News

Updates. In a world of instantaneous answers at the tip of our fingertips or tongues as we wag either at our various platform-specific digital assistants to tell us want we want to know, waiting for an update on anything can be a tortuous predicament on our first-world list of problems.

Faith. There seems to be a sense of spiritual angst among the audiophile faithful who stream their digital audio via cloud-based music services and its cause seems to be the continuing delay of the French high-resolution music service Qobuz from entering the North American market.

You’ve read the reviews obsessively. You’ve gone to your local bricks and mortar or a hi-fi trade show and sat shoulder-to-shoulder with others to listen to them, or stopped round to a mate’s flat for a pint and heard them. For all those out there in audiophile-land who have been hemming and hawing about whether to lay down some cash on KEF’s award-winning LS50 or LS50 Wireless loudspeakers, the time may have come to get off the fence and commit to buying a pair.

When Bel Canto’s Michael McCormick reached out to me to see if I would be interested in reviewing their freshest-of-the-fresh e.One Stream ($1,599 USD MSRP) I was ecstatic and within a couple weeks I had a production unit land on my doorstep.

Upgrade-ability. In the digital realm, unlike the analog kingdom, upgrading a component has turned into a vastly simpler, quicker and in most cases free proposition to drastically improve the sonic performance of a high-fidelity source component.

For those audiophile souls whose hearts beat a little faster when they know there’s a hi-fi show to attend, then either reset your pacemakers, put down that whisky, or throw on a sweatband because – steady on now – there’s two shows this weekend on either side of the pond as our British kin love to call the Atlantic Ocean.