If you wanted to get serious about sound on a budget in the 1980s, vinyl was your only option. For the most of the decade, Compact Disc was the domain of the wealthy; even the cheapest Philips machines cost over £300 towards the end of the decade. No, if you only had half that much […]
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Do you recall the birth of the Squeezebox? It was introduced in 2003 as the SliMP3, an MP3-only gadget with a connected connection that required a computer programmer to interface it with its host computer – or so it seemed. Two years later, the Squeezebox a proper arrived, with Wi-Fi, a digital output, and native
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In the big eighties vinyl scheme of things, the Mantra sat between a Rega Planar 3 and a Linn LP12, another long-lost British belt-drive turntable. It had a nice, stable base for tonearms ranging from the Linn LVX+ to the Rega RB300, and it was well-made and stylish. In 1989, Manticore released their own Musician
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Most amplifiers from the 1980s weren’t anything to write home about, especially the gadget-laden behemoths. But Marantz’s flagship was unique – a hefty 25kg integrated that cost £1,000 and featured the company’s odd ‘Quarter-A’ technology, which handled lower-level signals up to a quarter of the maximum power output in pure Class A. However, when the
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The SA-1 from Marantz was the state-of-the-art in high-resolution digital audio thinking in 2001. Compact Disc had been around for about two decades, during which time it had been polished and streamlined to the point that it could no longer function. Thanks to the redoubtable talents of its technical figurehead Ken Ishiwata, Marantz had shown
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Back in 1979, vinyl was the only serious music carrier this side of open reel tape, and the Linn Sondek LP12 was the only serious LP spinner, at least according to the UK hi-fi press. However, this viewpoint was not widely shared elsewhere, and in Japan, a fierce competition was raging between a number of
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It’s interesting how some iconic goods have vanished into the mists of time, completely forgotten, while others are still talked about decades later. The 104 tuner from Meridian is an example of the former, but it also deserves to be the latter! It has Allen Boothroyd to credit for its wonderful packaging and ergonomics, and
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Passive preamps have one advantage: Their short signal lines and lack of circuit complexity result in a clear, detailed sound. They aren’t, however, a cure-all for the problem of controlling your source. They have traditionally depended on resistive networks selected via a switch or rotary variable resistors, which can result in significant impedance mismatches at
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In a world of hard, harsh, and spitty budget boxes, the Mission 752 was one of the loveliest and most fascinating economical floorstanding loudspeakers of the nineties, with a beautifully smooth, open, and easy sound. One of the reasons for this was its (at the time) cutting-edge HDA (High Definition Aerogel) mid/bass driver, which provided
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It’s 1989, and the hi-fi world has changed dramatically. We’re still debating the advantages of digital audio – and unless you’re one of a select few hi-fi nerds around the world with early access to the new ‘Digital Audio Tape’ format, which runs at a heady 48kHz sampling rate, ‘digital audio’ means Compact Disc in
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