch and conduct delicate low-level signal operations, then a second box which increases the power in order

We were delighted to welcome the Canadian brand Classe back into our listening rooms, resurrected after Sound United’s purchase of former sister brand Bowers & Wilkins allowed the team to get back together and complete the project they already had un

One of Gryphon’s integrated amplifiers was recently described to us by a dealer of 25+ years standing as “one of the best integrated amplifiers we’ve ever heard”. It’s a sign of the respect generated by this Danish brand and its recently-retired foun

March Audio is based in Albany, Western Australia, where it appeared on the scene a little more than three years ago and quickly carved a niche as a supplier of power amplifiers that use the latest Class-D technology from Hypex and more recently from

The Adcom GFA-585se looks like it just arrived on a time machine straight from the 1980s, so if you sometimes think ‘They don’t make ’em like they did in the old days’, well, Adcom does. The GFA-585se is a high-powered Class-A/B ‘muscle’ amplifier of

How many companies can offer the highest levels of hi-fi speakers, even a complete concert P.A. system if you so desire, yet also excel with portable audio playing via Bluetooth? Surely only JBL, the Harman brand (so ultimately owned by Samsung) whic

We admit to having a soft spot for Ruark’s particular breed of table-top music system, which in their wood finishes (as below) can look appealingly traditional, yet in their satin white (as above) appear thoroughly modernist. The $1299 R3 is a good s

Should you head out for the night into the cobbled streets of Dublin, you’ll be looking for craic agus ceol — music and diversion, with ‘ceol’, originally ceól, meaning ‘music’ or ‘musical instrument’. Should you be staying in, however, Denon’s compl

Active speakers can help create a fantastic system solution — the amplification is inside the speakers, so no external amp is required, just a source, or sources, potentially even just your phone, as the $1599 Klipsch ‘The Fives’ can receive via Blue

Triangle’s $900 Borea BR03 standmounts are 33cm high, a bass-reflex design with twin ports on the front, giving them useful versatility in positioning. They also use a new ‘EFS’ tweeter design from the French company, short for ‘Efficient Flow System

USA brand Polk has joined Sound United’s distribution in Australia, alongside Boston Acoustics, Bowers & Wilkins, and Definitive Technology. The Polk Reserve series sits just below the company’s top ‘Legend’ series and uses the same custom-made drive

Freshly launched as part of Bowers & Wilkins new 800 Series D4, the 805 standmounts get some but not all of the new stuff, including for the first time the complete cabinet reversal that the floorstanding models in the range had enjoyed with the D3 s

Abig price jump to our next pair of standmount winners, Harbeth’s $7000 Compact 7ES-3 XD. Tall standmounts at 52cm high, they maintain Harbeth’s ‘BBC’ loudspeaker legacy in design terms, and their classic-style delivery stacks up very well against mo

Moving up in scale to floorstanders now, though as yet lower in price than our top standmounters, with these DALI Oberon 9s weighing in at a remarkably reasonably $2999. The newest and largest loudspeakers in the Oberon range, they stand 117cm high,

Revel has a dream team of designers, the backing of Harman International (which has some of the best acoustic laboratories and listening rooms in the world), and cross-benefits from other Harman brands including JBL, Infinity, AKG, Mark Levinson, Arc

The concept behind Wilson’s original Sabrina was to take what had been learned during the development of the company’s then top-of-the-line Alexandria XLF and bring it to a more affordable floorstander. And the SabrinaX maintains the design of that p

Velodyne’s ‘Deep Blue’ series of subwoofers, of which this DB-12 model is a part, is the first new range of subwoofers from this famous company following its sale to German company Audio Reference a few years ago. It introduces a new industrial desig

Itroduced originally to work with Q Acoustics’ 3000i surround packages, the Q B12 has talents that can stretch beyond its own kin to general purpose subwoofer work, given its performance and price ($1099 in satin and $1399 for gloss finishes), pretty

This category proved one of the hardest fought in our whole awards, with a number of brands in contention, and even another Yamaha, the RX-V6 at $1299, making the final decision one to mull over. But in the end it was the merits of Yamaha’s new Avent

Yes, Yamaha is back on top of our AV receiver awards, in this uppermost category which the company has dominated since the first arrival of its Aventage premium receiver range a little over a decade ago. The new 10th anniversary Aventage range took a

This $3199 MRX 540 is the junior of the company’s three latest AV receivers, its siblings rising to the MRX 1140 with 11 channels and processing for up to 15.2 channels. The MRX 540 here offers five channels of amplification, rated at 100W per channe

Two very different soundbar options on these two pages — and the pictures aren’t to scale, because while the bar from Samsung’s system opposite is a full 123cm wide, Yamaha SR-C20A has here gone the compact soundbar path, operating without even the s

Here’s a sign of TV technology trends: we have no winning OLED TVs this year. Both of our winners are LCD models using Mini LED backlighting. And perhaps even more of a surprise — they are both 8K panels. While there remains almost no 8K material yet

Samsung has won in our soundbar awards several years running now, ever since its Californian ‘audio lab’ started building bars that redefined the genre — and changed our own opinions on what soundbars could achieve. This is another full system — a se

Everything that’s true of the TCL 8K MiniLED TV opposite is doubly so with the $10,499 Samsung flagship 8K QLED Mini LED QN900. Its ‘Infinity One Design’ screen fronts a significantly thinner panel, yet it still blazes with brilliance when given a hi

BenQ has delivered ‘portable’ projection before, but nothing quite as neat or simple to use as the GV30. It has a ‘rolling’ design, the unit rotating in its little stand (two views shown above) so that you can point the lens anywhere from angling dow

So here we are moving up to proper table-top/ceiling projectors, and BenQ takes our first award here as well. This $2599 TK700Sti originally came to us for review as a projector with gaming credentials, for the new Xbox and PlayStation consoles in pa

When Sony’s projectors advertise 4K, they mean real 4K, both the capability of pro 4096 x 2160 resolution, and more importantly true native panel UHD, not created by pixel-shifting panels of lower resolution. That’s the first element in pushing price

We have a slam-dunk in our home headphones categories, with Stax taking both the upper and the lower price categories. There’s rarely been a year when Stax hasn’t been somewhere in the running here, given the company’s dominance and reputation in ele

So if the lesser earspeakers opposite deliver incredible clarity and purity of sound, how to describe the delights of the latest Stax flagship electrostatics, the SR-9000X, priced at $9500? And all the more s as we enjoyed their merits with a loan of

This category has been in relative decline recently next to the huge growth in ‘true wireless’ earbuds that jettison the cable entirely. But don’t be so quick to take the wireless leap. Cabled headphones don’t need batteries to be recharged. They don

The headphone output circuitry fitted to a great many otherwise excellent hi-fi components often leaves a lot to be desired, so you should not necessarily rely on it to give you great sound. In some cases this is simply because of low output levels.

During 2021 we heard many new true wireless buds which sounded good, and that improved their control systems and battery life to compete with Sony’s previous model, the WF-1000XM3. Unfortunately for all those contenders, Sony has since released the W

Our winning headphones here are wireless (though they can also take a cable), but they don’t — like the two winners overleaf — have active noise cancellation available to silence your surroundings. That can be a good thing, as their engineers didn’t

It is possible to find cheaper wireless noise-cancellers on the market, but those would be nasty cheap things unworthy of attention. Somehow (and economies of scale would be one obvious reason) JBL manages to hit here a price of $249.95 while deliver

Yamaha has been on a roll for headphones this last year, with a number of new models we’ve enjoyed, and best of all these wireless noisecancellers at $499 (a price which the arrival of Apple’s model overleaf now redefines as mid-price for the genre!)

You might expect Apple to do something different with headphones, and with the AirPods Max it certainly has. There’s no cable option, no off switch. They come with the strangest carry-case which looks like a bra from one side and a butt from the othe

Scott Rogan and his team at Rogue Home Cinema were contacted by the owners of this Western Australian home, who had come to realise that they never made use of their formal dining room. To achieve more use — and far more enjoyment — from the space, t

Our Sound+Image GOLD Awards are reserved for the best of the custom installations which we cover in Sound+Image, Australian Hi-Fi, Audio Esoterica and Best Buys Audio & AV magazines, whether home cinemas, mixed purpose media rooms, stereo hi-fi insta

It’s one thing to design a home cinema for a movie enthusiast, but another when your client actually works in the movies. This client commissioned a dedicated theatre in a lower concrete shell of a new-build home after spending his working life in ed

It’s a return to our GOLD Awards forWavetrain Cinemas, here for delivering this theatre in a new home extension — and in the process turning the client’s expectations on their head. “Initially I thought it was all about ‘coming as close as possible’

It’s appropriate that our installation product award falls opposite Wavetrain’s GOLD cinema, as it was there we first encountered the Elementi loudspeakers, before hearing them demonstrated at Wavetrain’s Sydney base. The ‘Fire’ range (individually s

So in our second annual online poll to find our Hi-Fi Retailer of the Year, the winner is… oh — the same as in our first poll last year! The Audio Tailor in Brisbane has taken out this award for the second year running. While they won by a considerab

The public vote for our second Hi-Fi Retailer of the Year award took place via our website at www.whathifi.com/au during October-November 2021. Our thanks to all who voted, and to Technical Audio Group for adding the encouragement of a pair of Audio-