Quad has typically catered to rich, (small c) conservative people who value quality but aren’t willing to spend exorbitant prices for it. Perhaps this explains why the 909 power amplifier is essentially a gently revised and rehoused 405 – the company’s award-winning, high-capacity transistor power amplifier that was introduced in 1975. There’s nothing wrong with […]
Quad was a one-man band in the mid-1960s who could do no wrong. Its recently released ESL-57 electrostatic loudspeaker was revolutionary and widely regarded as one of the best designs in the world. Its Quad II valve power amplifiers were also of high quality, and they had garnered a lot of fans. This made it
This is a fascinating story. Karl Heinz Fink of Fink Audio Consulting in Essen, Germany, and Steve Reichert of Armour Group in Cambridge, England, are the two main protagonists. The former is one of his generation’s top speaker designers, while the latter is a pleasant chap with a good ear and an Arcam sales and
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Pioneer is one of the more intriguing Japanese brands, as well as one of the most impressive in terms of product quality over time. It has never failed to innovate in consumer electronics since it was founded in 1937 by Japanese engineer Nozomu Matsumoto. The golden years of hi-fi, according to neutral observers, were from
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From a British perspective, high-end turntables in the late 1970s started with Rega’s Planar 3 and finished with the fully equipped Linn Sondek. That was the final chapter of the story. However, in those heady days when belt-drive ruled the roost and direct-drives were judged ‘unmusical’ by the UK press, any audiophile looking East would
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Pioneer’s PL-600 turntable was a wonderful turntable that seems to have dropped down the back of the sofa when it was released in 1979. It was a generation ahead of the company’s prior record players, being sleek and futuristic. The PL-200, an excellent quality but simple semi-automatic direct drive turntable, was the top conventional turntable
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The Pioneer PL-12D, like the first Volkswagen Golf, marked the beginning of a generation of low-cost, high-quality goods that got the job done quickly and efficiently. It was a turntable designed to eliminate rumble, wow, and flutter, as well as bearing friction, from budget purchasers. Of fact, it possessed all of these evils, but at
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Pioneer, as its name implies, has often been at the forefront of innovative formats and technologies. It produced various excellent turntables in the 1970s, ranging from the PL-12D budget deck in 1974 to the PL-L1000 high-end parallel tracker in 1978. It was a big shot in cassette, too, making decks that pushed the format to
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The A-400 integrated amplifier from Pioneer was released in the spring of 1990 to rave reviews in the United Kingdom. The fact that Japanese amplifiers had been regarded with great distrust in the British press until then, simply because they weren’t particularly audiophile in orientation, played a part in the dynamic. For example, a decade
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The Philips CD100 – and with it the new Compact Disc format – was released on October 1, 1982, and it came at a good moment for the music industry. The once-dominant LP format was on the decline; seven years earlier, it had sold a staggering 91.6 million discs in the United Kingdom, but by
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