For a couple of years now James and I have been seriously considering making the journey to Bristol to see the Bespoked Handmade bike show, but for various reasons the pilgrimage was never made. When the event came to London this year we were all out of excuses and went up to the velodrome in the Olympic Park near Stratford to test the metal. The Handmade show is a showcase…

Rega

Rega’s Phil Freeman told me that they were trying to stop visitors from taking the system too seriously this year. His reasoning being that trying to appreciate its finer points in a hotel room with high ambient noise is akin to test driving a Ferrari in a car park. As a distraction Simon Webster had brought along a variety of turntable components to illustrate the differences between models. They played an RP10 with its shiny RB2000 arm and the Apheta MC through…

I have been listening to Rega’s Saturn-R CD player/DAC for the purpose of a review in a certain audio journal and the experience has been so thrilling that I thought I’d share my impressions. To be honest I don’t know how they do it, how can you make a CD player that’s so engaging and exciting at such a reasonable price (£1,598). OK it’s not the prettiest of devices, in fact it’s finish is borderline agricultural, and the sound lacks the refinement of some competitors but its ability to…

Naim had hinted that they were going to unveil something special at CES in Las Vegas but not in my wildest dreams did I expect an amplifier of this magnitude. The Statement is the most outrageous product of the show and at CES that's saying something, it consists of one horsepower (746 watt) monoblock power amps and a preamp which are expected to be in production by July.…

I paid a visit to the Vertere HQ in Chiswick recently, Touraj Moghaddam, a man with a mission to convert the world to great sound, had said that I could hear his fresh from the oven turntable. I don’t normally jump on a train when someone makes this sort of offer but Touraj is a bit different, he has been working on cable since leaving Roksan but before that he…

Naim’s DAC-V1 is something of a game changer for the brand because it’s the first product from Salisbury that can be used to harness the audio potential of a computer. Naim is of the opinion, and I have to agree with them, that network streaming is the best way to play music files but with the DAC-V1 it has at least accepted that there are people who want to do things…

A couple of months back I went to see Chord and had the full Tuned ARAY (TA) dem courtesy of in-house music nut Nigel Finn. The experience was enthralling enough to warrant getting some cables to try at home, a pursuit I generally avoid like the X Factor because after all how can a cable enhance your musical enjoyment? Let alone a digital cable. So I persuaded Nigel to lend…

At Europe's biggest and arguably the world's best hi-fi show, High End in Munich, Naim took the opportunity to tell us about forthcoming product and software changes as well as giving an insight into how the business is shaping up in today's changing market. MD Paul Stephenson says that Naim now has 150 plus staff of whom 30 work in R&D and increasing amounts of manpower…

James and I finally got ourselves down to Amesbury to visit the folk at Chord Co to find out how they make their cables and hear more about the breakthrough technology they call Tuned Aray (TA). Nigel ‘The Cable Doctor’ Finn made a very good case for TA with his dem at the Bristol show but hearing it on a Naim system in the controlled environment of the Chord Co dem…

Partly by dint of weak competition Bristol has become the best show on the UK scene, the one with the biggest buzz and often some of the best sounds. This year it seemed as lively as ever with hardcore enthusiasts cueing round the block to get through the doors first thing Friday morning. I got there on Friday night and had a sneak peak at Tom Tom’s Guru room where James and…

Naim chose CES to launch its long awaited entry into the USB DAC stakes. DAC-V1 is a converter and digital preamp with fixed and variable outputs that caters for the computer audio enthusiast. It’s Naim’s first asynchronous USB DAC but also has five S/PDIF inputs in coax and optical form, it also harbours a fully formed headphone amplifier. The actual converter is a BurrBrown…

Las Vegas is a surreal place, nothing in it is much more than a façade and the faux Romanesque fountains in Caesar’s Palace are just ludicrous, so as you can imagine it’s not always possible to get a grip, especially when you are dazed by jet lag. But I found a kind of reality in the neon boneyard (above), a museum of old casinos and hotel signs from back in the day,…

Tom Tom is now ten and to celebrate this momentous occasion  James and the team threw a party for all of Tom Tom’s customers at the Noke Thistle hotel in St Albans. The event was not unlike Tom Tom's Festival of Sound shows but this time visitors were treated to a glass of bubbly and a buffet meal with live entertainment as a thank you for their support.

The chance to…

The latest generation of Rega electronics, the ones that inhabit half width cases, have proved to be among the most entertaining examples of affordable audio equipment that I’ve encountered in ages. So much so that I have been using the Brio-R integrated amp in my living room system for some time. I’ve heard more revealing and refined amps and have a few to draw on…

Guru is expanding its range to include a compact standmount at a very attractive price point. The Guru Junior has a 115mm main driver and a ring radiator tweeter in a cabinet with a slot port. When Guru showed me the Junior at Milan's Top Audio show they were still in pre-production form and the choice of front baffle and veneer finish had yet to be…

At the Top Audio show in Milan last week Naim unveiled the latest member of its Uniti family, the Unitilite. This is a slimline version of the NaimUniti and features a CD player, streamer and 50 watt stereo amplifier in a series 5 case. It will sell for £1,650 in standard guise or £1,895 with an FM and DAB tuner onboard.

Naim MD Paul Stephenson explained that the Uniti…

A crazy science fiction name always draws me to a product, who could resist Krell amps when they first appeared? Significantly fewer than were drawn to the Tralfamador amplifier, a long lost Irish creation that disappeared into the cosmos shortly after its debut, chances are that only Vonnegut fans remember the planet of the same name. But it doesn’t take much to get…

A day or so after James’ visit to Focal it was the turn of the press to be shown the facilities and technologies that this impressive company has at its disposal. We started our tour at the cabinet factory in the small town of Bourbon Lancy, this is where Focal builds and finishes the woodwork for its Utopia and Electra ranges, the top end stuff with the complicated shapes and fancy finishes. It’s not a huge place but there’s an awful lot of precision machined MDF in it and the quality of…

I am delighted to have been invited to be a guest blogger at the Tom Tom Club, not least because it means that I get to play with superb kit that is usually reserved for the inner circle of Naim devotees in the reviewing fraternity. James got me in at the deep end with full 500 series of electronics, an experience that left me feeling very sorry when it had to go back as you might imagine. But to paraphrase Tennyson, it is better to have listened and lost than never to have listened at…