For previous articles in this series of industry features, please refer to the archives.
February 2012 - Hypex Ncore® - For a few decades we've been tube nutters inside and out. Even before the hifi bug bit and infected both of us with an incurable case of serious audio disease, things had to have tubes. No guitar amp was even considered if there were no tubes aglow... This changed when the Devialet D-Premier arrived on the scene. Not only is it an all-in-one phono stage, preamp and streamer but a hybrid class A/D power amp as well. Over the years we auditioned a number of class D-based designs and had mixed feelings. There always was something uncomfortable in the music reproduced...
December 2011 - Oz Show - Jean-Marie Liere attends the first hifi show on Australian soil in a long time...
November 2011 - Luxembourg Show 2011 - November 19th and 20th saw another one of those small but extremely high-quality audio shows take place, this time in the superb Neumunster abbey of Luxembourg. The show was organized by Romain Wagner of Audio Concept who offered listeners five highly tuned systems to sample at will. It is almost impossible to have revelatory auditions during an audio show simply because set-up and acoustic limitations tend to abound. Yet I keep telling myself that one day a system will challenge my established hierarchies. At this show it actually happened - and by the system I least expected would be able to provide a revelation...
November 2011 - RMAF 2011 - Steve Marsh attended the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest and reports back with eight pages of commentary.
October 2011 - High End Swiss - The 3rd installment of the Zürich High-end show from the organizers of the Munich event took place at the end of October.
October 2011 - TAVES - David Kan, Frederic Beudot, Glen Wagenknecht and Paul Candy attended the first Toronto Audio Video Entertainment Show. Glen kicked off with his six pages, Frederic followed with his three and now Paul just added three more.
September 2011 - Go Green - It used to be that when you wanted to sell a product, you added sex. You sold cars when a scarcely clad well-curved lady was strategically draped across the bonnet. You sold loudspeakers when a scarcely clad well-curved lady touched the enclosure while licking her lips. You sold just about anything when a scarcely clad well-curved lady was somehow connected. Those days are over. Strangely enough the vanishing act of the scarcely clad well-curved ladies is not caused by the global embrace of moral (neo) conservatism or an overall jolt to the right. No, the vanishing of the scarcely clad well-curved ladies ...
August 2011 - RoadTour Buren II - In the beginning there was the horn, first formed by cupped hands to make a shout carry farther. The same principle was used for sound reproduction eons later. Amplifiers in the roaring twenties of the previous century were limited in power and transducers were handicapped in performance. Fitting a horn to such drivers enhanced the capabilities of the amplifier-speaker combination. As technology progressed amplifiers grew more power whilst improved dynamic drivers lost sensitivity. Hornspeakers remained the providence of theaters where huge systems were an integral part of the stage...
August 2011 - No more excuses! - It's no secret. I luv the iPod. It's the coolest thing to have happened to hifi in a very long time. That said, it's performance can certainly be improved. The most direct way is to handle D/A conversion offboard. The Wadia and Onkyo docks followed by similar devices from Cambridge Audio and Pure led the way. Then Peachtree Audio's iDecco rewrote the external digital-direct dock recipe by hard-wiring an integral dock to a superior DAC inside an integrated amplifier. Later Cypher Labs' battery-powered Algorhythm Solo took the show on the road by offering either internal D/A conversion or a reclocked S/PDIF stream output. Now comes the new XMOS turnkey solution for would-be digital-direct iPod dockists...
August 2011 - Hong Kong Show - Our correspondent on the Pacific Rim Clinton Yap submitted plenty of photos with short credits to give us a pictorial impression of the event.
July 2011 - Audiopax Maggiore 100 - On July 13, Eduardo de Lima came to Villeneuve for an interview about his latest amplifier. The 100/130-watt Maggiore 100 class A1 single-ended tube monos parallel six complete amplifiers with strategically dissimilar output transformers in a single chassis. Designed in Brazil but now built completely in Switzerland, the Maggiore monos represent Eduardo's latest thinking on cloning a high-power 'super triode' with classic triode curves from non-triode tubes and very unconventional single-ended circuitry which takes his original TimbreLock concept to the next level...
July 2011 - Andreas Vollenweider at the Montreux festival - The phone rang. It was 21:40. "Hiya Nino." As a jeweler with a downtown Vevey boutique, our friend Nino Medina has participated with a lakeside stand at the Montreux Jazz Festival for decades. Did we want tickets to Andreas Vollenweider? He could get two at the door. They were usually from CHF 80 to 200 but a guy flogged two for just 40 the set. When did the concert start? 22:00. Done. Grabbing the bus which shuttles the lake front between Villeneuve and Vevey free every 15 minutes during summer concert hours, it happened to leave our end stop as we approached. The driver kindly waited. We pressed plenty of flesh reaching Nino's exhibit through the slowly meandering hordes of boardwalk revelers next to the mini golf...
July 2011 - The Munich questions - Our Polish correspondent asks select exhibitors on changes in the industry to commemorate and 'freeze frame' the 30th installment of the High End Munich trade show.
June 2011 - Soliloquy -  It's from the Latin solus and loqui for alone and to speak. For today's purposes its ring is nicer than obituary. Or, shiver, necrologue. Of course there's eulogy. And really, it's supposed to be a swan song for a deceased. Component though, not person. So let's get on with a soliloquy then. The machine in question is John Chapman's Bent Audio Tap-X. It's dead in the sense of no longer being made. Why talk it up then? Why not leave fallen heroes in peace?
June 2011 - Lifestyle - The iPod finally evicted music consumption from the man cave into the streets for real. Audio became homeless and public spectacle. Where visibility of fine hifi was always limited to visitors, most other trappings of lifestyle—the house, car, clothes, watches and jewelry—are public domain. That's half the appeal. Impress the neighbors. Be noted. Belong. Apple's iPod revolution moved audio into the public eye. Now there's no doubt who and how many are actually doing it. Lifestyle and visibility are interlinked. The fashion aspect of lifestyle is useless if nobody sees you with it. For hifi iPod & Co. obviously enjoy the highest visibility. Is that why audiophiles struggle with the term?
May 2011 - The class of D 2011 - So-called think pieces help me think. Doing it out loud for an audience clarifies what otherwise might remain odds 'n' ends in the gray murky matter. Coming back from the just concluded München HighEnd show, I noticed something twitching upstairs. Writing it out helped me figure out what it was. I'd met Michael McCormick of Bel Canto Design. They were the first to really fly the 'Class D for president' banner. With well-developed distribution and now 3rd or 4th-gen analog switching amps, they've been repeatedly asked to launch a super amp which on price, performance and cachet would bring the brand mano i mano with Boulder & Co. While engineering at BCD is the domain of John Stronczer, Michael admitted to conceptual issues...
May 2011 - Jörg & Ralph in Munich. In 1982 all of 20 exhibitors joined to display upscale systems under the ‘High End’ show banner. This very small gathering paralleled the far bigger Hifi Video show in Düsseldorf upon which the High-End initiative then looked down with practiced disdain as a zoo for the masses and a mainstream mosh pit without proper conditions to demonstrate quality audio. A year later Germany’s then geographic center of Frankfurt with its Kempinski Hotel became the venue of choice and remained that way until 2003 when things bust at the seams for good. Too many manufacturers clamoured to participate in the success of the event which now exceeded the Kempinski’s capacities. This prompted the move...
May 2011 - Short snippets from the Munich HighEnd Show.
May 2011 - Science fiction aesthetics applied to loudspeakers design? Vivid Audio may be one of the strangest business cases in the global hifi industry. Who could have imagined a short 10 years ago that it was possible to manufacture some of the most technically advanced loudspeakers in South Africa?

Joël Chevassus visits to report on site.
April 2011 - A talk with Peter Lyndorf - At a recent audio show organized by AudioVideo2Day in a hotel near Antwerp, Belgium was present head of Lyngdorf Audio Peter Lyngdorf. He was there to demonstrate the flagship model of the Steinway Lyngdorf series of hifi systems called the Model D. Those who’ve met Peter at previous shows know how he loves to play DJ and MC at the same time while going through favorite tracks of his vast collection. This time was no different but the system he used was. Very different...
April 2011 - UK Show - Formerly known as 'The London Hi Fidelity Show', its organisers the Chester Group described 'Audio World 2011' as a stepping stone to their National Audio Show held at Whittlebury which I reported on last year.  By this definition it appeared I'd already tasted the main course and was belatedly about to sample the soup.  The Park Inn is situated in Heathrow, London and certainly couldn't be a more different venue from the picturesque Whittlebury where most visitors parked for free on the grounds or rather fields. Here it was all barriers, parking ticket machines, keen-eyed wardens and a hefty charge before entering...
April 2011 - Nano is the new cryo. When cryogenic treatment of cables first made the hifi rounds, it was mocked as voodoo. To protect their honor, a few manufacturers initially chose to call it 'proprietary treatment'. As the years passed the efficacy of hifi cryo on wires and even tubes became more widely accepted. Audiophiles began to understand that this process had a successful application history with car and tractor engines, guns, musical instruments, space craft and many other metal-working industries well before hifi discovered it. Of late our little industry has been invaded by nano. The brochure for Avantgarde Acoustic's Duo Primo is one example...
April 2011 - Audiophile Outlet Store - The factory outlet store—usually along the freeway for big-sign advertising, cheaper rents and consistent heavy traffic capturing not just the locals—has a solid tradition as a means to sell discontinued or blemished product at factory-authorized discounts not available through regular dealers. Now Gary Alpern has launched a hifi factory outlet store on the Internet freeway...
March 2011 - PC squared - I received a shocking email today which was all wrong, wrong, wrong! When my blood pressure returned to normal, it dawned upon me that this wrong view is still held by many people today, even some who are, or want to be, audiophiles. If you have the wrong premise you can follow all the golden logic you want but you will never make sense of the audiophile culture. Making sense of audiophile culture can only happen once you get the underlying facts straight...
March 2011 - RoadTour Buren - Moving house brings many changes and even more if you move twice in a year as we did. Part of settling into a new environment is getting acquainted with new neighbors - in our case new audio neighbors. Because we moved to a completely different part of Holland, the audio landscape changed with the scenery. From Manhattan-like high rises to a national park with forests, heaths, bog pools and wet meadows close to the Rhine river, gone are the large shopping malls where audio dealers share customers with furniture outlets and such. No, this area is sparsely populated with dedicated audio stores. One of those is located in Buren...
February 2011 - Pure i(ndulgence) - The revolution continues. More cheap fun to turn an iPod into a bona fide audiophile source...
February 2011 - Something in the air - You know the line. Soon coming to a theatre near you. B+W's new $599 Zeppelin Air is due at dealerships next month. It's as good an opportunity as any to talk about technological IQ. As a breed, high-enders overlook this product category altogether. In this instance it would overlook an object lesson in clever engineering that ought to be applied to 'our' type product. For starters this iDock machine's five drivers are actively amplified. This means discrete amps for each transducer—4 x 25 watts for the tweeters and mids, 1 x 50 watts for the woofer—and electronic crossovers. During a CES 2011 interview, B+W's engineers talked of having rewritten DSP code...
February 2011 - RoadTour AudioNec - Joël reports on a quite different system...
February 2011 - Dominance - With the release of the $40.000/pr Dominance, Zu rewrites its market share ambitions to include unconditional reference products. Zu's UK importer Simon Matanle put it this way: "With super-high efficiency and power handling, it’s capable of making a very loud statement of its abilities. But to this listener it’s not what Dominance does loudly that's most impressive. It's what it does softly after hours when the lambs are in bed. I'm thinking two in the morning, everyone asleep (except me), half a bottle of burgundy, an open fire and some 'Dead Can Dance' to play amongst the candle flames. In such surroundings Dominance proves yet again that the heart and soul of the music lies in the deepest frequencies...
January 2011 - Positive ID - Are you tired of seeing otherwise well-intentioned audiophiles make mindless forum statements like "iPod users will never experience high-end audio"? Do you regard those statements as nothing but smelly rubbish? Good. Cambridge Audio's new black or silver iD100 has us contrarians (or hopelessly hopeful) covered. Check out that rear panel. 1 = outboard power supply. 2 = video output. 3 = AES/EBU digital audio out. 4 = Toslink digital audio out. 5 = S/PDIF coaxial output. The USB socket is for easy syncing.