Equipment+
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Astell&Kern A&futura SE100 digital audio player
|Astell&Kern almost singlehandedly created the market for high-end portable music players. Currently they have players priced from less than £600 (for the AK70 MkII) to more than £3,000 (for the SP1000). The SE100, which is ...read more -
Node Audio Hylixa stand-mount loudspeaker
|Node Audio is a brand-new operation that’s both radical and unusual. Situated a few miles south of Cambridge, Node shares an advanced manufacturing facility with a hi-tech engineering company. Its two key principals are Ashley ...read more -
Lumin X1 music streamer
|Lumin sprung out of nowhere a couple of years ago. The Hong Kong-based brand was initially dismissed by the audio industry’s xenophobes as some kind of a rip-off of a well-known popular streamer from the ...read more -
Audioquest Niagara 7000 power conditioner
|Walk the corridors of any recent hi-fi show and you’ll have noticed a creeping, almost insidious presence, the first visible evidence of a (not so quiet) rise in audio’s dark side: mains conditioners, and chief ...read more -
WyWires Platinum headphone cable
|Alex Sventitsky of WyWires has been hand crafting high-end cables for audiophiles for many years. They took the personal audio world by storm in 2014 with their RED series headphone cables. At a mere three ...read more -
Revel Performa M126Be stand-mount loudspeaker
|Revel is the high point in Harman’s extensive range of loudspeaker brands; it has the luxury of sharing facilities with JBL, but doesn’t have to make mass market products in the way that behemoth does. ...read more -
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