What do you do if you’re a Japanese electronics behemoth with a respectable but uninspiring line of products and want to make a bold move for the niche high-end hi-fi market? Anyone who is still unsure should look at what Toshiba did with Aurex. It concocted a fancy Latinate name, applied it to some decent, […]
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A passive preamplifier is simple to construct; I’ve built several. Purchase a 50k ohm potentiometer from RS Components or a similar company, connect it to four phono connectors, and, if you’re feeling brave, mount it in a box with a knob! You can get great results for cheap, which makes you question why some people
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It’s difficult to understand how revolutionary Goldring’s G900 series was when it debuted in the late 1970s. Here was a state-of-the-art technology that weighed a silph-like 4 grams in a world of somewhat heavy, lowish compliance cartridges. It was, for a brief period, the very essence of a modern moving magnet, as zeitgeisty as New
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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
Let us not forget that the Compact Cassette was a convenience media. But it was a medium on a mission: to dethrone open reel as the most popular recording format on the planet, and to do so, it needed to sound fantastic. As a result, we saw some extremely genuine initiatives from companies like Sony
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Cyrus was founded in the 1990s, having previously been a sub-brand of Mission, a loudspeaker specialist. As a result, it was an exciting moment – a lot of items appeared that demonstrated the company’s ideas, some of which were short-lived. The Cyrus dAD7 is one such example, as it represents the company’s final attempt at
Few people have ever seen or heard of this piece of Plexiglas perfection, which first debuted in the mid-1970s. It was allegedly designed and constructed by IMF Electronics, and a deeper examination reveals why… The deck featured an electronic speed controller to drive the split-level podule platter through a fine rubber belt, which was unusual
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Arcam has a track record when it comes to digital-to-analogue converters. In reality, the Black Box was the first ‘offboard DAC’ (as they were known at the time) when it was released in 1989. The idea of removing the DAC from the CD transport was revolutionary at the time, but it’s now commonplace, so what
The more Japanese-dominated hi-fi became in the 1970s, the more flamboyant it became. Despite the fact that the mass market was flooded with big, brushed aluminum-fronted steel boxes adorned with knobs and flashing lights, some more discerning purchasers gravitated to Bang & Olufsen, and it was this product that won many over. It was a
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With its transport, DAC, clock, and upsampler, the flagship four-box dCS Vivaldi system is a magnificent thing. It is, however, exorbitantly expensive and difficult to set up, and it necessitates a considerable quantity of living space. The Debussy entry-level model, which shares most of its technology, is a simpler, slimmer, single-box design that doesn’t sound
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