The Amplification and Recording Company of Cambridge (A&R Cambridge, later ARCAM) began work on a line of high-quality inexpensive moving magnet cartridges not long after introducing its award-winning A60 integrated amplifier. The P77, which cost £45 in 1977 and featured a (then) trendy parabolic (extended line contact) stylus, was the first to reach retailers. The […]
Simon Lee, the founder of April Music, is a hi-fi aficionado who left a solid profession to import obscure foreign brands into his native South Korea; he then decided to start developing his own designs as well. The DP200 you see here is one of the intriguing products that resulted. Although commonplace now, the concept
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Alex Nikitin is one of the best-kept secrets in hi-fi. Although few people are familiar with his name, he is well-known in the business as the talented audio engineer behind many of Creek Audio’s products during the 1990s and 2000s. Alex Nikitin Technology (ANT Audio) is his most recent endeavor, and in addition to a
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When you hear “British hi-fi,” you immediately think of Linn, Naim, Rega, Cyrus, and Creek, firms that rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Quad, SME, KEF, Leak, and Wharfedale, all of which gained popularity in the 1960s, will also be significant for elder audiophiles. But what of Britain’s lost hi-fi brands, the ones
Tuners are rarely sought after. Even the best representatives of the species, such as high-end turntables or gigantic open reels, struggle to stir passions. But Aiwa’s AT-9700 was different: it was one of the first tuners with a digital frequency display, and it was super modern in the 1970s sense. This seemed to be the
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The late 1970s were a hectic period for mass market hi-fi; things were moving at such a breakneck pace that many Japanese manufacturers battled to keep up. As a result of this state of affairs, a lot of eccentric models like this were almost obsolete before they were launched – or, at the very least,
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BSR, a British business, introduced the ADC brand of budget-to-mid-priced turntables in November 1979. Because BSR was a troubled brand, it made natural to adopt the name of the American corporation that controlled it. The Audio Dynamics Corporation had been developing significant vinyl sources for nearly two decades and was a well-known manufacturer of cutting-edge
The AE1 is one of the most legendary hi-fi loudspeakers of the 1980s, with the Celestion SL6 and the Wharfedale Diamond, in the pantheon of boxes that changed the game. Aside from the BBC LS3/5a and the Spendor SA1, tiny speakers in the 1970s were few. Indeed, the breed had not been treated seriously at
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Although no cassette deck has ever been compared to an oil painting, early specimens of the genre were particularly unappealing. Top-loaders from the 1970s were fiddly and unwieldy to operate, with controls strewn about indiscriminately, whilst front-loaders appeared bold and threatening. Forget about the physics of the machines. They were crude and clumsy, confirming cassette’s
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Why can’t man develop an accurate loudspeaker if he can put cars on Mars and perfect open heart surgery? Modern speakers are severely hampered even under the best of circumstances, and the chance of getting one to perform correctly from 20Hz to 20kHz is still a long way off. Given that moving coil drivers are
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