The last weekend of February marks a seminal event in the UK audio calendar, because that is when the Bristol Hi‑Fi Show takes place. This is the longest-running audio show in the UK, and certainly the best attended as well. Little wonder, then, that the industry was out in force on the weekend of February 20–22 at the Delta Hotels by Marriott Bristol City Centre, as there was no shortage of new products making their debuts.
ATC
My favorite loudspeaker brand evidently decided that the early bird catches the worm, because they held a press call at 9:45 a.m. on the opening day of the show to reveal their new deluxe active floorstander, the EL50. Happily, ATC elected to hire a much bigger room this year, and it proved far more capable than their usual small room. I hope they retain this larger room for future shows.
The EL50 is housed in an imposing elliptical cabinet and combines the drive units from the standard ATC SCM50 with new discrete amplification packs and gorgeously veneered curved cabinets that mimic the design of the EL150, released in 2006. Gone are the boxy studio-monitor looks, replaced with something that is far more Aston Hall than Abbey Road.
Manufactured in ATC’s own cabinet factory, the curved enclosure is purported to reduce diffraction, increase stiffness, and improve frequency response. The cabinets are lavishly appointed in Italian walnut, finished with a high-gloss lacquer, and trimmed in genuine black napa leather. Priced at £49,500 per pair, the initial production run of this special-edition version will be limited to 50 pairs worldwide. However, ATC plans to release a less exotically finished version in due course at a slightly lower price point.
The three discrete active amplification packs have been redesigned; they now make extensive use of surface-mount components and boast entirely new input stages powered by three distinct transformers—unlike the standard SCM50, which uses a single transformer. ATC claims the new architecture reduces intermodulation and crossover distortion, and says that the EL50 incorporates the lowest-distortion circuits they have ever made.
The EL50s presented violinist Caroline Goulding’s performance of Fritz Kreisler’s “La Gitana” (with pianist Christopher O’Riley) from her self-titled album with immense space and transparency. Goulding’s fabulous bowing technique and the sense of gut-on-string in a real acoustic space were spectacularly revealed. Instruments were reproduced with lifelike scale, and there was a feeling of bottomless bandwidth to the piano.
On Jeff Buckley’s “Everybody Here Wants You,” the active ATCs showed sublime control of transients. Notes were supremely tight and fast, while the bass guitar was tuneful and fulsome.
There’s no denying that the EL50 represents a considerable jump in price compared to the standard SCM50ASL, which starts at £16,650/pair. My thoughts on whether the additional performance justifies the price difference will have to wait until I am able to hear the EL50 in my familiar system for an extended review. But I came away deeply impressed—this was a real highlight of the show for me.
Optoma
Optoma chose the Bristol show for the launch of a new high-end projector. Retailing for £5999, the UHZ78LV is aimed squarely at the well-heeled home-cinema enthusiast.
I’m probably quite unusual among high-end audio reviewers in that I run a full Dolby Atmos projection-based home cinema, which is fully integrated into my two-channel audio system. This reflects my deep passion for both films and music. All of my recent projectors have been Optoma models, simply because I prefer DLP to LCD and find the Optoma range tends to offer the biggest bang for the buck (or pound).
The UHZ78LV is a triple-laser 4K projector offering a 4.5-million-to-1 contrast ratio and 5000-lumen output. It’s a real light cannon, which is a significant benefit for people like me who are without a blackout facility and enjoy watching in the daytime. The projector also offers a motorized zoom and autofocus, and it supports all the latest high-dynamic-range video formats, including HDR10+, IMAX Enhanced, and Dolby Vision.
Optoma has also incorporated their PureEngine Ultra image-processing suite to enhance contrast, optimize brightness, refine detail, and smooth motion, all in real time. The firm claims that this technology preserves detail and improves depth perception, resulting in images that appear more natural, detailed, and three-dimensional given larger projection dimensions.
A selection of racing scenes from the F1: The Movie was used to demonstrate this new projector’s capabilities. I was astonished by the razor-sharp images, which were bright and full of contrast even in a showroom that wasn’t fully light-controlled. This was one of the finest projected images I have ever seen, with superb shadow detail, deep blacks, and incredibly fluid motion. The worst part of all this is that I want one now—badly! My Optoma UHD55 is a very fine 4K projector, but it’s clearly no match for the new UHZ78LV.
Sennheiser
Optoma was using the Sennheiser Ambeo Soundbar Max for their projector demo, and I was impressed with both the sound and scale of its presentation, considering its £2199 retail price.
Compared to the dynamic Optoma room, the Sennheiser headphone lab next door was an oasis of calm. The German company was featuring their entire range of headphones, including the legendary HD 800 S open-back ’phones, which I use at home and still regard as the finest headphones I have ever heard. They feel less like headphones and more like speakers than anything else, so there’s a real sense of sound being around you and not being steered straight into your ears.
Sennheiser’s wired headphone range
Launching at the Bristol show were the £399 Sennheiser HDB 630 closed-back, noise-canceling travel headphones. The HDB 630s offer a number of interesting features, not the least of which is a separate dongle that upgrades the wireless transmission from Android and Apple phones to the same Bluetooth codec that the headphones themselves support.
Every Bluetooth audio source supports certain Bluetooth codecs, but these are rarely the latest and best, like aptX Lossless or LDAC. As an example, iPhones support only SBC and AAC, the worst, most compressed, and most bandwidth-limited Bluetooth codecs. The HDB 630 cans come with a dongle that you simply plug into your phone’s USB‑C port, and voilà, the phone starts transmitting using aptX Adaptive.
I found the HDB 630s very comfortable. For closed-back cans designed for travel, they sounded remarkably open. Transparency was deeply impressive, with a very well-balanced sound across a wide range of material. The claimed 60-hour battery life should be enough for even the most committed globetrotters. Sennheiser really knows what they’re doing with headphones, and it shows—these are a knockout, and at a sensible price too.
Creek Audio
Creek Audio was launching a new loudspeaker at the show, the Cymatics 6, and also demonstrating a new range of amplifiers, which were in prototype form and thus hidden from view.
Priced at £2800/pair, the Cymatics 6 is the first of a planned trilogy of speaker models. It’s a modestly proportioned standmounted two-way loudspeaker weighing 34 pounds and offering 88dB/W efficiency at 4 ohms. Creek has developed their own tweeter for this model, but partnered with SB Acoustics to develop a bespoke woofer. All cabinets are built-in house, with 25mm walls and 18mm bracing. The crossovers are first-order designs on the tweeter and third-order for the bass. Creek took pains to communicate that their metal-domed tweeter is blessed with very flat frequency response, and they have paid a great deal of attention to waveguide dispersion.
Creek Audio’s Cymatics 6 speaker (right) in eco-friendly zebrano wood
“Layla” from Eric Clapton’s unplugged set sounded very impressive, with excellent bass response given the speakers’ size, while Olivia Dean’s Live at Eventim Apollo demonstrated the speakers’ fine transparency and scale.
Leema Acoustics
The Welsh firm launched their new i85 integrated amplifier at Bristol, which replaces the Quantum series integrated amp. For £1750, you get a UK-built amplifier with a Noratel toroidal transformer delivering 85Wpc into 8 ohms, doubling into 4 ohms. The volume control uses a resistor ladder for better accuracy than any potentiometer could provide.
This attractive amplifier has a high damping factor, which helps it maintain tight control of the speaker drive units. It also offers very high power-supply capacitance to ensure excellent climaxes with no risk of running out of headroom. This is yet more evidence of clever engineering from a firm that continues to quietly impress me with their superb engineering and sonics.
Anne Marie Almedal’s cover of “The Lovecats” by the Cure was superb, with a pleasantly balanced and detailed sound demonstrating great timing considering the modest cost of the system.
The I85 is available in two variants, one all-analog and the other equipped with an integrated ESS9028Q2M DAC for a small price premium.
Elite Audio UK
I was delighted to find the Elite Audio UK display tucked away in the basement level at Bristol. The dealer, based in Fife, Scotland, was demonstrating two very good (and affordable) systems using Electrocompaniet electronics and Top Gold cabling. The cheaper system happened to be playing while I was there; this comprised a Lindemann Woodnote Solo streaming DAC (£1850), Electrocompaniet ECI 80D integrated amplifier (£3299), and Revival Atalante 3 speakers (£2490/pair).
This system sounded gorgeous, with a very natural and unforced presentation, decent bass weight, and a smooth and engaging character. I must also commend Elite Audio for the clear pricing and model information that they were projecting onto a nearby wall.
The ECI 80D delivers 80Wpc into 8 ohms and is stylishly finished in Electrocompaniet’s gloss-black-and-gold style. The Atalante 3 is a very attractive two-way standmount with a 28mm soft-dome tweeter, a 7″ basalt-sandwich woofer, and a nominal impedance of 4 ohms.
It was refreshing to find a manufacturer that played what attendees wanted to hear—normal music that people listen to in the real world rather than hours and hours of exquisitely recorded audiophile dreck. Some other rooms have much to learn about how to present gear, market it, and feed it with good music.
Chord Company
Chord Company was celebrating just over 40 years since their foundation in 1985. Amusingly, all of the music played in their room dated from the year of the company’s founding. And in another interesting nod to their history, they walked the audience through a comparison of one of their 1985 cables with its modern equivalent. It was blatantly obvious that the newer cables offered significantly greater transparency and dynamics, with a lower noise floor. To some degree, I class myself as a cable cynic—I struggle to see the justification for ultra-exotic cables costing thousands of pounds per meter, or indeed other audiophile paraphernalia like network switches and exotic ethernet cables. But there’s no doubt in my mind that good-quality, sensibly priced cables do make a large difference to system performance.
One of the areas Chord has been working on recently is cable insulation and shielding. The differences between PTFE, XLPE, and finally Taylon insulation were demonstrated each in turn, with progressive gains in resolution and dynamics. Taylon was originally developed for aerospace applications, and its use in the audio arena is unique to Chord. It provides a better, more stable dielectric constant than PTFE, enhancing sound quality by eliminating phase inconsistencies at typical room temperatures. The Cure’s “Close to You” showed surprising improvements in three-dimensionality with Taylon-coated Sarum T cables.
Lastly, the firm has been catering to users with bi-wire and tri-wire speaker terminals by enabling the replacement of the metal plates on the back of loudspeakers with Chord V-Links, which take a female banana plug from the speaker cable and route the signal to each banana socket on the rear of the speaker using short lengths of Chord EpicX Aray. These offered a sizeable upgrade over the metal link plugs provided with the demo loudspeakers. The firm has prototypes for two-way speakers, but those of us with three-ways are going to have to wait longer (and I did beg!).
My first day at Bristol was a whirlwind of press launches, and the crowds were certainly an impediment to getting into some rooms. I found myself feeling that I hadn’t managed to see quite enough, which led me to join the rest of the industry in the hotel bar at the day’s close. But the bar soon became pretty busy too, so I met up with an old university mate for dinner in a nice Italian restaurant. After such a busy day it was nice to decompress one-on-one and prepare for day two.
Jonathan Gorse
Senior Contributor, SoundStage!
