Sound and Image

We had our neighbours round recently, and one of them came up to the music room to admire the glowing VU needles of the power amp from Yamaha’s impressive 5000 Series which was warming through for an upcoming review. He was suitably impressed, and he

8K TV resolution is all about larger screen sizes, so we’ve been unusually unexcited over Samsung’s release of 55-inch, even 65-inch 8K TVs, given you’d need to be sitting with your nose on the screen to get much of the benefit of the increased resol

Panasonic has announced its 2019-2020 AV line-up, including three new OLED TV models and a handy entry-level UHD Blu-ray player, among much more. The three OLED TVs are the GZ2000, to be available in 65-inch only from September priced $8299, the GZ15

“I never thought this day would come…” says Marantz’s longstanding audio guru Ken Ishiwata, as he steps down from his role with Marantz, which appears to be part and parcel of the newly announced acquisition of Onkyo, Integra, Pioneer and Pioneer ELI

Ortofon is celebrating the survival of vinyl with new cartridges at opposite ends of its range. The new $129 Super OM 5E (centre above) is now the pinnacle of the entry-level OM 5 Series, its elliptical stylus offering a broader frequency range and b

Remember Metz, the premium television brand? Well it’s back (actually, in Germany it never went away), and the brand is currently in the throes of going global with a new affordable premium brand, ‘Metz blue’. ‘Metz blue’ is to be “powered by German

We were among the first to review Warwick Acoustics’ initial product, the Model One, a pair of headphones which introduced an innovative new electrostatic driver using only a back grid of stainless steel mesh instead of the usual pair, and with a dia

We’re fans of the ‘Heritage’ styling adopted by klipsch for its range of wireless speakers and also headphones, especially as it emphasises the history of the company back to 1946 when acoustics pioneer Paul W. Klipsch set up in Hope, Arizona, from w

HIGH END 2019 ran in Munich from May 9th to 12th, the 38th consecutive staging of this German show which has become an essential part of the hi-fi calendar, and which again delivered everything from the small and handy to the gigantic and horny. Let’

Whether you’re after better music control in the car or just reliable voice-based hands-free control, Google is aiming to assist as it overhauls the Android experience behind the wheel. Unveiled at the recent Google I/O 2019 developer conference in M

The BenQ W2700 AV projector is the company’s third generation of projectors with Ultra-HD (4K in its domestic context) resolution. The first generation was the BenQ W11000 and X12000, BenQ’s original projectors to sport Ultra HD, using an 0.66-inch 4

Cambridge Audio, which is part of Audio Partnership, has grown from its position in the 1990s when it was redefined as an entry-level hi-fi brand — solid yet affordable, a little like NAD, and re-established (by then in its third incarnation) as a ho

One of the things we like about Sonos is that it doesn’t release iteratively updated new products every year; it uses firmware updates to add new abilities regularly to existing models, and then introduces generational hardware changes when it’s time

In recent issues we have been enjoying a series of samples from Bluesound’s ecosystem — first the hard-drive-equipped Vault, last issue the Pulse Mini wireless speaker, and here in this group of smart amplifiers, the Bluesound Powernode. As with the

It may seem a little strange devoting a review to an accessory. That, after all, is what the Questyle Super Hub SHB 2 is. It’s a docking station, as we used to say, for Questyle’s high-quality and high-res-capable QP2R portable audio player. But it’s

Yamaha’s MusicCast platform has proven one of the most successful at connecting together multiple devices in different rooms for multiroom music playback. And Yamaha has given it a wide ecosystem, putting MusicCast not only in to the usual selection

Is your house wired for voice control? If it is, you probably have either Google Home or Amazon Alexa devices. Or, maybe, Apple Home. Each has their pros and cons, but one good reason to go for Alexa is the rather strong third-party eco-system that h

amsung is pulling out of the Blu-ray S player market. Various reasons have been given, including the apparent victory of Dolby Vision over the Samsung-backed HDR10+ in the battle for an enhancedmetadata version of HDR. I personally found the news qui

I’ve recently written in our sister magazine Australian Hi-Fi about the output impedance of headphone amplifiers — about how this can affect the frequency performance of headphones, and how difficult it is to even find out what the figure might be. W

T the other big Korean may be exiting the Blu-ray player market (see the intro article), but LG is still here. Currently the brand sells two regular Blu-ray players and two UHD ones. The LG UBK90 is the premium model, selling for $399. The main diffe

In Australia we often don’t see the full product range from the consumer electronics giants. Sometimes they make audiophile and videophile products... but then market them only in their home market, or perhaps North America. The Panasonic DP-UB9000 U

The simplest definition for augmented reality goes like this one, from the online dictionary dot com: “a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world, thus providing a composite view”. So you might think

Sometimes we know the price of equipment coming in for review, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we check it before we start, so we can judge the product in its context, but occasionally we do much of our listening in the dark as to pricing, which gives

To complete our all-science-fiction collection in this issue, we finish with the classic 1979 film Alien. Yes, it’s also a horror film, but if science-fiction is about exploring ideas in technology, space or science, this does that aplenty too. The a