LATEST ADDITIONS

Disc Players
Cyrus CD 8SE - £1,300
Ed Selley  |  Aug 15, 2010  |  0 comments
Cyrus CD 8SE - £1,300 Cyrus has included its own servo evolution platform, bringing CD replay close to perfection we’ve seen this model before (HFC 310), but it has been very slightly revised, so we thought a re-test might be a good idea. Many of these revisions are cosmetic, including a new window for the display and a redesigned bezel, which fronts the slot-loading transport and puts the mind at rest about scratching discs (not that we hand any such concerns in the first place). But there have also been some changes to the software which controls the disc-reading servo. This servo was the ‘big news’ about the 8SE (the letters standing for ‘Servo Evolution’) and was something of a novelty for a specialist manufacturer such as Cyrus, in that it optimised disc-reading from a high-quality audio standpoint, rather than the more common trade-off between read quality and performance with dodgy or damaged discs.
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Disc Players
Micromega CD-10 - £820
Ed Selley  |  Aug 15, 2010  |  0 comments
Micromega CD-10 - £820 It has a limited repertoire, but this player still divides opinion on its performance abilities Micromega’s name was made with mid-price CD players, and the company continues to enjoy a high reputation for such devices. As the baby of the range, this model doesn’t do anything particularly surprising, but it’s clearly a carefully designed piece of kit. Micromega makes particular mention of the power supply arrangements, which start with an R-core transformer. The R-core design originated in far-Eastern budget audio, but as Micromega points out, one of its characteristics is a rather narrow frequency band, which isn’t ideal for all applications but, in low-power equipment like CD players, it effectively contributes a degree of mains filtering.
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Disc Players
Moon CD.5 - £999
Ed Selley  |  Aug 15, 2010  |  0 comments
Moon CD. 5 £999 Inspired by some cutting-edge technology, the Moon has a few surprises in store Moon’s range extends upwards from this simple and businesslike model to some quite fancy players, including the two-box Andromeda which is well over ten grand’s-worth of cutting-edge technology. While it’s hard to see many physical constituent parts that have ‘trickled down’ from the Andromeda, the design aims seem consistent across the range. For instance, Moon is keen on integer oversampling, rather than the asynchronous ‘upsampling’ which has been in vogue for some years.
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Disc Players
NAD M5 - £1,600
Ed Selley  |  Aug 15, 2010  |  0 comments
NAD M5 - £1,600 Judged for its CD performance only, this multi-format player managed to hold its own Here’s a multichannel SACD player, competing on the strength of its CD performance. Although it should be noted that the M5 offers the full gamut of SACD replay, stereo and 5. 1, complete with bass management and a video output for use in setting up (though an external display’s not actually essential). That much will already make it appeal to lovers of true high-fidelity surround-sound, but there’s plenty more behind the attractive all-metal fascia.
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Disc Players
Roksan Kandy K2 - £899
Ed Selley  |  Aug 15, 2010  |  0 comments
Roksan Kandy K2 - £899 With a highly competitive price tag, Roksan pushes all the right buttons on this fine player Best known as a purveyor of all things analogue, Roksan has had a CD player or two in its catalogue for many years, the Kandy K2 being the cheaper of the two currently on offer. In essence it’s pretty much what you’d expect from a player at this price – straightforward with no frills. The look is distinctive, though, as is the display, which is indeed a bit of a throwback to the 1990s. We mean that in a good way, as it gives a little more information than most.
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Loudspeakers
Bowers and Wilkins CM5 - £799
Ed Selley  |  Aug 02, 2010  |  0 comments
A mini adventure Paul Messenger test runs Bowers and Wilkins' stylish CM5 - a variation on a familiar and long established two-way luxury standmount theme The request from the Bowers and Wilkins marketing team to the engineering department responsible for the CM5 loudspeaker, probably went along the lines of “make us something small, simple, beautiful and affordable”. So it did! At £800, it doesn’t come cheap, but it is unquestionably delightfully designed and beautifully finished and a vast improvement over the 685 model (HFC 299), which incorporates many ostensibly similar core ingredients at around half the price, yet which is dressed in clothes that even its friends would call nondescript. And that’s certainly not the description one would apply to the CM5. But its virtues aren’t entirely superficial.
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Cables & Accessories
Beyerdynamic A1 - £977
Ed Selley  |  Aug 02, 2010  |  0 comments
Follow the A1 Dominic Todd gets acquainted with legendary headphone manufacturer Beyerdynamic's high-performance A1 headphone amp he mission for Beyer’s A1 is all about bringing wideband audio to the headphone enthusiast. The entire circuit has been designed to transmit 96kHz signals, making it ideal for SACD, DVD-Audio or other high-resolution audio formats. Against its rivals, who often seek a mellifluous, valve-like sound, the Beyerdynamic A1 has studio-like neutrality as its design concept. In a similar vein, the A1 is styled for practicality rather than flamboyancy.
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Loudspeakers
Monopulse 62S - £1,195
Ed Selley  |  Jul 20, 2010  |  0 comments
Monopulse 62S £1,195 Monopulse breaks the rules on standmount stereotypes with the help of its proprietary super-tweeter The basis of Monopulse loudspeakers lies in applying audio lessons that were learned working with phased-array radar systems, the prime purpose being to reproduce transient leading edges accurately. The consequent need to time-align the outputs of the three drive units at the listening seat imposes some constraints on the driver layout. These are solved by adopting a floorstanding configuration (which determines the height of the drivers above the floor), by placing the tweeter beneath the bass/mid drive unit, and by mounting a super-tweeter on the top, set back from the front panel under a metal protective hoop. The complexity of this arrangement perhaps goes some way towards explaining the decision to go for a fabric covering over the front and sides of the enclosure.
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Loudspeakers
PMC DB1i - £985
Ed Selley  |  Jul 20, 2010  |  0 comments
PMC DB1i - £985 Probably the smallest transmission line speaker in the world. Someone should inform the Guinness Book of Records In PMC parlance, DB is shorthand for Dinky Box. While somewhat deeper than sealed-box miniatures, like the classic BBC LS3/5a, the front view is barely larger than that needed to accommodate two drive units, so this DB1i is certainly a tiny loudspeaker. Especially when you consider that the four-section transmission line squeezed inside this little enclosure to load the back of the small main driver has an amazing effective length of 1.
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Loudspeakers
Roksan Kandy K2 TR-5 - £895
Ed Selley  |  Jul 20, 2010  |  0 comments
Roksan Kandy K2 TR-5 - £895 This petite Kandy pitches above its station, thanks to the credentials of its much larger Caspian FR-5 brother Roksan’s fine reputation has been built largely off the back of its fine turntables and electronics, though several interesting loudspeaker designs have also put in an occasional appearance. The fine floorstanding Caspian FR-5 was very well received when it arrived in 2006 and the obvious question for this review is whether this Kandy K2 TR-5 can repeat the same trick. The K2 Kandys are Roksan’s recently introduced and least costly range of components, and while the official price of this TR-5 varies from £895 (high-gloss black) to £945 (the beautifully finished satin rosewood of our samples), substantial discounts are available if other Kandy K2 electronics are purchased at the same time. Besides those two options, the speaker is available in silver, maple and metallic black.
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