I confess that I have never really been excited by Marantz’s AV receivers. They were never ahead of the features game and always aired too much on the side of sonic caution for my liking. Safe, reliable, solid and about as exciting as endurance snail racing. When the £1,400 SR7005 arrived I brewed a really fresh cup of Horlicks, put my slippers on and settled down for an evening of light entertainment. read more »
All the excitement about 3D has rather distracted us from the fact that many viewers haven’t yet caught up with HD. There’s also another revolution going on, in Internet-enabled TV. Sony’s KDL-40EX503 ticks both boxes.
As far as many people are concerned, free-to-air HD (without the satellite dish) has been a bit slow in coming. So it’s good to see that high-def material is now available to the masses via Freeview HD, read more »
I subscribe to the theory that any disc player worth owning should have the demeanour of a battleship built by a Scottish shipyard. Rigidity foreshadows integrity, and tells me that a manufacturer takes the player as seriously as I take my media.
So Samsung’s debut 3D BD player, the BD-C6900, is a challenge. Its almost impossibly slight frame (it’s more kayak than cruiser) contradicts my world view, and teases me with a transparent lid and glimpses of my spinning discs. Yet I need to take it seriously. read more »
You can only love or loathe the wall of buff metal-work that is the full-fat NAD Masters Series home cinema system. As a high-end range of components the design is every bit as funky, industrial and quirky as the near £9,000 price ticket suggests, albeit cosmetically almost identical to the original Masters Series setup reviewed and raved about by HCC around three years ago.
What has changed is the technology on the inside. Okay, the M25 power amplifier is the same potent, class AB, fun-loving seven-channel beast, but the source and processor are much advanced on the old models.
The M56 is a fully Wi-Fi enabled Blu-ray player, meaning that even if you can’t run a network cable to your AV room, you can still access BD-Live content and firmware updates over your wireless network. It claims to offer super-fast disc-loading, and the usual 1080p24 output, 1080p upscaling of DVDs and on-board decoding and 192kHz DACs for Dolby True HD and DTS-HD. It handles DivX HD discs without a wobble and the internals look like an exercise in heavy-duty engineering. Under the lid it is all heavy-weight PCBs and chunky great components with a serious look about them, indicating copious R&D investment in the audio and video performance department...
First published in Home Cinema Choice 183, June 2010
You can also download the pdf here
LG’s N2B1 is the world’s first NAS (Network Attached Storage) box with an integrated Blu-ray writer. The benefit of this is obvious: you can quickly and easily archive off upwards of 50GB of files to Blu-ray media as and when you need them. However, this burner won’t play commericial BDs or rip them to the drives. read more »
Because my own roots are in pro audio I was glad to audition these professional active (self-amplified) monitors and subwoofer. Of course, you do get separate amps and speakers in the pro audio world, but this tends to happen only at the major level. This active satellite system is for nestling around mixing desks, but is so cute that Acoustic Energy was getting asked for them for home sales.
The AE22-10 ProSat marries a single midwoofer and a fabulously posh tweeter to a brace of differentially-sized channels of internal amplification. They bear a lot of the same DNA as Acoustic Energy’s AE1 speaker in performance, coming from the purity of a pistonic cone that’s unforgiving, and not necessarily warm. As such, it’s untiring to the ears for pro users who play them all day, and revealing of what their job needs them to hear – clinical detail with no power compression...
First published in Home Cinema Choice 181, April 2010
You can also download the pdf here
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Quad L-ite 5.1 system review
Cabasse iO2 5.1 system review read more »
American speaker manufacturer Klipsch is famed for its horn speakers, due to their clarity, power, definition and, most of all, sheer size. Its legend-model, the Klipschorn, is like a triangular sideboard, but this 5.1 set of Icon speakers is more living room-friendly, and intended to marry up to modern flatscreen TVs, so adopts a kind of horns-lite approach.
Available in two pretty but subtle veneer finishes, each of these medium-sized boxes features a cleverly-designed polymer assembly in its face that squirts the high-frequency audio all around with a greater efficiency than any normal dome tweeter ever could. Think of them as speakers for those who want sexy, top-end performance without their room dominated by massive boxes. Which is quite a lot of us, probably...
First published in Home Cinema Choice 180, March 2010
Epson knows a thing or two about projector technology. Late last year, it announced a 4,096 x 2,160-pixel LCD microdisplay for a new breed of super high-definition 4K2K PJs. Until that nine megapixel future beckons, though, we’ll have to make do with the Full HD displays that are delivered by
the likes of its new flagship EH-TW5500 and (reviewed here), step-down EH-TW4400 models. read more »
Sony may have withdrawn from OLED technology for the time being, but Korean rival LG obviously sees a future for the next-gen display technology, and has ushered this 15in model onto UK shelves. read more »
XiVA’s musicm8 is the easiest entertainment server I’ve ever installed. To get it up and running took minutes at most. Juiced up and connected to my network via Ethernet, and I was good to go. Having wrestled with servers in the past that literally drove me to distraction with their belligerent non-compliance, this was a relief.
For the uninitiated, the cutely-monikered musicm8 (‘music mate’) is a music server and ripper, a contemporary update on the hardware that first brought maker Imerge to prominence in the 90s.
It sits on your network, but is conceived as a living room product. It’s neatly turned out, stands vertically or horizontally and has a CD tray to rip discs directly. Significantly, it’s very quiet when running. read more »
Phillipe Starck, the French designer responsible for the look of Parrot’s Zikmu speakers, says his job was to ‘design a minimalist setting for [Parrot’s] technology for the benefit of man’. Which sounds like exactly the sort of hyperbolic thing you’d expect from the guy also responsible for a £200 bottle-opener.
Still, while you might be forgiven for thinking that Starck’s involvement in these cabinets involved nothing more than doodling a shape on a piece of paper one lazy afternoon, the Zimku does have immediate visual appeal. As iPod docks/stereo speakers go, they stand out easily from the competition. read more »
Panasonic is a superstar of the Blu-ray world. Year after year, its new players are greeted with the sort of unbridled enthusiasm usually reserved for Tom Cruise’s red carpet walkabouts in Leicester Square.
The reason for its techno-celebrity is simple: innovation. Profile 1.1, BD-Live, Blu-ray recording – you name it, Panasonic did it first, and over the years no-one has done more to push the format forward. read more »
Philips’ 47PFL9664H is one of the top dogs of the Dutch manufacturer’s LCD TV range. Strip out the Cinema 21:9 and LED Pro models and it’s actually the most highly-specced TV it offers, boasting a plethora of picture enhancing tech alongside Wi-Fi, web and media-streaming DLNA capabilities – not to mention the iconic Ambilight rear lighting system. read more »
It took a while for Freeview to dip its toe in the sparkling waters of high-definition. After all, the BBC successfully trialled over-the-air digital HD broadcasts a couple of years ago. But specification squabbles, bitrate and bandwidth issues, chipset shortages and the global recession have all gotten in the way of the launch of Freeview HD. Still, better to be late than never. read more »
In France, speaker brand Cabasse is celebrated for its avant-garde creations, but are we Brits ready for floating tweeters and balls that balance on rare-earth magnets? Let’s see... read more »
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