Great things are afoot in Southend. Rega, for it is their patch, are growing in scale and technological advancement as I found when I visited recently. With the workforce up to 140 and a new healthy food canteen to keep them fuelled the company is doing remarkably well. When I last visited five years back the new mezzanine floor was only a quarter filled, now…

Maybe it’s because I didn’t get there last year (for the first time since 1988) but the Bristol Show seemed more hectic than ever this time around. It may be a bit like groundhog day for the industry veterans but local enthusiasts have lost none of their enthusiasm. They were rewarded with a high standard of sound quality from many exhibitors and a slew of…

LP12 Magic above the new Supernait 3

Earlier in the week I went to hear the latest additions to Naim’s range of integrated amplifiers. Both the Nait XS and Supernait are now in their third generation, but you’d have to be eagle eyed to spot the difference which comes down to the addition of a ‘phono’ input button on the front panel. This of…

 Now that streaming audio has truly come of age we thought it might be useful to offer a few tips on how to put together a streaming system along with some tweaks that can be used to improve sound quality. Streaming is not only an easier way to enjoy your music collection it is also a remarkably easy way to improve the sound quality of a CD collection. A good…

 The festival of audiophile excess that is the Munich High End show is a blast. There are so many products of all shapes and sizes that you quickly get snow blind and only see the most extreme examples. It is not a place to try and assess a manufacturer’s ability to build an entertaining audio system unless your own listening space is made of glass and full…

Naim has given its Classic series streamers a radical shake up, bringing them up to speed with the all the features that have been developed in the ten years since the original NDS was launched. Three new models will be coming in the summer and I have had the opportunity to get a good idea of what engineers Roy George and Steve Sells (below) have been doing to improve the…

The Bristol show is a bit like Groundhog Day, there’s a sense that I have been here before but this is probably because I have been going for 30 years now, and it’s always fun getting to see and hear the latest kit. If you’re lucky you might discover some decent new music as well, the best music I heard this year was an album I already know but quite a new one in the form of…

Munich in the spring is always a pleasant place to be, albeit not so much so in the upper reaches of the MOC exhibition centre that houses the High End show. There the temperature can reach tropical levels with humidity to match, but this didn't stop our intrepid reporter from fighting his way through the madding crowd to see what the most important brands were up…

For the 2017 Sound and Vision show Bristol City Council put on its own show of road works and Hurricane Doris had managed to block off the usual access road to the Marriott Hotel, so it was a wonder anyone managed to set up at all. But it takes more than that to stop the dedicated and the halls thronged with people and music all weekend, or at least until the rugby…

At the Bristol show earlier this year I got an idea of what Nigel Finn at the Chord Company had been up to with the new Sarum Super ARAY cables, it was enough to lure me to Amesbury to hear more precisely what he has been up to. Sarum Super ARAY replaces Sarum Tuned ARAY at the top of Chord’s current cable range, it is an evolution of its predecessor and looks…

There was quite a large price and performance gap between Focal’s Electra Be and Utopia ranges, but not anymore, at the Munich High End show they unveiled Sopra, Italian for ‘above’. Sopra consists of a bookshelf No.1 and the No.2 floorstanding models, both built around the same core design. The cone drivers remain Focal’s W sandwich type but their motors systems (magnets)…

Naim’s display at the High End show in Munich focussed on its NAP power amplifiers, most of which have benefitted from Statement tech trickledown. This comes in the form of the NA009 transistor developed for the range topping S1 mono power amps, which is quite a serious slice of silicon. Naim’s engineers took a year to investigate how to make a better output device and…

Last month I went over to Salisbury for the launch of the NAC-N 272, Naim’s latest preamplifier/streamer. While at the factory Naim showed myself and some other journalists the production area for the Statement NAC S1 preamplifier and NAP S1 power amplifiers, Naim’s most ambitious electronics to date.

This is a jig for holding main and sub assemblies during…

Bristol, so much to answer for. Not Morrisey’s exact line of course but he clearly wasn’t in the audio industry, if he were he’d know that this city is the only place to be for hi-fi enthusiasts on the third weekend of February.

Derek Gilligan of Kudos fame has completely revised his Titan range topper, which looked stunning in the (fabulous) colour scheme of the…

As Tom Tom Club members will appreciate mu-so is not A N other Naim product, it doesn’t follow the purist, separates in black boxes path that has been the norm since the seventies. Mu-so is a whole other box of tricks, a box of many tricks in fact, most of which hadn’t even been dreamt of in Julian Vereker’s day.

The Naim mu-so is a wireless music system, a…

The first samples of mu-so, Naim’s wireless audio system, have been making a whistle stop tour of reviewer’s homes and last week I had my 15 minutes (well two days, but that’s still quick). It’s a lovely bit of kit in the flesh, very solid at 13 kilos and beautifully finished with the aluminium over MDF wrap and solid ally heat sinking. I was concerned about the acrylic base…

I have heard the Naim Statement at two shows now but the opportunity came up to listen to it in a more relaxed environment so naturally I jumped at the chance. The fact that I could play some of my own music was the icing on the audio cake. Statement was sitting between an NDS with twin power supplies and an imposing pair of Focal Grande Utopia III…

If either of the new Rega turntables cost 10x what they do the hi-fi world would be thronging with their praises. As it is the entry level nature of Rega’s best known turntables and the relative affordability of the RP8 and RP10 mean that they have not been taken as seriously as they deserve.

Both are built on a skeletal foam cored chassis that is lighter and stiffer than any turntable has ever been. This is virtually ultimate realisation of Roy Gandy’s theories about turntable design…

Gérard and Doug look on as Jeff lets rip via Statement and Grande Utopia

Naim

Paul Stephenson announced that the company now employs over 150 people and expects turnover to reach £25M this year. Moral has also been boosted by a Queen’s Award for Innovation, which should help maintain the £3M that the company invests in R&D.

Marketing…

Paul Stephenson presents six times 75 watts at the launch

Naim chose the Vinyl Factory in café cultured Soho to launch their first foray into real-world audio. This ensured a good turnout of mainstream press alongside dealers and even a few forum members, spreading the word as wide as possible is where this product is at. Muso is a Bluetooth, Airplay, USB and Ethernet…