The blue-sky lab at Sonneteer, hidden in the darkest suburbs of Guildford has once again taken high end audio research in an unexpected and curious direction. The audio pioneers who recently came up with The Bard’s Headspace, a £15 gadget, that makes headphones sound like loudspeakers, are better known for their high-end audio separates (Stereo amplifiers, CD players and what not).
Finding your Sound DNA Read More »
A short while ago via our various social media accounts we ‘put out’ a teaser from our Heart beat project showing a pre-amp of sorts. Hopefully it spoke for itself. For those, like me, who have a typical social media attention span, I have repeated it below.
But first, a new one. There is one small red herring. I will leave you to work it out.
It’s about control: Heart beat teaser, The Amps Read More »
It was about 20 years or so ago and I was sitting in front of a brand new hifi system my Girlfriends’ flat mate had just bought. He was a young man, in his mid twenties, working in the City of London and was earning beyond what normal graduates would be earning at that age. I, on the other hand was working for toffee, writing editorial and reviews at Hi-Fi World magazine. The hifi system in question had as its centre piece an amplifier from a well know brand of the time that by chance I had just written a review of. My tactless younger self sat down with the chap and said to him that he should have spoken to me first and that his ears would be hurting after less than a hour of listening even at low levels of volume. A few days later the flat mate got in touch to tell me I was right. Some attribute this phenomenon to what they call Listener Fatigue though I am not so sure.
Ear Ache: Listener fatigue and other mythology.Part 1. Read More »
The beating heart of any sound system is the amplifier. Its invention is attributed to the coming of the first triode[1. http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/audio.history.timeline.html][2. http://www.ehow.com/about_4899502_history-audio-amplifier.html][3. http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/physics/transistor/history/] valve at the turn of the twentieth century to make the first AM radios. Since, the audio amplifier has unassumingly featured in all electronics’ products that are sound making while the
The audio amplifier and other format sauce. Read More »
Digital amplifiers, up till this point were considered somewhat of a novelty. Not many knew that as plasma and LCD televisions were becoming popular, just about everyone of them included a Class T or Class D (commonly known as digital) amplifier inside. Apple were starting to use them in their computers, and we were already