Hifi Pig’s second report from the Bristol Sound and Vision Show 2018 including Musical Fidelity, Chord Electronics, Cyrus, Hegel, Prism Sound, Decent Audio, eclipse, Kronos, Scansonic, Eclipse, Iso Acoustics, Astin Trew, Air Audio, Graham Audio, Sota Acoustics, Cary Audio.

Musical fidelity were showing off their NuVista  valve phonostage and their M8 500 Encore 500 all in one storage and streaming unit. One of our reviewers recently reviewed their M6 Encore and loved it. 

Chord Electronics room and stand sounded great with European debuts for their Qutest DAC and GoFigure configuration app for the Poly streamer.  Based on the latest proprietary Rob Watts’ FPGA technology developed for the class-leading Hugo 2 DAC/headphone amp, Qutest dealt with all D/A conversion duties in Chord Electronics’ main room on the Ground Floor. The room sounded excellent considering the price of the Qutest DAC (£1195) and was accompanied by the 220-watt CPM 3350 integrated amplifier, speakers from Bowers and Wilkins and cables from The Chord Company.

Cyrus was another good sounding room and their Soundkey device was generating a good deal of interest. Soundkey was funded by a Kckstarter campaign and is aimed at users who primarily use their mobile phone as their main source when out and about.

Dr Jonathan of Keith Monks and his fab looking record cleaning machine, the REDUX, trying to get us to take a tipple of his record cleaning fluid. We declined, but expect to see a review of his machine in the near future on Hifi Pig.

Hegel were showing off their integrated amp range including the H90, H190 and H360. Also in the room was the Hegel HD30 DAC and a pair of Amphion Argon 7LS speakers.

The Prism Sound were showing for the first time at the show their Callia DAC capable of both PCM and DSD decoding as well as being a preamp. It’s designed and manufactured in the UK. The speakers are ATC and the room had been fully treated with GIK acoustic panels to very good effect. There was a distinct air that this room was somewhat influenced by music professionals and studio engineers.

Decent Audio had a couple of rooms at Sound and Vision and both were very good. In the first room they had the Kronos Sparta turntable with van den Hul’s Grail phonostage, Audio Analogue’s Maestro amp and Eclipse speakers. In the next room we had Scansonic MB speakeres, the Kronos Sparta .5 Turntable, Audio Analogue amps and the new Audio Analogue phonostage and Puccini Anniversary amp.

I’v had the dem of the Iso Acoustics footers a few times now and they do work. They are a Hifi Pig Outstanding product award winner and you can read the full review here. The Orea is a pared down isolator which we’ll soon be getting hold of for review.

Astin Trew, Air Audio, Graham Audio and Plananlogue shared this room. We’ve seen the Planalogue in action in the past but when we went in the room they were playing music by Lyn Stanley…who had actually flown in from the States to attend. The new Astin Trew amps we reported on previously were in action for the first time.

Sota Acoustics with Black Rhodium cables and using Longdog Audio power amplifiers. RAcks are by Out Of The Woodwork. The turntable we believe to be the Planalogue Preluse using an Origin Live tonearm.

This is the first time we’ve seen Cary Audio and their head guy Billy Cary in the UK. New for the show was the SLI – Valve integrated. The AiOS is an All in One System.