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It wasn’t so long ago that the entire family would gather together to enjoy music in one room, and while sitting and listening to a crackly rendition of the Glen Miller Orchestra as father smokes a pipe and mother frets about what the neighbours think are very outdated concepts, individual members of the family still enjoy listening to music, but in their own space. Up until fairly recently this would’ve necessitated a separate system for every room, but now with the advent of multi-room one system can stream music anywhere in the house that you care to stick a set of speakers. All of which brings us rather neatly to Yamaha’s answer to multi-room, MusicCast. Rather than design a range of speakers to form a line of products, MusicCast is a feature set that has been added to a selection of Yamaha’s audio components allowing youto assemble a multi-room setup that includes the elements you desire in the places you want them.

Since we all miss an issue of Hi-Fi Choice from timeto time it’s good to know that you can plug any gapsin your collection by making use of our Back Issues service, which has recently found a new home. The website at mags-uk. com is where they’re at and finding them couldn’t be easier. Sign in on the home page, then select Hi-Fi Choice via the Titles or Publishers (MyTimeMedia) listing on the menu bar.

With JJ Electronics European-produced valves, the V40 Blackline is claimed to provide the warm, luxurious sound that’s so commonly associated with tube amplifiers. Output is quoted as 30W with an impedance of 4 or 8ohm, and the V40 is the first product in the Blackline range to offer Bluetooth4. 0 connectivity – aptX no less. Additional socketry includes RCA phono inputs and a micro USB port.

What better way to mark the 70th birthday of your company’s founder than to launch a luxury edition of a timeless favourite loudspeaker? That’s precisely what ATC has done in honour of founder and managing director Billy Woodman. Taking the classic design ofthe SCM10 mini monitor from the nineties, the new SCM10SE comes with a lustrous blue piano finish, with silver detailing and a fine-grain blue leather baffle. The original SCM10’s soft dome tweeter has been updated with the recently developed SH25-76S ‘S-spec’ 25mm dual-suspension design alongside the SB45-1255C 125mm mid/bass unit with integral soft dome. In turn the crossover has been reworked for the new unitsusing ATC’s hand-wound air-cored inductors and polypropylene capacitors throughout.

There can be few things more frustrating than sitting down to listen to a favourite record only to find that it’s filthy. Giving your vinyl a proper wet clean can be a time consuming and at times messy job. Enter Clearaudio with what it’s describing as its best solution for cleaning records yet – the Double Matrix Professional Sonic. Integrating both sonic and vacuum cleaning elements, the Double Matrix Professional Sonic record cleaner is claimed to deliver a deep, but importantly, gentle cleaning of pressing residues and persistent dirt that’s deep within the grooves of your vinyl – enabling you to listen your music as it really should be heard.

Budget two-way speakers the LX-2 and LX-3 (shown) are the debut models from Mission’s latest entry-level loudspeaker range, the LX Series. Despite their affordable price tags, Mission informs us that the new models have been designed to deliver compelling musicality. For the LX Series the company has produced a tweeter with a neodymium magnet (selected for maximum magnetic force in such a small space) and a 25mm microfibre dome. This is partnered with the 130mm mid/bass driver unit (one in the case of the LX-2 and two for the LX-3), sporting cones fashioned from an advanced fibre formulation apparently selected for its superior self damping and excellent stiffness.

In the 1986 hit, Huey Lewis and the News famously sang: “It’s hip to be square”, but is it really? Could it be that the man behind the eighties powerhouse The Power Of Love hadn’t quite managed to get his facts straight? There’s no doubt that when it comes to the most popular shape for loudspeakers, square – or perhaps more precisely rectangular – is the way to go. But what if someone were to break from the norm and come up with something a little bit more exciting looking? Could it really be possible to get a high-end performance from a shape other than those boring four straight lines that make up an oblong? And while they’re carrying out the process ofreinventing the audio equivalent of the wheel, how about making just one of the things, rather than the pair that we’ve hadto make room for up to now? Enter the clever folk at Geneva, who with the AeroSphère Large (HFC 407) have created something that looks more like a piece of high-concept furniture than a way to impress your friends and terrify audio traditionalists. Beneath that slightly flattened 40cm orb, is a rather more angular forward-facing structure that houses two 25mm tweeters, a brace of 102mm mid/bass drivers and an upward-firing 152mm subwoofer. These are configured within three separate acoustic chambers and powered by individual, DSP-optimised Class D amplifiers capable of some cunning fine tuning to suit your room via a free app that can be downloaded from the Geneva website.