Sunday morning began with a bit of a surprise. After I boarded the lift to head down for breakfast, it stopped on the next floor so a group of six beautiful young women could enter. Audio shows attract certain demographic and let’s just say this posse broke the mold. So I felt compelled to ask them, “Are you here for the hi-fi show?” This resulted in much laughter. Apparently, these young ladies had gone away to celebrate a friend’s 21st birthday and had booked into a hotel that was packed to the rafters with balding, middle-aged men. They probably wondered if they had blundered into a sales convention for incontinence products or stairlifts.
Acutely aware of the need to attract young blood into the industry, I contemplated ushering them into the Naim room, which was near the breakfast hall, in order to introduce them to the delights of high-end audio. I would have loved to see the faces of the Naim guys when I sauntered in like a Maharaja with my new harem, but it felt too much like a pickup. So I suggested they explore a few rooms, bade them farewell, and made for the safety of the scrambled eggs.
Lockwood Loudspeakers
After breakfast, I headed for Lockwood Loudspeakers’ room. Lockwood started out in 1930 as a provider of studio monitors. Their loudspeakers all feature dual-concentric drivers and cabinets whose style hasn’t changed in decades. When I checked out their website, I was surprised by the number of hit albums that were mixed or mastered on Lockwood monitors. These include several Bond movie soundtracks, The Beano Album by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Beggars Banquet by the Stones, Led Zeppelin II, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and on and on!
The Lockwood Academy, launched in 1962
On demo at Bristol was the Lockwood Academy, which was launched in 1962 and remains in production, almost unchanged. These loudspeakers defy their age and don’t sound anything like you would expect from their looks. They’re whipcrack-fast, clean, and dynamic. Each birch cabinet with 18mm walls houses a concentric driver with a waveguided, 2″ aluminum-and-mylar tweeter at the apex of a hand-built 12″ Volt woofer. Pleasingly, the firm builds almost everything in-house, including cabinets and crossovers.
Dual-concentric driver tech throws a superb soundstage
The dual-concentric design has the ability to conjure up a tremendously three-dimensional soundstage, which is why such loudspeakers remain so popular today. On this occasion, Lockwood was using the Quad Artera monoblocks (£1299 each) and Quad Artera Solus CD player–DAC–preamp (£1489) to drive the system.
Also shown at Bristol was the new Lockwood Mini Major, a speaker with a fascinating heritage. Eight pairs were made for Abbey Road Studios in 1970 as a complement to the larger Lockwood Major monitors. It was believed that all eight pairs had been lost until the firm found a set at Mark Knopfler’s British Grove Studios in West London. From this last remaining pair, Lockwood was able to reproduce the original Mini Major. A new version of this extremely rare loudspeaker was on static display at Bristol.
Lockwood Mini Major
Sound Foundations Distribution
Sound Foundations was showcasing two new Soulines turntables. These originate from Belgrade, Serbia, which goes some way to explaining their apparent value for money. The TT9 is unsprung turntable constructed from aluminum and acrylic. It sells for under £5000, complete with Soulines’ KiVi M3 tonearm. Also on demo was the upmarket Kubrick DCX turntable, which retails for £6500, including the KiVi M3 tonearm.
The striking Soulines Kubrick DCX turntable and KiVi M3 tonearm
Both turntables use a DC motor and acrylic platter, but differ in their methods of isolation. The TT9 uses rubber-cork washers to decouple the acrylic sub-plinth from the main plinth. A DC motor drives the platter to which the record is secured with a supplied clamp. The Kubrick DCS uses a rigid aluminum plinth and a sub-plinth built from differently shaped layers, coupled together and strategically damped.
Two new vinyl spinners from Soulines
The Kubrick DCS was fitted with the DS Audio DS E3 cartridge (£1250). With Kerr Acoustic K320 floorstanding speakers on Townshend Seismic Podium loudspeaker supports, the sound was impressively fast, dynamic, and detailed.
Kerr Acoustic
Kerr Acoustic showcased the new K300 mk.3 transmission-line standmount loudspeaker (from £6395/pair). This utilizes a birch-ply cabinet, customized Scan-Speak ribbon tweeter, and 6.5″ wood-fiber midrange-woofer. Thanks to the transmission-line design, the K300 mk.3 achieves bass extension down to a claimed 33Hz (no deviation is specified).
Kerr says the mk.3 iteration offers improved midrange clarity and stereo imaging compared to its predecessor, thanks to redevelopment of its passive crossover, which employs hand-wound, air-core inductors and polypropylene capacitors.
Kerr Acoustic K300 mk.3
Fronted by a Chord Ultima Integrated amplifier and Dave DAC, the system on demo provided an impressive sense of scale and precision, with excellent timbre, on “Dreamer” by Supertramp.
The people at Kerr Acoustic are big fans of Townshend Seismic Podium loudspeaker platforms, which they used for the show. This remarkable support system utilizes sprung and damped load cells, which must be matched to the weight of the equipment they will be isolating. After trying them earlier this year, I think they are the second-biggest upgrade I have ever made to my system, which now achieves remarkable levels of articulation.
Kerr Acoustic K300 mk.3 on a Townshend Seismic Podium
Auralic
Auralic showcased its Vega S1 streaming DAC (£3000) in a system with Sugden’s impressive-looking Sapphire-series DAP 800 preamplifier (£5650) and FBA 800 power amplifier (£8530) driving a pair of ProAc K3 floorstanders (£8000).
The sleek Auralic Vega S1
The Vega S1 incorporates Auralic’s Tesla G3 streaming platform, and it features femto clocks and galvanic isolation to reduce noise, jitter, and distortion. The new Sugden Sapphire-series components are claimed to be the finest pre–power combination ever built by the Yorkshire firm. Two years of circuit design and development have culminated in these pure-class-A designs. Rated at 20Wpc, the FBA 800 uses a floating bridge design to achieve a low noise floor, low output impedance, and excellent load tolerance.
Sugden’s magnificent Sapphire Series pre and power combination
I was struck by the superb bass, snap, detail, and speed on “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” by the Temptations. Sugden is a brand I can’t wait to explore further in 2025.
ProAc K3 loudspeaker
REL Acoustics
REL now offers a variety of cool colors on some of their subwoofers
I have used REL subwoofers in my home-cinema system for over 30 years. Currently, I use the firm’s impressive REL HT/1510 Predator II (£1699), a sealed design with a 15″ CarbonGlas woofer and 1000W onboard amplifier. This subwoofer has already seen off a couple of highly acclaimed rivals.
REL offer a wide range of subwoofers for music and movies. My favored HT/1510 Predator II is on the immediate left
To celebrate their 35th anniversary, REL presented a two-channel musical showcase of pure shock and awe. For this report, it seems fitting to save the very best until last.
REL’s truly cavernous room in honor of their 35th birthday
In a truly cavernous room, REL assembled not one, but six, No.31 subwoofers, at a cool £7000 each—so that’s £42,000 on the subwoofers alone. REL call this stack of three subs on either side a “Line Array,” and it was an imposing sight. The main loudspeakers were the awesome Stenheim Alumine Five floorstanders (£69,700/pair), powered by a pair of Audio Research Reference 330M monoblocks (£90,000 each). The total price of this remarkable system was somewhere north of £330,000.
REL’s awe-inspiring No.31 line array beside a Stenheim Alumine Five speaker and an Audio Research Reference 330M power amplifier
For years, REL has been the go-to subwoofer brand for discerning audiophiles and cinephiles in the UK. In fact, 70 percent of the firm’s subwoofer sales are to people with two-channel systems. The aim of this demo was to show how much subwoofers can add to a high-quality music system, even one with high-end, full-bandwidth loudspeakers like the Alumine Fives. REL made their point by disconnecting the subwoofers at times during the performance. With the subs playing, it was as if there was a live band playing in the room—it was truly astonishing. With the subs disconnected, the sound became smaller in scale and narrower in bandwidth.
The REL No.31 subwoofer is simply extraordinary. I want one—badly!
What impressed me the most was how agile and extended the stack of No.31 subwoofers were. Rarely have I heard one or more subwoofers that can keep up with a pair of high-end loudspeakers across all genres of music. This was one of the most definitive demonstrations of how much more lifelike music becomes when it is reproduced on a system with a properly dialed-in, high-end subwoofer setup.
REL’s delightful Rob Hunt beats a retreat before all hell breaks loose
The was a road-to-Damascus moment, a moment in one’s audiophile journey when all your preconceptions about what is possible in audio are demolished. I love that, and I love REL for making it possible.
Closing thoughts
And so, another Bristol show drew to a close. As somebody who cherishes great sound, it’s easy to feel you are alone in a world that seems content to listen to MP3 files through Bluetooth speakers. Shows like Bristol bring those of us who care about audio together. It was a blast to discover there are so many of us out there. What I found at Bristol was an industry powered by great people and driven by a passion to drive the frontiers of music reproduction forward.
Jonathan Gorse
Senior Contributor, SoundStage!
