Founded in 2000, the Chicago (US) based company CEntrance develops innovative audio entertainment products and licenses its technology to industry brands, such as Playback Designs, Bel Canto, Benchmark, PS Audio, and Lavry.

CEntrance will be demonstrating their “Audiophile Desktop System” at this year’s Munich High End show and very interesting it looks too. The system packs a stereo pair of “MasterClass™ 2504” desktop 2-way coaxial speakers and the “DACmini™ PX” desktop amplifier, headphone amp and DAC.

The bundle also includes a travel case with custom foam cushioning as well as speaker and USB cables.

The Audiophile Desktop System was designed from the ground up to bring Hi-Fi sound straight to the desktop for today’s Internet-connected consumers. The DAC, amp, speakers and cables are closely matched and voiced to work together perfectly. The system provides a complete digital audio listening solution for $2,000 USD and is available for ordering now.

Michael Goodman, Managing Director of CEntrance – “We have tuned this system for performance and it offers superior results than ad-hoc collections of components from several manufacturers. We’re confident that the new Audiophile Desktop System will turn some heads and ears.”

Hifi Pig hopes to have one for review soon.

Not strictly home hifi but interesting news none the less:Minnesota (US) based Remote Technologies Incorporated (RTI) have announced that the company is now shipping its new four-channel CP-450 and 16-channel CP-1650 audio amplifiers. Designed as the perfect complements to RTI’s eight-zone AD-8 distributed audio system, these powerful new amplifiers provide an additional 50 W per channel to extend speaker outputs in larger installations.

“Our AD-8 distributed audio system provides 25 W per channel, which is ideal for most installations, but larger rooms and subzones might require more speakers and more power,” said Pete Baker, vice president of sales and marketing for RTI. “We are pleased to offer our dealers a powerful, cost-effective solution to this installation issue with our new CP-450 and CP-1650 amplifiers.”  More »

Hifi Pig has snoofled out some very interesting news for valve amplifier fans and enthusiasts of the iconic Radford STA15 and STA25 valve hi fi amplifiers.

UK based Radford Revival have announced the limited edition reissue of Radfords classic series 3 hifi amplifiers. The father and son team of Steve and William Moores hand-build these beautiful amplifiers to order and make them from the original, and hand drafted 1964 blueprints and the original hand-written transformer winding specifications.

Steve has a long history with Radford and has perhaps the largest collection of Radford amplifiers and transformers in the world.

The new transformers on the reissued amplifiers are superior to the originals in several respects. They are machine wound to modern safety and insulation standards. Superior termination is provided by tags embedded in the plastic bobbin, which are much stronger than the original tags, which were glued to the outer insulation of the winding and had a tendency to fall off.

Metal components and casework in the amplifiers are also reproduced from original blueprints (meticulously scanned and converted into metric) and the company used happens to be the very same company contracted by Radford in the 80s to product the metalwork for the Mk4 STA25.

I’m sure you will agree with HiFi Pig that these valve hi fi amplifiers are truly things of beauty and we wish the company every success for the future. We hope to have a review of the amplifiers in the very near future.

The STA15 is £2750 and the STA25 is £2800 which Hifi Pig thinks is a very reasonable sum for such a well crafted piece of engineering.