It’s been a long time coming but Woo Audio’s WA8 trans/portable tube amplifier, recently subtitled ‘Eclipse’, is now in production and was shown off by the New York manufacturer at CanJam SoCal 2016. We first saw the WA8 way back in September 2014 when Jack Wu showed off a 3D-printed […]
Being a New York local Jack Wu has brought everything – including the kitchen sink – across the East River and into Brooklyn. His room is a U-bend of benched headphone gear with at least five or six listening stations. I try to ignore the $16k flagship monoblocks and make a beeline […]
The awkwardly named Woo Audio WA7 ‘Fireflies’ looks like it has dropped into Australia earlier than expected. There aren’t too many DAC/head-amp combos that really tickle my fancy but Jack Wu’s (picture above, right) latest is surely one of them. A matched pair of Sovtek 6C45, Class A, single-ended headphone stage […]
Hi-fi priorities – how does the beginner audiophile separate the low from the high? When everything matters, how does the newcomer decide what to tackle first and what to leave for later? Trial and error guide our first steps. Shortcutting this process is the sharp lesson that the loudspeaker system’s […]
Separate. Activate. Stuff it. What’s that? A call to civil disobedience? A secret invite to pig out at an endless buffet? Neither. Today is about active sealed woofing. Inspiration came from two recent back-to-back reviews for my 6moons site. First to arrive were the Polish Cube Audio Nenuphar Mini BASiS. […]
IT 101. An Apple Macbook or Windows-based PC is made up of two fundamentals: the hardware; and the software that runs on the hardware. We can see the hardware if we pop the lid and take a peek inside: the CPU, the RAM, the storage (SSD or HDD) and the […]
Future-Fi? That’s high-end audio for those who care not for the journey of system compilation and its (potentially) endless revision but would rather an all-in-one, set-and-forget hardware purchase. How do manufacturers talk to this kind of consumer? If you’re France’s Cabasse, you take a leaf out of the Devialet Phantom […]
Brit restraint alert: I was somewhat taken with the LS6 speakers from Graham Audio. The design principles behind them swim against the tide. It’s simple – the cabinets are supposed to vibrate. Forget Fort Knox solidity, forget 25mm side walls. Say hello to thin cabinet walls that oscillate with the […]
Sometimes we want steak, other times only sushi will do. And so it goes with loudspeakers: we might lust for (full-range) floorstanders but either our room’s acoustics and/or our aesthetic sensibilities say otherwise: only standmounts can be accommodated. Like food, it’s better to have too little than too much. In our latest […]
Over a pork knuckle in January, I enthused to a friend about DJ Hell’s collaborative work with P. Diddy (“The DJ”) and Bryan Ferry (“U Can Dance”) – two standout tracks from the veteran German producer’s 2009 album, Teufelswerk. English translation: Devil’s work. Eight years on, the remainder of that […]
What defines our taste/s in hifi gear? Those of a more platitudinous nature would claim that it’s all about the music. But that implies that we’d be just as content with a $50 Bluetooth speaker as a US$500k system. Being an audiophile is about the being into the gear. No shame in […]
Enjoying its first public showing at Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2017 this weekend will be PS Audio’s PureStream Power Plant P20: not a power filter but a power regenerator: “Power Plants take your incoming AC power and regenerates new sine-wave-perfect, regulated high current AC power. In the process of regeneration […]
John H. Darko
Srajan Ebaen
Phil Wright