Reviews

Nakamichi 600 Review

Compact Cassette was still considered a novelty media in 1973, having been invented by Philips a decade before for dictation purposes alone. It was absurd to think it could deliver true hi-fi performance. Serious tape users possessed Revoxes, particularly the A77, or one of a growing number of high-end Japanese decks from Sony, Akai, or

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NXT X-Space Review

The fact that multimedia speakers aren’t intended specifically for hi-fi is the main obstacle for most hi-fi enthusiasts. As a result, they can’t possibly be worth an audition, so the logic goes. Since the dark days of the late 1980s, when the first examples appeared, modest active designs used by students to beef up their

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Marantz PM-94 Review

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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Marantz SA-1 Review

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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