A top Marantz engineer once told me, “The original Bitstream players sounded horrible.” You understand that this is strictly not for publishing, yet it is refreshingly open all the less. Others used more diplomatic terminology at the time, but it’s worth noting that the company didn’t release a flagship Bitstream system until 1994’s CD-15. This […]
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Who would have guessed? Oppo Digital Inc., a California-based spin-off of an obscure Chinese optical disc player firm, launches a high-end hi-fi product line. It’s not your normal hi-fi success story, but with each new product launch, the tale becomes more credible. The business now has its own matching DAC/preamp/headphone amp – in the very
Cyrus Audio’s ONE integrated amplifier, which debuted at the 2016 Munich High End Show, is a Class D design that employs the company’s hybrid Class D technology’s third iteration. When headphones are plugged in, the power supply rails switch to powering the Class AB headphone stage, claiming 100W RMS per channel into 6 ohms. As
The sheer quantity of low-cost Philips-based Marantz CD players produced in the 1980s and 1990s is staggering. The market was continuously moving throughout the heyday of the silver disc, and Marantz, like everyone else, had to come up with new features, adjustments, and/or style to maintain its market position. In 1988, Marantz released the CD65
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The Aurora was the company’s first turntable, and it cost little under £1,000 when it was released in 2014. It’s a high-quality skeletal belt drive design hewn from black acrylic with a low-resonance platter, just like the original from 2003. It lacks traditional sprung suspension and must be placed on a well-isolated table or wall
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The decade of the 1990s was perhaps equally as significant for digital audio as the decade before it, because it witnessed the first introduction of high-resolution recording and playback. The next wave of DVD players that followed towards the end of the 1990s were finally able to deliver 24-bit, 96Hz stereo, whereas Compact Disc had
In 1988, the recordable CD (also known as CD-R) was introduced. The format, known as CD-WO (CD-Write Once), was fully compatible with the original ‘Red Book’ CD standard, offering up to 74 minutes of recording (650 MB), although later CD-Rs gave up to 80 minutes of recording (800 MB) (737MB). CD-RW (CD-ReWriteable) discs were also
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To honor the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Johan Sebastian Bach’s death, Ortofon released three new Kontrapunkt moving coil cartridges at the turn of the millennium. The a and b comfortably outsold the c, despite the fact that they were all slightly different. The b was my favorite of the bunch, with a Nude
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It’s difficult to overstate the decline of Dual, which had once been one of Europe’s leading turntable manufacturers, employing over three thousand people across various factories in West Germany during the country’s postwar economic boom. It originated in 1907 in the Black Forest village of St. Georgen, when brothers Christian and Joseph Steidinger began creating
The DVD-Audio vs. SACD conflict was raging by 2002. Many manufacturers first pledged their allegiance to one format, but quickly realized that they needed to support both new hi-res disc formats. Because this was before the age of so-called “universal” players, most businesses offered a choice of two models that were essentially the same. For
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