Best Buys – Audio & AV

It’s one thing to flick through a magazine like Sound+Image or Best Buys Audio & AV, reading about the latest equipment, or catching up on the latest developments. And we know many of our readers will already have a system and may be looking for a sp

Denon has a definition problem here. Not musical definition: heaven forbid, this unit operates at high-resolution and should offer all the definition you need in those terms. No, it’s what exactly to call the DNP-2000NE — how to define its functions.

Happy birthday Rega. It’s 50 years since its founding in 1973 in Southend-on-Sea, UK, where the company still lives, designs and manufacturers Rega turntables, electronics and speakers. The Planar 3 arrived just three years into the company history,

Phono cartridges produce an output signal that is tiny, being inducted only by the bouncing and shimmying of a diamond through a vinyl groove. To play this into a line-level amplifier input, the signal needs to be much bigger — boosted by a phono pre

Undeniably, one of this year’s significant launches comes from Musical Fidelity, a brand known for its remarkable electronic creations, now pioneering an unprecedented venture. They’ve unveiled the Nu-Vista series, an ensemble of amplifiers that prom

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From the very first sight, this seems like a lot of turntable for the money. Lenco’s LBT-225 is a belt-driven fully-manual turntable with a substantial plinth in a very nice walnut finish, fitted with a glass platter, a carbon-fibre tonearm, no less,

While Yamaha’s AV receivers brim with smart functions and streaming options, the Japanese company has hitherto kept its premium stereo hi-fi amplifiers fully analogue. Indeed its top 5000 Series is a fully analogue system from end to end, with a gian

We were impressed by the TWA-10B before we’d even fully unpacked it. First out flopped two printed manuals, identical except for one being in English and the other in Polish, so that the latter announces a ‘Bezprzewodowy Odtwarcz Sieciowy’, while the

It was while reviewing for the previous issue of Best Buys Audio & AV that we first encountered Revival Audio, an entirely new operation hailing from Alsace in France, close to the German and Swiss borders. Although a new company, it has been co-foun

BenQ seems pretty excited about its new W4000i home theatre projector. It’s a premium model, although not stratospherically priced. Do we think its excitement is warranted? Let’s see. At first glance, this compact black-coloured projector doesn’t loo

Mixing and matching is one of the big points of buying hi-fi separates, rather than an all-in-one system or a complete set of kit from a single brand. Some companies are good at loudspeakers, say, while others are amplifier specialists. By combining

Something has changed in the world of projectors recently, especially at the medium level. Traditional projectors may be fairly clever in how they serve light to the screen, but they’ve been pretty dumb otherwise, requiring a video source, and some k

Optoma’s latest L1+ shows precisely how much projectors have changed since the arrival of the smart ultra-short-throw breed. It requires no cumbersome installation, benching close to the wall shining up, rather than attaching to your ceiling somewher

Not so many years ago we were steering readers away from soundbars wherever possible. But our views have been changed by developments at the premium end of the market, where a soundbar system like JBL’s range-topper here can be priced up at $2k. That

In the main issues of Sound+Image magazine we regularly feature home cinemas which have been custom-installed by experts: the full monty, the film-lover’s dream of a theatre room at home to which the owners can retire for a full-blown movie experienc

The Cinema 40 is the current top of the range for one-box Marantz AV receivers, outperformed only by the separate flagship AV 10 and Amp 10 multichannel preamplifier and power amplifier combo — and those come in at more than $25k the pair. Here it’s

A few pages back, when we said that higher-end soundbars had made us rethink a previously negative attitude to soundbars, there was one soundbar in particular which made that change. It was from Sennheiser, called just the ‘AMBEO’, and was so large i

In Australia this is Sony’s very latest top-of-the-line multichannel receiver. In the UK it’s an amplifier, because it doesn’t have a tuner. In America it’s a relatively junior model; they get three other new models above it, with Sony’s desirable ‘E

Chinese TV firm TCL is interesting in a number of ways, not least being its seeming agnosticism as to which smart TV system it implements in its televisions. Its present line-up includes Google TV models, Android TV models (similar but not identical

TCL was the first to bring Mini LED to market, and it’s stuck with it for this 2023 Google TV. Mini LED combines tiny backlights with an LCD panel and quantum dots (QD), a combination which challenges OLED performance and indeed beats it in several k

The general ethos at Tivoli Hi-Fi in Melbourne is nicely summarised in one of its favourite taglines: ‘Music Lovers With A Purpose’. “Tivoli Hi-Fi is run and operated by music and movie lovers,” the team says. “We listen to music, buy music, stream m