Don’t like orange lava? (What’s wrong with you?) Potential owners can customize their Mera ELBs. Pick your favorite colors and clean away.
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The world’s sexiest record-cleaning machine? Possibly. This Hannl Mera ELB (2670), housed in orange acrylic to look like hot lava, offers programmable cleaning and suction functions for quiet operation and quick drying.
Does this man look tired? Not at all. In fact, he seems tireless.
“Do you have any new products?” I innocently asked Hans-Ole Vitus, Vitus Audio’s uncompromising founder and designer.
His eyes went wide.
“Yes. I hadn’t slept for two weeks leading up to this show because I’d been worrying about all the new products.”
The RI-100 ($12,000) is the first new component in Vitus’s Reference series. It uses a brand new transformer design, and provides 300W RMS into 8 ohms running in class-A/B mode. The user has the option of adding a DAC, headphone amp, and…
The press kit reads: “Home is where we can do exactly what we please. It’s freedom to breathe, live, love, and play together with music as a dedicated companion….”
I know it’s just marketing talk, but I have to admit that I like it.
The new Dali Fazon F5 (1499) uses a 1.1” dome tweeter and two 5” mid-woofers, while the cabinet is curved to avoid any parallel sides and prevent standing waves. Special spring-loaded terminals developed by Dali work together with the speaker’s integrated base to neatly conceal speaker cables. (Because, really, who wants to see speaker cables?) In…
NAD gear really gets around. The stuff was all over the Munich High End Show, which made me feel sort of proud to have NAD’s C 316BEE (review to come in our July issue) in my own system.
Rosemarie was dressed to perfectly match this lovely, simple system: Dynaudio’s small and capable DM2/6 loudspeakers ($800/pair), matched with NAD’s C 565BEE CD player, C 165BEE preamp, and C 245BEE amplifier.
“Just sit right here and look pretty,” I told her.
“What?”
“I said, ‘You look so pretty.’ What did you think I said?”
A typical display at the M.O.C. was open, airy, and comfortable, made to resemble a well-designed modern home—very much unlike the typical hotel room at many of our US hi-fi shows, which are often dimly lit, stuffy, and completely uncomfortable.
Time and time again during the Munich High End Show, I was impressed by the ways in which hi-fi was presented.
The issue of cost, which is so often prevalent at our shows, also seemed nonexistent in Munich. Even the issue of sound, our reason for existence, seemed easy to overlook in light of the pure fun, obvious physical…
Yamaha Aventage BD-A1000 universal Blu-ray player
You may already have ripped all of yours to a computer or music server, but most of us still own lots of CDs—as well as other 5" optical-disc formats that are not so easily ripped and stored. DVD-Audio may have faded, but the occasional new DVD-A is still released. SACD slogs on with a steady output of classical discs and, rarely, other sorts of music. But the numbers of music and movie releases on Blu-ray keeps burgeoning. Truly universal players are getting scarce, as DVD-A slips through the cracks and with analog 5.1/7.1-channel outputs…
You may already have ripped all of yours to a computer or music server, but most of us still own lots of CDs—as well as other 5" optical-disc formats that are not so easily ripped and stored. DVD-Audio may have faded, but the occasional new DVD-A is still released. SACD slogs on with a steady output of classical discs and, rarely, other sorts of music. But the numbers of music and movie releases on Blu-ray keeps burgeoning. Truly universal players are getting scarce, as DVD-A slips through the cracks and with analog 5.1/7.1-channel outputs…
I compared the BD-A1000 with the Sony XA-5400ES SACD player using the Marantz AV-7005, AudioQuest Carbon HDMI cables, and SACDs and BDs that I had in duplicate. The Marantz's readout indicated that both players were outputting 176.4kHz, but while I could distinguish them by ear, choosing a preference was difficult. Sara K.'s voice in "Set You Free," from her Hell or High Water (SACD/CD, Stockfisch SFR 357.4039.2), was slightly mellower and more forward through the Sony, but the Yamaha countered with superior delineation of instruments and ambience while retaining a quite convincing…
At this point in the saga, Meridian had been advancing their digital-processing and D/A-conversion technologies in other products, particularly the 808.2 Reference, which John Atkinson called "the finest-sounding CD player I have yet heard" in his April 2009 review. For the 808.2, Meridian, in their words, "designed a much improved analogue output card. It has better analogue, digital, power supply and clock circuits . . . partly possible because CPLD (Complex Programmable Logic Device) technology had improved since the original 808." This would be transferred to the 861, but "with different…
Sidebar 1: Contacts
Meridian Audio Ltd. Latham Road, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire PE29 6YE, UK. Tel: (44) (0)1480-445678. Fax: (44) (0)1480-445686. Web: www.meridian.co.uk. US distributor: Meridian America, 110 Greene Street, #407, New York, NY 10012. Tel: (646) 666-0140. Web: www.meridian-audio.com.
Yamaha Corporation PO Box 1, Hamamatsu, Japan. US: Yamaha Electronics Corp. USA, 6600 Orangethorpe Avenue, Buena Park, CA 90620. Tel: (714) 228-3343. Web: www.yamaha.com/yec/index.htm.
Brinkmann's 9.6 tonearm ($3990) resembles the German company's longer, more expensive 10.5 and 12.1 arms, which in turn resemble the legendary Breuer. The new arm includes the same headshell, armtube, mounting socket, and cueing device used in the other arms. The bearing system differs, though the Swiss-made ball bearings are identical.
While the more expensive arms use traditional fixed-gimbal bearings, the 9.6 has a unipivot-like construction for the horizontal bearing. The weighted arm housing sits on a small ball that rests on a pivot, also as in a typical unipivot design. A second…