LATEST ADDITIONS

Integrated Amplifiers
Primare I22 Integrated and and CD22 CD player- £1,250 ea
Ed Selley  |  Nov 29, 2011  |  0 comments
Beauty and the beat Who said you can't have beautiful hi-fi and keen pricing? Richard Black looks at Primare's new £1,250-per-box CD and matching integrated Primare doesn’t launch new products every day, so we were excited to be offered the first chance to try these newcomers. Replacing the CD21 and I21, they are the company’s budget models, though obviously that’s a relative term. Still, £1,250 is a keen price although we can’t think of much hi-fi that looks this impressive for that kind of sum. The sound’s the thing, of course, but there’s also no denying that visually, these units just ooze class.
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Network Media Players
Denon, DNP 720AE - £300
Ed Selley  |  Nov 29, 2011  |  0 comments
Denon gets on stream Denon has entered the network audio player market with an inexpensive, iPod-friendly player. Malcolm Steward streams his tunes The Denon DNP-720AE is quite a late arrival at the network player party, but it compensates for its tardiness by bringing with it a genuinely useful gift: Apple Airplay, to cater for those who keep their music library in iTunes and that is an extraordinarily large group of people. Despite the number of services and features it offers, the appearance of the player is delightfully simple. The fascia contains only an on/off button, a push button for input selection, a rotary cursor control, which will be familiar to iPod users, and a centrally mounted, three-line, Organic Electroluminescence Display.
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Network Media Players
Olive O6 HD - £4,600
Ed Selley  |  Nov 29, 2011  |  0 comments
Olive branch Olive’s new flagship hard-disk player brings huge storage and simple ease of use to the masses. Malcolm Steward listens in The 06HD is the current flagship model in the Olive range of hard-disk music servers. The enclosure is rather idiosyncratic: it is trapezoidal with the CD-drive loader (along with the headphone socket and volume control) mounted on the front, while the sloping top holds all the control buttons and an impressive 10-inch colour touchscreen. This precludes stacking the device or placing it on anything but the top shelf of an equipment rack.
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Cables & Accessories
Isotek Evo 3 Solus - £595
Ed Selley  |  Nov 29, 2011  |  0 comments
Electric Tech Want clean mains to power your hi-fi ? IsoTek’s range of passive mains conditioners promises you all that and more, says Jimmy Hughes The quality of the mains supply directly influences the sound produced by your hi-fi . If your mains is contaminated with noise (and it is!), the sound will lack transparency and clarity, making the music seem congested and lacking in dynamics. The solution? Invest in a good mains conditioner. IsoTek offers a wide range of products, from the mighty £6k Super Titan, to smaller more affordable solutions like the new EVO3 Solus at £595.
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Loudspeakers
Totem Arro - £2,025
Ed Selley  |  Nov 29, 2011  |  0 comments
Arro takes Flight Totem’s super-slim new Arro is a beautifully made speaker. Paul Messenger gets close up and personal with the Canadian rocker Well established Canadian manufacturer Totem takes its name from – and tends to name its models after – elements of that country’s First Nations culture, though quite where Arro comes from remains a little obscure. Perhaps it simply reflects the fact that the speaker itself is unusually straight and slim, albeit devoid of point or flights. Whatever, few serious speakers manage to look more discreet and self-effacing, especially in the highly reflective (and very fashionable) high-gloss black of our review samples.
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Network Media Players
Naim ND5 XS - £1,995
Ed Selley  |  Nov 29, 2011  |  0 comments
XS all areas for just £2k Naim introduces its ‘entry-level’ network audio player, but there is nothing ‘entry-level’, however, about its performance, says Malcolm Steward The ND5 XS is Naim’s second network audio player and its first to offer native streaming of 24-bit/192 kHz sources. It follows the lauded and more expensive (£2,995) NDX (HFC 345) that arrived in February, this year. It differs from its forerunner, though, in being built into the attractive, slim-line XS series case rather than the taller Classic series enclosure, but is similar in being performance upgradeable. Upgrade options currently available include the XPS or PS 555 power supplies and the Naim DAC.
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Disc Players
Audiolab 8200CD - £700
Ed Selley  |  Nov 28, 2011  |  0 comments
Flexible friend Audiolab’s superb 8200CD gets new filter options and internal upgrades: Richard Black reckons its value remains unbeaten It’s just a year since we first encountered the Audiolab 8200CD (HFC 340), which we quickly came to consider one of the finest sensibly priced CD players we’ve had the pleasure of testing. Although there’s no hint in the nomenclature that anything has changed, Audiolab has, in fact, recently put a few tweaks and upgrades into the design, so a re-test seemed in order. As the main photograph shows, this is basically a CD player like any other. Take a squint at the back, though, and you’ll see that it’s not quite so normal: it has digital inputs (electrical, optical and USB), as well as the more common outputs.
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Turntables, Arms & Cartridges
Audio Note AN-TT2 Deluxe- £3,275
Ed Selley  |  Nov 28, 2011  |  0 comments
Twin Engined Audio Note has a range of new arms for its well established TT-2 turntable. Ed Selley finds out if two motors are better than one. Audio Note is best known for its extensive range of valve amplifiers and digital products, but it has been producing turntables and vinyl accessories for many years. The current range consists of three turntables, three new tonearms and a range of moving-magnet and moving-coil cartridges.
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Turntables, Arms & Cartridges
Pro-Ject Xperience 2 Basic - £599
Ed Selley  |  Nov 28, 2011  |  0 comments
Are you Xperienced? Pro-Ject has added a unipivot to its Xperience turntable. Ed Selley cues up Pro-Ject seems intent on creating a turntable to suit absolutely everybody and its range is expanding on a seemingly daily basis. The classic decks, of which the entry-level 2-Xperience Basic+ is now a part, sits somewhere above the Essential and Debut ranges and runs parallel to the RPM series. Beefed up The deck itself looks more like a beefed-up Debut, than a member of the RPM series.
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Turntables, Arms & Cartridges
Rega RP3- £475
Ed Selley  |  Nov 28, 2011  |  0 comments
The Planar evolution Jason Kennedy finds out what improvements Rega has included to turn its best-selling turntable into a giant-slayer The RP3 is the latest generation of a turntable that goes back to Rega’s roots in the seventies when it launched the Planet; a turntable that evolved into the Planar 3 and has been slowly improving ever since. The last iteration was the P3-24, but something dramatic has happened to this budget classic since then: it has grown an exoskeleton between main bearing and tonearm, in an effort to bring greater rigidity to this crucial link. This is a lot more than cosmetic – it signals a change from attempting to make the entire plinth as stiff as possible to concentrating on the inflexibility where it matters most. That’s not all, the tonearm has gone through its second stage of evolution to come out more sleek and rigid again.
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