American muscle amp, blingy appearance, heatsinks along the sides.
Yawn – not another one?
Certified for THX – why are you wasting my time with this AV stuff?
Move along, nothing to see here for a 2-channel audiophile.
But wait – it’s wonderful! More »
Having been impressed with MF’s most popular player on the block, the A5 CDP, I was curious to know how its diminutive sibling the XRay V8 would fare so managed to get hold of one for an audition. It arrived neatly packaged with the separate off-board power supply unit, leads and remote. Initial impressions on build were quite good. Well screwed together and quite an unusual design with the long slim casings and separate (and quite beefy) psu. Assembled and left to warm up, I had a look at the remote which is a plastic affair with far too many buttons and a confusing layout. The remote is intended for the matching amplifier and tuner operation too and the overall impression is that MF intended this to be bought as a package with those units (X100 amp and X-Tuner). They share a trademark casing design meant as an upgrade to the older cylindrical shaped units . More »
This is one of the more, errr, ‘controversial’ CDPs of recent years. It got a thorough online blasting by that Lampizator chappie, who discovered that the DAC chipset used was a cheap and cheerful variety rather than the upmarket leading edge hi-tech item that was claimed! Nonetheless it received many very favourable reviews and online comments by others and even Lampizator gave it 10/10 for sound quality!
It’s a top loader with a neat sliding dark plastic panel, and a magnetic puck is supplied to hold a CD firmly in place. A remarkably hefty item as well, it definitely inspires confidence. Balanced (XLR) outputs as well as RCA. Switchable by remote (when a CD is not playing) between the standard Red Book 44KHz and a choice of 88 or 196KHz upsampling.
I spotted one on a well known auction site and I thought it was worth a punt just to hear it for myself.
Well – I’m very, very glad that I did! More »
MBL 116F RADIALSTRAHLER SPEAKERS
This is a difficult review for me. I normally like to be able to put a hifi component into context, by comparing it with some of its sonic and/or financial peers, and so being able to point out their relative sonic merits, the pros and cons of the performance. More »
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