There's a number of great classical box sets going around in recent times, remastered from the golden analogue days of the 50's and early 60's. In particular, the Decca and Mercury sets have many fans.   But the set I went for was the Living Stereo 60 (count 'em) CD collection. Partly because...

You know those times when you're feeling a bit down? When only Laughin Len can cheer you up.   But with a consistently high standard, which album to choose? Those classic early ones? or the brilliant mid period of "I'm you're man" and "The Future"? With his voice getting deeper with every...

High End headphone systems seem to becoming more accepted in the mainstream hifi press at an accelerated rate. Here's a link to AVGUIDE's review of the WES: Woo Audio WES Electrostatic Headphone Amplifier (Playback 54).   There's a review of the SR009 in the same edition. The most...

In a few months I’ll be moving from a lovely, but impractical, stone cottage into a “normal” full sized house. Apart from gaining my own “music and study” room, I’m finally in a position to plan a dedicated main spurs for my hi-fi. So I’ll be able to compare the value of dedicated spur versus my...

Introduction This is a purely subjective review that contains controversial terms like “burn in” and “power cords” as well as clichéd subjective descriptions. Readers of a nervous disposition, or sound scientists on a short fuse, had better avert their eyes now. Background I’ve been an...

Most mains transformers hum to some extent. And most of the time, there is no problem for me. But occasionally, some of my electrical appliances “buzz” dramatically louder than normal. My first guess is that it’s just a peak loading issue, but my observations below don’t entirely correlate to...

From a BBC news story today, a school has been making unruly pupils listen to classical music during detention. The idea of listening to classical music was so abhorrent to these teenagers that the detention rates fell by over a half. There was more to it than that - it was just one part of...

A criticism often made against cable companies is that they don’t offer any measured evidence to prove that their cables make a difference. Probably because traditional LCR etc measurements just don’t show any differences. Well Roy Gregory (now with Nordost) has an interesting article in the...

By Non-believers, I mean those who don't believe that cables and tweaks make any noticeable difference to sound quality. And that amplifiers, CDPs and DACs also don't make a difference as long as they are properly designed to have minimal distortion, have a flat frequency response and have the...

Introduction This is a purely subjective review of the Transparent "Reference" interconnect cable. The purpose of the review is to give an indication of the differences in sound quality one may expect to hear in the high end cable world – it’s not really about Transparent per se. I’m just...

I couldn't resist the pun, but I have managed to break my O2 Mk1 cable by standing on it whilst listening in the dark. The result was a sudden tug of the cable away from the headphone. No visible damage, but (horror of horrors) I now have intermittent lost sound on the LHS channel. At the...