Information about hi-fi key brands

After a short hiatus and a change of UK distribution, HiFi Gear is proud to announce that we are once again working with Rotel to provide some of our favourite Japanese hifi equipment.

To coincide with their return, Rotel have announced a suite of improved products, with many of their 14 series products donning a mk2 badge, to indicate an improvement to performance, internal components, board design and most importantly sound! Along with their even greater improved, flagship Michi series proudly wearing the 'Series 2' name, bringing along with it a whole host of improvements, more of which we will go into below, with further details on each product page.

Offering excellent build quality, unique technology and superb value, Rotel offer an amplifier for everyone, from their compact yet powerful integrated amps, to their range-topping pre & power

Monitor Audio Silver 7G - A breath of fresh air

Monitor Audio has just announced the new generation of their very successful Silver Series, we already loved the previous Gen 6 Silver series, with 2 speakers in this range, in particular, the Silver 50 Bookshelf Speaker and the Silver 200 Floorstanding Speaker, I will get into detail why shortly.

With a new generation of speakers comes new technology and looks. On paper, these are shaping to be a real eye-opener with their new RST II tech and we're so very keen to get our hands on them and give a full, honest review of what we expected. As always, the Silver range comes with an array of different finishes, in this instance, we have Gloss Black, Black Oak, Ash, Walnut and Satin White, making them fit seamlessly into any sort of living environment.

Ryan and I were recently invited to Henley Audio in Oxford for a tour around the facility as well as some informative training on some of the brands we deal with in the store. Towards the end of the day, we also had the opportunity to rebuild an Essential III from Project from putting the platter and belt on to re-fitting the cartridge and aligning it. I will be going into more detail on this build later on in this post.

The two headphones I will be comparing are the Bowers & Wilkins PX and the Sennheiser PXC-550. I will be talking about the Sound Quality, Noise Cancellation, Comfort, Physical Appearance, App Control and any features which I think are worth mentioning. 

The PX’s are currently priced at £329 and the PXC-550’s are £249. There has recently been a price reposition on the Sennheisers’ from £329 to £299 - which makes them a great competitive price against the PX's! 

The LS50 now has a dedicated platform to perform upon, designed and engineered by Custom Design to match the appearance and enhance the sound of the LS50 and LS50 Wireless models without compromise.

Loewe are a well established and highly regarded manufacturer of television sets and hifi products, having been designing and engineering many ground-breaking innovations for almost 100 years. While renowned worldwide for their impeccable build quality, stunning picture, immersive sound, luxurious design and overall futuristic feel; Loewe has a compelling history as an impacting force behind the development of consumer electronics industry as we know it today. This history is extensive, so I've tried to simplify it out to some of the more impacting milestones.

The Chord Company are a British manufacturer of high quality cables and interconnects, designed and engineered specifically for music enthusiasts by music enthusiasts. Chord build award-winning cables for hifi stereo systems, home theatre applications, high definition televisions/gaming, music streamers and for custom installation environments.

Cameron and myself were recently invited down to the Chord factory in Salisbury, allowing us to put some faces to the names and voices we’ve befriended over telephone and email conversations, and also to get a real feel for the level of effort and care that Chord put into the design and construction of their award-winning cables.

It's that time of year again! On the third Saturday of every April since 2007, thousands of independent record shops, turntable manufacturers, musicians and vinyl enthusiasts across the world celebrate the unique culture surrounding the independent record store.

Hifi Gear's Guide to Files & Formats By Stephen Goode

We (finally) set ourselves up at Bowers & Wilkins' highly prestigious and well-talked about 'Society of Sound'. We're finding ourselves spending almost as much time there as we are on our own site...