LATEST ADDITIONS

Current affairs Mains filtration removes high-frequency noise, but as Richard Black discovers Isol-8’s Powerline Axis goes the other way, removing direct current ains treatment specialist Isol-8 has been around for quite a while, but has not been over-keen to offer product for review. Evidently, the reason for this decision was due to the fact that advanced sales had outstripped supply, apparently! Now that this problem has been addressed, we’ve finally been able to get our hands on a sample and a fascinating product it is, too. In its basic form, the PowerLine is ‘just’ a mains distribution board – though it’s actually about as deluxe as such a thing can get, with silver-plated wiring, high-quality sockets, a solid metal chassis and so on. But the Axis variant adds something very unusual in mains filtering called DC blocking.

Altered images Jason Kennedy investigates an intriguing turntable from Dr Feickert which takes a new approach to the challenges of perfect vinyl replay This stylish German turnable is the first we have encountered from the elusive Dr Feickert, seen and heard at Munich’s High End show in May. The Woodpecker is the least expensive turntable that he makes, yet it embodies the principles that you find in the top Twin and Triple designs whilst managing to look entirely contemporary. It’s distinguished by a large cut-out which means you can slide the armboard along and accommodate tonearms between nine and twelve inches in length. This makes it one of the most flexible, yet elegant turntables we’ve seen in a long time.

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.

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.