Writings about Tidal Audio from Lotus Hifi

Tidal Audio – NEW factory visit 2025

I am walking through Tidal Audio’s new 2000 square metre factory in the small town of Erftstadt just outside Köln, Germany, and it all feels extremely familiar. The sense of purity and clean air, elegant pristine exhibits peppering the large and voluminous stress free spaces, a striking red Ducati 999 race bike glistening at the end of the central gangway, and up ahead when you first enter, a gigantic back-lit portrait of two beautiful silver and black Bugatti Royale loudspeakers. It's all familiar then, because in truth not a lot has changed. This is the old factory but ungraded [...]

1st July 2025|

AMPLIFIED PERFORMANCE – Tidal’s breakthrough AP1

FROM 2016 to AP1 The system you see just below is very similar to the one that wooed the crowds at the Munich High End show 9 years ago or so. It would probably still rank in the last few percent of rooms if you took it back to Munich today - or indeed any other international Audio show. The cost ? With the Assoluta bass towers, around 1 million euros. Several years after that time, TIDAL were selected by the Bugatti motor company to design and build a ‘no limits’ Bugatti branded audio system. This initiated [...]

14th April 2025|

Tidal AP1 world premiere – at LOTUS

This weekend it was my great pleasure to host the World Premier of one of the most ambitious projects ever to come from Tidal Audio, the new AP1 amplified loudspeaker. Lotus Hifi is extremely proud and excited to take delivery of the very first pair to leave the Tidal factory in Köln, Germany. My sincere thanks goes to our UK partner Fraser Robertson from Airt Audio, and of course Tidal Audio M.D. Jörn Janczak; please never stop creating these amazing new masterpieces which challenge and develop the very boundaries of our industry. The AP1 for me represents [...]

16th February 2025|

TIDAL FOR BUGATTI – Munich High End 2023

In the world of the audiophile even the expression “no words” might be a well worn cliche but in the case of Tidal Audio’s Bugatti Royale system - presented for the first time in public at Munich high end last week - it’s so agonisingly difficult to describe and even perhaps understand what we all heard, that “no words” really was my first reaction when Tidal’s MD Jorn Janczak asked me to commit my reaction to paper. Any story about this system must begin with the Bugatti Veyron hypercar, something that greatly influenced Jorn from its [...]

30th May 2023|

THE TIDAL CONTROS

A MIRACLE OF BALANCE This is a great arresting image from the factory, which conveys a few intriguing messages all at the same time. First you spy a piece of witchcraft; how can a box of high end audio electronics achieve such a balancing act ? This miracle for me is primarily an echo of exactly what Contros is and how it performs. Certainly for Lotus, it is a new way of doing things and a new unprecedented milestone of performance at its price level. Secondly, the image is perhaps a nod to the product’s compactness [...]

21st November 2022|

TAIKO EXTREME vs. TIDAL ARKAS !!!

INTRODUCTION Senna against Prost,  McEnroe v Borg, Cola versus Pepsi, Patek fighting it out with AP. This is a battle which I probably should have covered last year but as ever I’ve probably been too busy selling the things and looking after customers 24/7 with what has been a very busy 2022. There might be something equivalent out there in the world of music servers/streamers but I certainly don’t know about it yet and I do tend to spend a lot of my downtime hunting for new technologies and emerging hot products. There are a few close outliers [...]

5th August 2022|

The TIDAL INTRA

Information on this new exciting amplifier from Tidal has been a little scarce, in part because of the singular events of 2020, but the truth is we have been quietly retailing and fulfilling orders on the Intra for almost a year now. Our demo arrived way back last Spring. So what's the headline ? Well the very clever team from Koln in Germany have essentially upgraded and redesigned the outgoing Impulse with a product that is not only sonically better, but much more geared toward common audiophile trends and wishlists, and at the same time, sports an impressive array [...]

5th April 2021|

Unchartered waters – the Tidal Prisma

If you’ve ever spent any reasonable amount of time with me, either on the phone or in person, you will have no doubt detected to some degree my profound love of Tidal Audio. Back up a moment though because I actually have tremendous passion for all the brands and products I sell. I hand pick pretty much every item in my shop window right to the level of the range of a particular product of a particular manufacturer. If something is a dud in the range or does not quite mate with the Lotus way of system building then I [...]

26th May 2020|

TIDAL / VIMBERG FACTORY VISIT 2018

In the Summer of this year I had the pleasure of visiting the Tidal factory. We do pop in to periodically to keep abreast of things but this time was rather special because firstly we were set to investigate and gloat over the newly launched Vimberg brand of loudspeakers and secondly, the team have just finished a sizeable factory expansion with the launch of a stunning brand new demonstration room. Whilst the electronics assembly and R&D has always been off site at a different location, the speaker manufacturing and assembly was always located on the ground [...]

4th September 2018|

SPEAKERS FIRST … NOT SOURCE !

I had an illuminating conversation with a customer of mine the other day. So key was it's message that I thought it might be a good idea to write an article around it. This particular customer of mine has a great system with me. We moved him into Vitus amplification around 3 years ago and then soon after that we upgraded his Notts Analogue deck to a Brinkmann Balance with Transfiguration Proteus moving coil. An Allnic phonostage and some TelluriumQ wires complete the picture as far as Lotus is concerned. At the business end though, he has left his [...]

1st March 2018|

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