Hi-Fi Choice

It must be great to be Italian. For all the country’s quirks, it’s one of the richest seams of European culture and so much beauty has come from within its borders. Whereas we Brits can congratulate ourselves for inventing most of the essential tools for modern life – from the steam railway and the jet engine to the worldwide web – Italy has made things of great beauty, in so many forms. The sonnet is one such example – 14 lines of verse in iambic pentameter.

Known for its specialist tonearms, Jelco – distributed in the UK by Divine Audio, but supplied here by ISOkinetik – has made its SG-1 digital stylus pressure gauge available as a separate item priced at £79. Previously supplied with its flagship TK-950 tonearm (HFC 438), the SG-1 is a well-made gauge with a non-magnetic stainless-steel bracket fitted to the sensor plate. Pressing the on button illuminates the green backlit LCD display and zeros the balance.

As last month’s Group Test of entry-level network audio players showed, the streaming sector is hotting up with a wide selection of easy-to-use players to choose from at some very attractive prices. As if to further demonstrate the growth in the market, Yamaha has introduced its keenly priced MusicCast NP-S303 music streamer that’s designed to be an easy network audio add on to an existing hi-fi setup, or to partner with its matching full-size integrated amplifiers as part of a unified system.

Since the demise of the iPod Classic and the rise of the smartphone as the portable audio device of choice for the majority of users, the digital audio player market has struggled to flourish. This hasn’t stopped some specialists from carving out a niche, though, and Astell&Kern has been offering a considerable range of high-end players for some time. With an eye on keeping things in the real world, the A&norma SR15 is at A&K’s more affordable end of its extensive product range and is £100 more than the AK70 (HFC 428) that’s more recently been updated to mkII. The specification of the SR15 improves on the AK70 mkII and it’s fitted with 64GB of internal memory, which is supplemented by the inclusion of a microSD card slot for a card up to 400GB.