September 2014
In This Issue... The Success Of LPs Today
Editorial By Noel Keywood

 

  Whoops! We didn't manage to get our review of The Beatles in Mono LP box set into this issue – so I apologise to all those readers eager to find out about this new release.

You can read about the Abbey Road demo of these new albums in this issue, on page 25. OK, it isn't the same as an album review, but in there you'll see that the world consumes surprisingly large quantities of vinyl with a release like this – and it dwarfs production: there are not enough LP stamping machines to cope.

The upshot is, review samples are secondary to meeting pre-order demand. I've been begging for ours and we have been assured a box set will arrive soon – but too late for this issue I'm sorry to say. The review will now – hopefully – appear in our next (October) issue. We have a special 'authentic' system ready and waiting for them, featuring Ortofon's dedicated 2M Mono SE cartridge and sparklingly new Tannoy Kensington Gold Reference loudspeakers, whose dual-concentric predecessors were used in Abbey Road Studios at the time. So I hope you like it – when we can publish it!

We had more success with other planned items. Yamaha's new Soavo loudspeakers were eagerly awaited, because we loved their predecessors. Yamaha are a company dedicated to audio quality, graced by the pedigree of their historic piano division, and we all heard this in the new NS-F901s reviewed on p10.

If you use headphones, you owe it to yourself to hear a valve headphone amplifier – and we review a great one on p22. It'll drive any phones, no matter how insensitive and exotic, and give that lovely big, spacious and liquid smooth sound only valves offer.

There's no whiff of the past in the Invicta Mirus DAC reviewed on p36. This is as hot as it gets in digital today – no fewer than two ESS Sabre32 DAC chips strapped for full performance lurk inside – and what a sound!

So the success of LP today defeated us, you could say – but perhaps that is no bad thing: vinyl will forever sound wonderful. There's still plenty in this sizzling September issue – I hope you enjoy it.

 

--- Noel Keywood, editor.

 

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