Ed Selley

PrimaLuna Prologue Two Basic on the features front, but beautifully built and an excellent choice for lovers of human voice Designed in Holland and made in China, PrimaLuna’s amps are essentially classic valve designs, but they bring distinctive aesthetics and a few modern design touches to the party. One such notable feature in this amp is ‘Adaptive auto bias’. Bias is a long-standing pain in the neck of valve amps: quite simply it’s the DC (‘standing’) current in the valves under conditions of no audio signal and it’s critical. Usually amps either have manually adjusted bias, which may even require test equipment to set, or auto-bias (also called ‘self-bias’), which does what it says but, in the traditional implementation, reduces maximum output power.

Triode Corporation TRV-88SE Striking to behold, very agile – but doesn’t quite knit everything together as one would like Triode Corporation makes a range of amps, which presumably all use triode connection of the output devices – this one certainly does. In many ways it’s a fairly conventional push-pull design, though the external finish is certainly among the best, with and wooden side cheeks. The removable valve cover is exceptionally resonant, but the cover over the transformers appears to be filled with resin and is completely dead, acoustically. Internal construction uses a mix of circuit boards.

Only way is Essex Rega’s first ever DAC, a £500 five-filter mini marvel, is here and Technical Consultant Richard Black has (five) stars in his eyes . . . It’s always hard to resist a sense of humour.

The art of sound Jason Kennedy puts a £1,700 German-made newcomer from Acoustic Signature against rivals from Pro-Ject and Well Tempered Just when you thought that you could relax with your record collection along comes another contender with a substantial range of serious-looking turntables. What’s surprising, however, is that despite having UK representation for some time, it’s only in the last few months that we have discovered Acoustic Signature, of which the Manfred Mk II is one of the German company’s more affordable offerings. It comes with an outboard power supply and a free-standing motor and the diamond polished platter sets it apart from an increasingly large crowd of competitors at this level, as does switchable speed control. It can be supplied with any Rega tonearm, or a base to the arm of your choice.