Nuforce - all you need for your desktop audio Nuforce is one of those myriad companies that breathe by hooking up with Apple iPods, iPhones and iPads and provide a superior audio experience out of these trendy/fancy devices. Nuforce produces a suite of stylish and high performance DACs and desktop headphones and speakers amps. Their specifications are quite high and their prices quite reasonable, so it is definitely a product that has found a niche in a crowded market. They can bundle up their products with Tangent Audio EVO speakers, a great team indeed! NAD - no it does not mean Noise And Distortion... It is no big secret that I am a fan... Over the years, I have owned a NAD 7140 receiver - now retired after 23 years of good service - and now a NAD turntable (a clone of the REGA P1) a NAD phono stage PP3i and a NAD C326BEE, used only as a preamp to drive my Bryston 3B, and a second hand tuner 4150. So it was fitting to see NAD exhibiting a triphonic speaker system, very Microphase-like indeed! That is certainly a piece of equipment I will not buy, but it would certainly a good buy for someone not as biaised as myself... Add Comment The end of an ERA...turntable 10/03/2010
 I am not too sure how I came to own one of these fancy French contraptions, and I have no recollection how it disappeared from my life, apart from the fact that I had a very naughty kitten at one point who really enjoyed playing with the antiskating counterweight! One can always use a cover, I hear you say, but there is great debate out there, whether or not it affects the sound! The cat certainly did!!! This was quite an elaborate design, with a floating subchassis and an arm based on an unprecedented (and unrepeated, as far as I know) virtual design pivot. I heard on another forum that JC Verdier had a hand in the design...If it is true, then it would have been the most inexpensive of his designs! The whole thing was pretty difficult to set up and was very wobbly indeed, but the sound was quite an upgrade from the Dual it replaced. It is also at that time, that I started to be very found of the Grado cartridges, certainly contributing to the notch up in quality from the inexpensive Shure cartridges used on the Dual. It is also at that time that I started to work for HP in the Test & Measurement division - now Agilent, and had access to the best test equipment in the World! I had a big garage at the time, all fitted as an electronic laboratory, where I played with MOSFET amplifiers, ICE amplifiers modules from Sanken (I used to sell them...) and curiously, not much with tubes and speakers. All this happened before I moved to Scotland and discovered NAD, and the battle between Linn and Rega, the emergence of the CD...and started designing the Microphase speakers. All photos are courtesy of www.vinylengine.com   Cabinet and Filter - suite... 08/21/2010
We have had several versions of the cabinets and filters. The first hundred or so were made without any commercial objective of profit whatsoever and we had the crossover made on the fly (see photo in previous post) and the internal faces of the cabinet were lined with bitumen for added neutrality. We even had a very limited series finished in piano lacquer (8 coats with resanding in between coats) which we sold for about 4 times the price of the standard ones (see photos of my daughter's system below featuring a pair of them, together with MY Rega and a A60 amp from A&R Cambridge, now Arcam) BTW, I bought myself a NAD turntable for Christmas. They are obviously made by REGA, but with a cheaper mindset, and on a positive note the new Rega 251 arm and Ortofon OM5E cartridge, an improvement on the Grado I use on the Rega. Under commercial pressure, later versions were not lined with bitumen and the filter was later built on a printed circuit board. Although it does not seem to affect the quality of the sound too much, I am still to do an A/B listening test to make sure. My next project is actually to build new filters on air core inductors, better capacitors (all from Solen...after all they are a French company!) and also implement an impedance compensation network on the midrange driver, and no PCB. There is also room for improvement with the damping cloth used inside the cabinet. I will keep you posted on these experiments.     | AuthorBorn in France, well travelled, relocated to Sydney in 1997.  ArchivesMarch 2012 CategoriesAll |
French Vintage HiFi
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