LATEST ADDITIONS

As Bat For Lashes, Natasha Khan earned Mercury Music Prize nominations for her 2006 debut Fur And Gold and its follow up Two Suns. Her third album, 2012’s The Haunted Man, a set of beguiling art-school pop on which her lofty soprano floated beguilingly above her characteristically dreamy soundscapes gave her a first American chart entry. Yet despite such critical and commercial success, a feeling persisted that she had more to give and we were still awaiting her first truly great album. At 36 and no longer the fluttering ingénue, The Bride is that record, destined to catapult her into the premier league.

If you’re in the market for a high-end cartridge, Audio-Technica’s AT-ART1000 at £4,100 could be for you. The hand-crafted design places the moving coil directly on top of the stylus tip, meaning that signal transmission from the stylus diamond to the moving coil are direct rather than transmitted along the length of the solid boron cantilever. Eight turns of 20um-diameter PCOCC wire create coils of 0. 9mm diameter.

If your aspirations extend beyond conventional solid-state hi-fi components but at more real-world prices, then this tube series from the US-based audiophile specialist Audio Research may well grab your attention. The Foundation ‘entry-level’ series is from the same engineering and design team responsible for its aspirational Reference series, and the three-strong range (for now) includes the LS28 line stage preamplifier with four balanced and four single-ended inputs, PH9 phono stage with five different impedance settings for cartridge loading – which can be changed on the fly with the included remote – and the DAC9 384kHz and DSD-compatible digital-to-analogue converter. All three models are built around the same chassisand 6H30 vacuum tubes, with four in the LS28 line stage preamplifier, three in the PH9 phono stage and a pair in the DAC9. Available in both black and natural anodized aluminium finishes, each unit comes with its own custom metal remote control.

Danish audio brand Copland has been absent from these pages in terms of new product launches for some time, but now it’s back with its long-awaited DAC 215 USB DAC/headphone preamp fed by a pairof ECC88 tubes. Described as a “Universal high-resolution DAC, preamplifier and headphone amplifier” it can be used as a headphone amp, preamp or as a pure DAC – the choice is yours. The Copland DAC 215 looks set to be bang on trend with its retro styling thanks to the rotary front panel controls for the volume level and input selection, and the faint glow of the valves from the headphone amp output section lurking behind the slatted grille will undoubtedly enhance any likely old-school feel for potential purchasers. But at the heart of the DAC 215 is a digital-to-analogue converter with multiple S/PDIF inputs, PCM, and DSD capabilities using the ES9018 Reference 8-channel DAC used in double-differential mode.