The company was founded in Lindfield, West Sussex in 1977 by Dudley Harwood, who had spent the previous two decades designing loudspeakers for the BBC. The name is a contraction...
Brian Holden |
What follows is a practical guide to building a first serious hi-fi system, specifically when buying used. The used market changes the maths substantially. Components that cost twelve hundred pounds...
Brian Holden |
This is a mistake, and a fairly expensive one if it leads you to ignore one of the most consistent and musically satisfying sources available for a well sorted system....
Brian Holden |
A DAC converts digital audio into an analogue signal that an amplifier can work with, and without one you cannot hear any digital source at all. The question is not...
Brian Holden |
The deck you buy second hand today and the deck Linn delivered to its first owners fifty years ago share a plinth and a basic architecture. Everything else can be...
Brian Holden |
And yet the Planar 3 turntable has been in continuous production for nearly fifty years, the Brio amplifier regularly beats rivals costing twice as much, and used Rega equipment holds...
Brian Holden |
The cabinet is the same. The drivers are the same. The crossover components have aged gently. And the sound is essentially identical to what you would have heard in the...
Brian Holden |
The challenge is knowing what to look for. A turntable has more variables than most other hi-fi components, and a few of them are genuinely expensive to fix. The goal...
Brian Holden |
On the other: the technically minded who will produce measurements demonstrating that a good digital source outperforms vinyl on almost every objective metric, and conclude that vinyl is nostalgia dressed...
Brian Holden |
That word keeps appearing. Alive. It is not a technical description. It is an experience, and it is the reason a second-hand Nait holds its value better than almost any...
Brian Holden |
This is understandable, because the phono stage is invisible. It does not have a tonearm to admire or a driver to inspect. It is a small box, or sometimes no...
Brian Holden |
That is not nostalgia. It is physics. Vinyl carries a wider bandwidth of information than standard digital streaming. The groove physically encodes high frequency detail, ultra low bass, spatial information...
Brian Holden |
But knowing what to look for makes all the difference between a great purchase and an expensive disappointment. Here is what we check before an amplifier goes on our shelves,...
Brian Holden |