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|
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THRAX ENYO

THRAX AND LOTUS – THE EARLY YEARS I have been strong a admirer of Thrax’s separates for many years now. Over the last 10 years I had encountered them several times along my travels and sometimes through other manufacturers I work with. The look, the philosophy, the design principles and of course the house sound and sonic ethos, all were facets that impressed. When I began with Dohmann turntables back in 2017 I actually formed a working partnership with Thrax’s MD Rumen Artarski because he was responsible for the manufacturing and ordering process for the those decks. I [...]

5th March 2022|
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ROCKPORT AVIOR II

Rockport have been with us for a good year now. Anyone who has heard the entry £32,000 Atria floorstander here has been profoundly impressed and it’s no surprise that actual sales of this outstanding product began very quickly in 2021 and demos on new enquiries are still going strong early 2022. I wrote exhaustively about the Atria II back then and before you dive in deep here, it might be worth reading that article first, as a detailed introduction to Rockport and the house sound. As that article mentions, the Avior, first created some 10 years ago in Mk [...]

23rd February 2022|
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TONDA – when size is power

It is well known that the speaker is the most important part of the system and should receive the lion’s share of the budget, in part because it’s the most difficult component to design whilst there are many modest amplifiers and DACs in existence that sound amazing. So to this end we have been talking about speakers quite a bit here on the pages of LotusHifi.co.uk. With Rockport recently joining Vimberg, Avalon and of course those German masterpieces from Tidal Audio, our enviable line up here is more exciting and exhaustive than ever before. The Vimberg [...]

18th October 2021|
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ROCKPORT ATRIA II – UK PREMIERE

Late last year it was my great pleasure to finally bring Rockport to Lotus, to our exclusively high end environment with the cables, mains, electronics, analogue and digital to truly do these world class loudspeakers justice. Alongside Tidal, Vimberg and Avalon, Rockport completes a remarkable four strong repertoire of transducers to offer our customers. All very special, but all sufficiently different from one another to represent a meaningful and worthwhile spread of choice.­ The Atria II have been with us since the tail end of 2020 but only now with Covid19 lockdown lifted, are we using them in anger [...]

7th May 2021|
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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|
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The Digital Cable

Over the last year or so the USB cable has received a fair bit of attention from our brands Shunyata and Tara Labs. The performance ceiling of this cable and associated technological know how, the best that is currently available, has been shifting upwards dramatically and this has underlined more than ever before something that we already knew but that now needs spelling out very clearly to customers: The USB cable (or digital cable) might be the most important cable, probably equal in influence and importance to the speaker cables. I talk to new customers regularly who are using say [...]

19th March 2021|
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Optimising the Network – a HUGE source of noise

Most of our systems are plugged into the home network these days. Our streamers and servers are attached to the network to be controlled from our Ipads and if we are not playing files directly from a network attached hard drive, we are using streaming services like Tidal and Qobuz, pulling music from the deep recesses of the web. The problem is the home network is a large and very complex source of noise. There are many noise factors with USB and ethernet cables, phase noise from consumer grade network clocks, noise from cheap router/dataswitch power supplies and even [...]

25th November 2020|
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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|
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NAIM TO VITUS – IN 2020

It has been almost 5 years since I wrote my original Naim to Vitus article and 7 years since I started this whole paradigm. It feels like a lifetime ago, so much has happened since. In that time we have moved probably over 100 Naim owners out of their green boxes and into Danish Highend. It is such a well-trodden and proven pathway now and it happens here every single month. I pioneered this philosophy and methodology and evangelised its success and ease far and wide, not just in the UK but across Europe and even in the US [...]

21st May 2020|
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