Equipment+
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Boulder Model 508 phono preamplifier
|Boulder Amplifiers, Inc. of Boulder Colorado, USA has established, over its nearly thirty-five years, a history of truly mountaintop performance. Designs can be on the market for over a decade as their individual excellence may ...read more -
Marantz SA-KI Ruby CD/SACD player
|When Ken Ishiwata was lured into working for Marantz in 1978 he had already been at Pioneer Japan for ten years. The story goes that the European base that Superscope had created for Marantz in ...read more -
Chord Electronics Étude stereo power amplifier
|From the get-go, Chord Electronics’ amplifiers pushed the technology envelope. The company was making amplifiers with switch-mode power supplies when every other audio brand had barely even heard of a switch-mode power supply. That ability ...read more -
Focal Maestro Utopia Evo floorstanding loudspeaker
|In a worId where fashions and faces change with alarming regularity, Focal’s distinctive Utopia series loudspeakers are about as close to a permanent fixture as you can get. Of course, there have been massive evolutionary ...read more -
YAR Y-der loudspeakers, B-yond amp, Feeld platforms, YAR cables
|Let’s start with that name; it’s not an acronym. Everyone in the audio world is so programmed to see the letters ‘A’ and ‘R’ together and assume they have a meaning that one of the ...read more -
Abyss AB-1266 Phi CC edition planar magnetic headphones
|The Abyss AB-1266 Phi edition planar-magnetic headphone represented an evolutionary improvement upon the original AB-1266 that first appeared in 2013. In fact my conclusion was that the AB‑1266 Phi edition took “an already superb headphone ...read more -
Questyle CMA400i headphone amp/DAC
|Good audio products are hard to find. However, that cuts two ways; there’s the “to find your prince, you have to kiss a lot of frogs” aspect that suggests there are a lot of mediocre ...read more -
Finite Elemente Ceraball, Cerabase, Cerapuc isolation products
|I’m not a big fan of the Rocky franchise, but you can’t help but admire the protagonist’s tenacity in those movies. Life throws more than a few rocks at the lead character and he just ...read more -
Stax SRM-T8000 energiser
|Every Stax ‘earspeaker’ is an electrostatic design. Every electrostatic needs a specialist, dedicated high-voltage amplifier (Stax calls it an ‘energiser’). Stax makes more top-end earspeakers than it does energisers, so there’s call for a really ...read more -
Audio Research Reference 10 line preamplifier
|At the start of the decade, Audio Research announced a strictly limited two-box line preamplifier to celebrate 40 years of the brand. The Reference Anniversary model was only available during 2010, but it became the ...read more -
Isotek EVO3 Nova power conditioner
|It’s easy to get this a bit mungled up. IsoTek make a product called the Nova One, which is a single £1,500 power outlet filter from the company’s Mosaic range. Delete the word ‘One’ and ...read more -
Elipson Prestige Facet 24F floorstanding loudspeaker
|Elipson is France’s oldest speaker brand. Founded in 1938, it ran as an independent company until 2008 and during that time never exported its products. Which says a lot for the strength and patriotism of ...read more -
XTZ Divine Delta stand-mount loudspeaker
|Let’s start in the middle here. No matter how you slice it, irrespective of how good or bad you think the XTZ Divine Delta is in sonic terms, as a value-for-money proposition, it’s outstanding. All ...read more -
CEC TL5 CD transport
|Okay, I admit it: I still listen to CD. But far from apologising for that fact; instead, I’d argue that CD doesn’t just remain relevant: for a number of reasons CD users have never had ...read more -
Cambridge Audio Edge A integrated amplifier
|Cambridge Audio celebrated its 50th Birthday in 2018. While most of us turning 50 might look to ever-expanding waistlines and the occasional mid-life crisis, Cambridge Audio has instead gone to the gym and got ripped. ...read more