When Compact Disc was first introduced in 1982, there was a lot of debate over how it sounded. There were two separate CD player tribes at first: Philips-based units and Japanese-based machines. The former had DACs that only went up to 14-bit resolution but oversampled the digital datastream four times, such as the Philips CD100. […]
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The M1, which is currently in the ‘where is it now’ category, first emerged on the analogue scene little under a decade ago and made more of a ripple than a splash, if only for a brief while. However, it did not sell well, and the ever intrepid Antony Michaelson quickly went on to other
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It’s all forgotten now, but there was once upon a time when a costly – but not exorbitantly priced – turntable appeared, battled the best of the best, and triumphed. That is, almost. The JBE, you see, was an underground sensation for a brief period around the turn of the 1980s. Despite its high quality,
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The first Compact Disc players were released in 1982, and British purchasers received them a year later. This generation has mostly been forgotten since then, which is a shame because many of them sound considerably more ‘analogue’ than many of today’s high-end esoterica. A good example is the Marantz CD-54. It’s a late first-generation design
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Anthony Michaelson uncorked the Cockburn’s Special Reserve, polished the silver, and introduced a celebratory collection of Tri-Vista items in 2003 to honor the two decades since its legendary Dr. Thomas preamp first hit dealer shelves. The Tri-Vista 300 integrated amplifier (of which only 500 were created) and the Tri-Vista CD/SACD player (of which only 800
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The Jelco Ichikawa Jewel Company, based in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro area, is one of the country’s many small-scale precision engineering firms. It has been producing since 1920, and by the 1970s, it had naturally shifted its focus to turntable parts in response to the hi-fi craze of the period. Over the years, it has done a
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It shared much of its genetic make-up with a Philips machine – the CD303 – and was the top model in the company’s first generation range of CD players. To put it another way, its list of component parts reads like a wish list from a 1980s digiphile. The CDM-1 Pro mechanism, which has a
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This is one of Musical Fidelity’s numerous unusual yet appealing products, first released in 2002 as a direct competitor to Naim’s Nait 5 integrated. It was a lovely half-width integrated amp – the business has flirted with this format before returning to full-width – that made a style point of its sleek, custom-built aluminium extruded
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Switching distortion is at the root of a lot of the problems with transistor amplifiers. The sound of those tiny three-legged semiconductors turning on and off on demand is ubiquitous, and most people have become accustomed to it — like rain in the winter. It also has a similar effect on sound; it becomes murky
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Japanese manufacturers were fighting tooth and nail in 1980 to provide the cleanest and most powerful transistor amplification yet developed. Marantz was solidly in the Class A camp with a series of new-fangled MOSFET power amps, but Sony and Yamaha had lately gone down the V-FET road (with the TA-N7B and B2, respectively) and Pioneer
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