UK Hi-Fi Show Live 2024

Ascot Racetrack is one of the most salubrious places to hold an event. It’s a racecourse that is the playground of the rich and famous. It’s home to Royal Ascot in June – one of the dressiest events in the UK social calendar. The grandstand is also home to the annual UK Hi-Fi Show Live (run by Hi-Fi News magazine) in the grandstand (also known as the Royal Enclosure during Royal Ascot). The grandstand is very grand indeed. It is occupied by the sort of people who own stables – or in the case of the Royal Family, own countries – so each room gets five-star treatment. However, even off-season this means the rooms are subject to the whims of their owners and not every room is available to audio companies for the UK Hi-Fi Show Live.

This is both good and bad for show-goers. It means each room is free from noise pollution as their nearest neighbour might be three or four doors along a corridor. However, it also means long walks down seemingly empty corridors full of closed doors, and few companies can guarantee their ‘spot’ from year to year. In addition, the sheer size of Ascot Racetrack’s grandstand soaks up show-goers; the rooms might be full, but the walkways and corridors seem sparsely populated when a few thousand people turn up to a place that can hold 10,000 with ease. However, this gives the often-unfounded impression of a ‘soulless’ event.

The UK Hi-Fi Show Live is home to many new product launches, especially as it has a close link with the EISA awards ceremonies. Many companies use the show to highlight what’s going to be on the equipment stands of this season’s audio buyers.

Here are a few highlights of the event:

Sound Design Distribution has taken on the prestigious Vivid Audio and Halcro lines. The company used a Grimm Audio MU1 media player fed by a Lumin D3 server and Silent Angel’s network products (all sitting on a Lateral stand) into a pair of Halcro Eclipse Mono power amps and Vivid Audio’s Moya M1 flagship loudspeakers, all fed by Accusound cables. This was a room large enough to do these big, powerful speakers justice!

New CD players are thin on the ground these days, but the luxury brand Michi (Rotel’s high-end division) bucks the trend with its Q5 top-loading CD player. Built around the company’s CNC milled aluminium CD mechanism and featuring an ESS ES9028PRO DAC at its heart, the player includes digital inputs and MQA support, but is designed primarily as a damn good CD player!

Henley Audio has a working prototype of the upcoming HiFi Rose RD 160 DAC. This striking new DAC features two different AKM-based DAC pathways (for PCM and DSD), a high-precision OXCO clock and a ‘stealth’ OLED front panel display that can show a range of options, from internal architecture to a graphic display of the sound output. Final samples should be available very soon.

Henley Audio also recently announced it had taken on the distribution of Piega loudspeakers from Switzerland. The distributor is focusing primarily on the Coax Gen 2, ACE and ACE Wireless designs, rather than Piega’s more esoteric Master series models, but it’s great to see this brand back in the UK and supported by a distributor that will give the company the gravitas it deserves.

Seen for the first time anywhere, Bel Canto showed its uprated Black range of products. The main change is a move to fibre-optic connections between the devices, allowing for distortion and noise-free connections between the devices. A new integrated amplifier and the complete controller and mono amp system were on demonstration.

YG Acoustics had a complete line on demonstration, but the most exciting product was the XX3 Live system. This comprises two four way, eight driver loudspeakers with built in amplification and separate controller that can connect to a range of digital and analogue sources. It’s a complete turn-key system at a very high-end (over £250,000) price!

Sound United – the parent to Bowers & Wilkins, Definitive Technology, Denon, Marantz, and Polk – showed off the new Marantz 10 Series. Comprising SACD 10 CD/SACD player, Link 10 network player and Model 10 integrated amplifier, these three represent the flagship of the company, and sounded very good when played through a pair of Bowers & Wilkins 702 S3 Signature floorstanders.

Picking up a lot of attention, Kog Audio’s featuring Soul Note’s A3 integrated amplifier and the Finkteam Borg Episode 2 floorstanding loudspeakers sounded particularly good. Kog had recently announced the distribution of German turntable legend Transrotor and was demonstrating the Massimo Nero model with great success. However, back-lit black turntables and cameras do not mix!

Signature Systems showed off an entire PS Audio system, complete with the new Aspen FR5 stand-mount loudspeakers. This filled a surprisingly large room with sound, given its diminutive stature. That it was driven by the best PS Audio electronics and power products possibly helped!

Signature Systems also showed off two new distribution agencies. Udo Besser from AVM was at the show to welcome Signature into the family, and showed the company’s CS8.3 Black all-in-one system. At the same time, Signature Systems showed the Matrix Audio line, including the excellent MS-1 Music Streamer. This extremely configurable streamer supports any input or output, and can be driven by the Matrix App.

While photographing black things without a flash in a back-lit environment never works well, this small MBL system – featuring the MBL 126 Radialstrahler stand-mount loudspeaker – showed it’s possible to play good omnidirectional sound in even the smallest rooms. This was something of a surprise as I’ve long suspected such systems need more ‘breathing space’ than this very small room offered.

Although best known for its Hylixa loudspeakers, Node Audio also makes a fine line of support components, Called SS1, this range of support systems can be used to hold everything from equipment on racks to speaker cables. A-B demonstrations at a show are usually a sure sign of failure, but these ones worked successfully, suggesting Node Audio might be onto something…

Clearaudio teamed up with guitar legend Al Di Meola to create a turntable shaped like his Gibson Les Paul Custom that featured on his Elegant Gypsy LP. Elsewhere, Clearaudio and DS Audio distributor Sound Fowndations showed off the new tube-based version of its popular equaliser for the company’s optical cartridge system.

Russ Andrews has joined the network audio filter club with its new Network Purifier. This passive filter uses eight of Russ Andrews ‘MiniZap’ filters to prevent the ingress of network nasties from your switch to your media player.

Last, but by no means least, Absolute Sounds takes the largest section at the show and had several new products both on demonstration and display. Some of the most notable demonstrations came from the combination of Audio Research’s new Reference 330M mono power amplifier and the re-born Wilson Audio WATT/Puppy.

An unexpected new product on display at the Absolute Sounds stand was the Devore Micr/O bookshelf loudspeaker. We hope to hear more from this pocket rocket soon.

There were some other big launches at the show. The new dCS Varèse five-box digital front-end was on display and Arcam’s new Radia series were both impressing people, but their mirrored front panels both managed to fox my camera’s autofocus system and the results in picture form were very blurry! My apologies for the lack of good images.

This remains an important show with many new products on display and demonstration and – despite the fact that you could put 5,000 people in the grandstand and it still look ’empty’, the show often delivers above-average sound. It’s well worth a day at the races!

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