Originally Posted by
vintage60
Hi All
I don't know whether I am waging a one-man battle against the giant manufacturers with their mega-bucks marketing budgets, but lately, I have been scouring the net for products made by our smaller HiFi cottage industry to see how good their products are.
First stop was Audiomods, where I bought Jeff Spall's Classic MkII tonearm. For around £500, it punches well above its weight and gave my far more expensive Origin Live Illustrious a good run for its money. I'm glad I took the leap of faith and went for the Audiomods because not only did I save a huge amount of money, but I got to hear for myself just how good this beautifully engineered arm performs against the big brands. Conclusion is that unless you are spending close to £2,000, no big manufacturer's arm will surpass the Classic Mk II in any meaningful way.
Encouraged by that, I took another leap of faith a few weeks ago and bought a pair of Voltaire Reference Zero stand mounts from Robson Acoustics. Robert Hudson at RA was a delight to deal with and when I took delivery of the Zeros, I was gobsmacked at just how good they are. They feature very expensive mid-bass drivers from another English company, Volt Loudspeakers, down in Dorset and some very high quality ribbon tweeters. All beautifully finished off by Robert, the whole thing is handmade from start to finish.
The Zeros excel in the following 4 areas:
(i) superb cohesion between the upper mids/highs from the ribbons and the mid bass/bass from the Volt drivers. There is none of that phasing problem you get with poorly designed/made ribbon tweeter speakers where the lows lag the highs and the whole is just incoherent and not properly integrated
(ii) incredibly transparent, airy and smooth treble and mids without any hint of graininess, glare or harshness.Cymbols really shimmer rather than just splash
(iii) neutral and natural. There is none of the modern trend of emphasising the upper mids/treble to create a (false) impression of detail and resolution which after a while simply becomes fatiguing to listen to because in reality, it is nothing but the treble being made prominent
(iv) musicality. They really do grab your attention and hold it. At the end of the day, no matter the laboratory test results, if hifi doesn't have emotion and feeling in a real world living environment, then (in my book) it has failed the test. If I simply wanted some music in the background, I'd save myself a lot of money by wondering around shopping centres.
In terms of what the Zeros have been up against: Focal Electra 1007S, Harbeth SHL5, Usher X-718, PMC Twenty.22, PMC DB1i, Harbeth M30, Harbeth HL-K6SE, Harbeth P3-ES2se, Audio Note AN-K and Audio Physic Step 25+ (not all at the same time, but these are just some of the speakers I have owned in recent years). All of these are more expensive than the Zeros (perhaps bar the PMC DB1i), but I would choose the Zeros over any of these any day.
I just want to make clear that I have absolutely no connection to Jeff Spall/Audiomods or Robert Hudson/Robson Acoustics in any way whatsoever other than being a customer of their kit and I am not in the hifi industry or media and I'm most certainly not a professional reviewer...I just love hifi.
I wanted to share my thoughts since I don't feel that these sorts of manufacturers of ours get that much recognition since they do not have the marketing budget to paste their wares into every hifi magazine and to maintain snazzy websites. But it is clear to me that here in the UK (and elsewhere), there are some really terrific bits of kit being made by some very talented individuals.
I'd love to learn of anyone else's experiences along these lines as this is the only way we can share information to find our hidden gems.