Articles
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ADL X1 Portable DAC and Headphone Amplifier
|Someday in the future we will be able to carry round and play our entire musical collection, on a device smaller than credit card. And while the hardware isn’t that miniaturised yet, the £395 ADL ...read more -
Cavalli Audio Liquid Gold fully-balanced headphone amplifier
|Over the past several years Dr. Alex Cavalli, a gifted consulting physicist and engineer, quietly has been developing some of the most ambitious and best sounding headphone amplifiers ever made. First came the hybrid valve/solid-state ...read more -
Peachtree Audio nova125 integrated amplifier/DAC
|Some years ago, Peachtree recognized that a seismic shift in the high-end audio universe was at hand—a shift wherein PCs would step outside of their traditional roles as office tools to become full-fledged digital audio ...read more -
AMI Musik DDH-1 DAC/headphone amplifier
|AMI (Audio Music Interface)Musik is a young Japanese design, Korean build company. The compact DDH-1 is the first of two products out of the starting gates (the other being the DS5, a DSD supporting DAC ...read more -
First Look: HiFiMAN HM-901 high-resolution digital music player/DAC
|What follows is a “First Look” blog about a very special high-performance digital audio player that has, if truth be told, gone through one of the longest gestation periods in personal audio history. The product ...read more -
First Look: iFi iDSD nano DAC/headphone amp & iCAN nano headphone amp
|Early this year I wrote a blog about iFi Audio’s iCAN nano headphone amplifier (click here to read), but mentioned at the time that my findings were based on a pilot production sample and not ...read more -
First Listen: Chord Electronics Hugo portable high res DAC/headphone amp
|A Hi-Fi+ review project I’m working on at the moment involves the Chord Electronics Hugo portable high res DAC/headphone amp, which is priced at $2,395 in the US or £1,200 in the UK. In practice ...read more -
Head-Fi meet in Austin, TX
|It occurs to me that many readers familiar with the traditional world of speaker-centric high-end audio systems may be unaware that there is a rapidly evolving, parallel high-end audio universe that revolves around high-end headphones, ...read more -
CES 2014: Headphone, Earphones, and Related Electronics – Part 3
|If I had to name one broad high-end audio product category that is growing rapidly and for all the right reasons, that category would be Headphones, Earphones, and the specialised electronics needed to drive them. ...read more -
CES 2014: Headphone, Earphones, and Related Electronics – Part 2
|If I had to name one broad high-end audio product category that is growing rapidly and for all the right reasons, that category would be Headphones, Earphones, and the specialised electronics needed to drive them. ...read more -
First Listen - HiFiMAN HM-901 high-resolution portable digital music player
|Over the past year, the firm Astell & Kern has garnered considerable press attention, first for its AK100 high-res portable digital music player and then for its even higher-res AK120 player. The A & K ...read more -
First Listen - iFi iCAN Nano portable headphone amplifier
|In 2013, the tiny iFi Micro iCAN desktop headphone amplifier proved one of the most pleasant—and pleasantly affordable—discoveries of the year for serious headphone audio enthusiasts operating on real-world budgets. I’m not sure if I ...read more -
Chord Electronics Hugo to preview at CES 2014
|From the Chord Electronics press release: To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Chord Electronics’ ground-breaking and game-changing DAC 64, the world- leading Kent-based audio expert will be launching something very special at CES 2014. Based ...read more -
AURALiC Taurus MkII headphone amplifier/preamplifier
|My first exposure to AURALiC came at the 2013 Munich High-End show where the Hong Kong-based high-end audio firm used its components to power both a pair of exotic YG Acoustics Sonja 1.2 loudspeakers and ...read more -
Crowdfunding - not just for Geeks?
|The world of traditional audio is sometimes not exactly at the cutting edge of modern life. It’s kind of understandable – a lot of it is entirely Boomer on Boomer action and, while we might ...read more