UK Audio Show 2023: Daventry

I’m not sure whether it’s the relatively down-to-earth setting in the Staverton Park Hotel near Daventry or the nature of the exhibitors at the UK Audio Show, but this event was more friendly and relaxed than many, not least the grandeur of the Ascot show the previous weekend. This event attracts a wide range of manufacturers and distributors, but on the whole, they are smaller brands; the products may be from around the world, but there aren’t many international representatives among the professionals manning the rooms. There were a few exceptions to this and a few product launches as well, with Bricasti making a comeback to these shores with a dedicated transport for CD as well as SACD, and the return of a British loudspeaker marque not seen for 50 years.

The sound that many exhibitors produced in rooms of various sizes was better than average, with some creating particularly enchanting results. Those looking to enjoy their music on the move had the opportunity to listen to a selection of cars courtesy of Driving Sounds magazine, and there was even an in-car amp specialist turning his hand to the high-end domestic market. All in all, Daventry was a good show in a handy location for many.

Editor’s note: This feature was supposed to have run some weeks ago. Instead, I got COVID-19 and parked it in my drafts folder. My apologies to all concerned.

Acoustic Energy Corinium

Acoustic Energy launched their most ambitious speaker for some time in the elegant Corinium. This is distinguished by a 6mm aluminium baffle that supports the tweeter while the midrange and bass drivers are fixed to the woodwork below. Corinium is the Roman name for Cirencester, where Acoustic Energy is based; back in the day, it was the biggest British city outside Londinium. The speaker of the same name has new carbon fibre drivers with long-throw voice coils and a new soft dome tweeter. The boat section cabinet is available in traditional finishes, but the racing green shown proved very popular; however, it adds a small premium to the £6,000 asking price.

Sigma Acoustics, EAM Lab, Chario

Audio Dreams is a new distribution company run by Italian Stefano Funes who specialises in brands from his homeland. Some are familiar names, such as Chario, while others are less well-known, including EAM Lab electronics and Sigma Acoustics loudspeakers. The latter showed the Monitor T 10 in the 25th Anniversary guise (£3,990); this is a stylishly faceted two-way with a Heil AMT tweeter and a custom-made six-inch mid/bass driver with an oversized voice coil and hybrid magnet system. EAM Lab was represented by the Element C201 line preamplifier (£2,700) and Studio 362 Ltd power amplifier (£4,000), which has VU meters and a 230W power rating that rises to 600W into two Ohms. Funes also demonstrated the Chario Sonnet Academy (£7,490) on dedicated curved stands (£1,719), this has a 32mm Silversoft dome tweeter and 170mm Rohacell woofer in a solid walnut or cherry and HDF cabinet and sounded rather good on the end of a Kestrel KT-200 turntable with Kestrel and Edwards Audio electronics.

IAS Beaulieu 40R

IAS launched its Beaulieu loudspeaker at the Cunard Hotel High Fidelity Spring Exhibition in 1980. Carl Beckwith, along with one of the company’s original founders, David Hall, has revived the brand and chosen the UK Audio Show for its debut. The Beaulieu 40R (£40,000, and pronounced ‘beww-lee’) combines an exclusive 10inch Volt bass driver, a SEAS midrange dome and an Accuton ceramic tweeter in a cabinet made from inch-thick birch ply with an aluminium damping plate on the back. A dedicated stand contains the solder-free crossover, which uses Duelund Cast components and offers tri-wiring connections. The latter has copper binding posts and a separate pair for single wiring.

Bricasti M19

Carlo Marengo has been picking up a bit of lingo from his chosen hometown of Edinburgh and had a selection of flyers fronted with slogans including ‘Ah Didnae Ken’, ‘Ya Dancer’ and ‘Pure Barry’. On the back of each was a translation and a way in which this particular saying pertained to the products he distributes. I like ‘Pure Barry,’ which expresses enthusiasm and approval.

It’s an apt phrase for the Bricasti electronics that Carlo brings in, not least the M19 SACD transport (£12,000) that was unveiled for the first time outside the US. This is, as the name suggests, a CD and SACD spinner that emits PCM and DSD from outputs that include an I2S connection on an RJ45 socket; this uses DoP to get a DSD signal to Bricasti’s M1S2 DAC. The full suite of Bricasti electronics included an M20 preamplifier and M25 power amp and these were driving a pair of Art Audio Emotion Diamond 8 loudspeakers (£21,000) to impressive effect.

Classic Turntable Company 301

Alan at Alchris had brought along a Classic Turntable Company 301 which is a rebuilt Garrard that is totally refurbished and has a new aluminium chassis. This company offer a range of parts for the original idler wheel Garrard turntables and clearly knows their stuff; it was quite surprising that this example, which has a Shindo platter, solid laminated birch plinth and SME 3009 tonearm, only costs £5,000. The current owners of the Garrard brand have a similar package for six times the price.

Alchris V200 loudspeakers (£4,200) were making some fine sounds playing Greg Brown’s Slant Mind on a Yaqin SD-33A CD player via an Aavik U-380 amplifier.

Kerr K200

Transmission line speaker specialist Jes Kerr was sharing the Townshend Audio room where his substantial new K200 speakers (£19,995) made some good sounds despite the hubbub. This is effectively a stand-mount version of the K100 with a new 10-inch Volt bass driver that supports the spider and voice coil with an exoskeleton chassis, a 75mm midrange dome and a 60mm true ribbon tweeter. The cabinet is built from Baltic birch plywood and incorporates Kerr’s “unique transmission line loading”. At 43kg, this is a serious proposition designed to offer maximum accuracy and detail resolution; the dedicated stands are almost certainly a must.

Ultrafide U4/ U500DC

Two brands from the pro world chose this event to launch upon an unsuspecting audiophile public; Ultrafide is the creation of MC2 and XTA designer Alex Cooper, formally with Klark Teknik. Ultrafide has created its own Class D amplification modules and used them in the U500DC power amplifier (£4,500), a 300W design which accepts that many audio enthusiasts prefer the warmer sound of Class AB by including a switch marked vintage sound that mimics that balance. The U4 preamplifier (£4,500) has a ‘high quality’ phono stage for both MM and MC cartridges that offers loading and gain settings to match specific models.

Quested OLY-208

The other company to jump the divide between studio and home entertainment is Quested, whose loudspeakers are designed by Roger Quested, who worked with the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and many other greats back in the day. The ethos he brings to domestic speakers is pretty much the same as for studio monitors; you hear the same sound as engineers do in the studio. It’s an approach that works for PMC and ATC, and the results heard from Quested OLY-208 stand-mounts (£14,400) on the end of the Ultrafine electronics mentioned above suggest that it works for this brand too. The OLY-208 is from the Olympic range and combines dual 8-inch bass drivers with a 75mm soft dome mid and 25mm tweeter; the more compact OLY-108 two-way omits the midrange yet has a specified 115dB peak SPL capability.

Coppice BG1

Coppice specialise in solid wood loudspeakers, which until now have been fairly sensible, even manageable affairs; this all changed at Daventry. Here, they introduced the BG1 or Big One (£19,995), which lives up to its name with a 150-litre bass reflex cabinet made from machined ash, the different figuring on the two speakers being a deliberate move intended to show that this is solid wood rather than the veneer found on 99% of the competition. Coppice have chosen a soft dome tweeter and a pair of 8-inch Beyma bass drivers to augment the Lowther full-range driver. The latter is a prototype that the recently reformed Lowther is developing, making it the first significant change to this classic driver in decades. The crossover is external so that these beasts can be tuned to different rooms without the need to move them around, which would clearly not be easy.

Kestrel KT-200 & KMM-1

Record player specialist Kestrel Audio was sharing a room with Kevin Edwards of Talk Electronics fame and using a Talk A5 Carbon tonearm on their KT-200 turntable (£899.95). This has a larger-than-average plinth that’s available in satin walnut or high gloss Macassar veneered finishes and runs an 18mm acrylic platter on an aluminium sub-platter in the Rega style. The A5 Carbon arm is that rare thing a unipivot, a type usually only sold separately and regarded by some as the best bearing option. Kestrel also showed a dedicated moving magnet phono stage called KMM-1 (£699.95); this offers three levels of gain and a 47k Ohm impedance setting alongside a 1k Ohm option for high output MCs.

Moor Amps Ascalon-8

As the owner of a Moor Amps Angel 6 power amplifier, I was pleased to see that Tim and Ruth Narramore have finalised the Ascalon-8 loudspeaker (£11,500) shown in prototype form at Bristol earlier in the year. The Ascalon-8 has been designed to be used close to the wall to make it easier to accommodate in typical British sitting rooms. To this end, the reflex port has been tuned down for a gentle roll-off that is less likely to excite room modes whilst producing decent bass extension. The drive units selected for the 24mm birch ply cabinet are from Volt, which is based in the West country like Moor Amps themselves and consists of an 8-inch bass unit, 50mm midrange dome and 25mm soft dome tweeter. The veneered model on the right is the finished thing but blue is an option.

Etude EHSB

Chris Liauw had some shiny black examples of his Etude 5 speakers alongside a 1.55m high addition to the range in the form of the Etude High Sensitivity Bipoles or EHSBs (£6,500 per pair). These are dipoles with eight BMR drivers front and rear flanking a compression driver tweeter; they were created to work with single-ended amplifiers such as the Super Natural Audio (SNA) 2.3 SE power amp being used in the room and have a high 105dB/W sensitivity to suit. The examples on dem were sitting on the Clipaudio Mute Point isolation system that’s not a million miles from the towers on an SME turntable in design. The system sounded good and included a Clipaudio Dolomite turntable and 9-wave arm, SNA amplification and DAC alongside a Lucas Audio LDMS music server.

Zeiler PR-01 & PA-01

I came across Ralf from Swiss brand Zeiler at the High-End show in Munich and saw that his amplifiers have subsequently been reviewed by none other than Alan Sircom of Hi-Fi+, so it was encouraging to find him and his fabulously machined products in Daventry sharing a room with newly appointed agent Symphony Distribution. This company is in charge of Tannoy in the UK and realised that the superbly built Zeiler tube amps would be a great match. At the show, they paired the Zeiler PR-01 preamplifier (£30,000) and PA-01 KT150 equipped 10 Watt power amplifier (£30,000) with a pair of Tannoy Kensington GR Signature loudspeakers (£19,995) to highly entertaining effect.

Audio Wave CR-30X

While there were some fancy cars near the entrance at the UK Audio show I was surprised to find power amplifiers from the in-car entertainment world driving a system in one of the dem rooms upstairs. Audio Wave is a high-end player in that universe, and even in ours, the asking price is a pretty serious £32,000 for a pair of monoblock power amplifiers. These amps come in two variants: a Class A version offering 50 Watts and a Class AB alternative with 400W on tap. The high price is the result of handmade production in the UK, right down to the heat sinks, each of which is made up of 63 copper rods.

Dyptique DP 140 MkII

Greg at GPoint Audio brought the latest panels from France’s Dyptique as the DP140 MkII (£12,480). This mid model in the range stands 1.41m high and incorporates two mid/bass isodynamic cells allied to a 55cm ribbon tweeter. The isodynamic drivers combine large-section bipolar magnets and coils made of aluminium tape on a membrane to create a dipole driver that delivers as much energy to the rear as the front of the speaker. The cabinet such as it consists of a welded steel frame with MDF and felt elements to control vibration. The ribbon tweeter is likewise made of mylar film with an aluminium coil, and the pairing only requires a first-order crossover.