It’s all about the customer service… A tale from Audio T and Dynaudio.

/ Audio T Oxford/

In our almost 60 year history, Audio T has prided itself on exceptional customer service, both during and after the sale. This is often made easier by the quality of the products we sell and the manufacturers we choose to operate with. Here is a tale of one such example of how a premium manufacturer deals with aftercare, alongside an authorised dealer such as ourselves…

Here at Audio T Oxford, we recently had an enquiry from a gentleman whose father had bought a system from us back in 2003 compromising of a pair of Dynaudio Special 25 Speakers, Cyrus 8/ PSXR amplification, an Arcam CD93 Player, an Arcam tuner and a Denon cassette deck - Remember those?

Now, whilst Dynaudio products have a well founded reputation for being bulletproof, after 20 years of faithful service one of the mid/bass drive units had failed. Our customer, Jimmy, is now 99 years young and still loves his music and in particular, loves these speakers.

Dynaudio Special 25

Jimmy had asked his son Steve to see if he could help get the speaker looked at. Given that the speaker was purchased twenty years ago, Steve thought it best to contact Dynaudio directly. As the original purchase location and authorised dealer, Dynaudio put Steve in touch with ourselves.

So, Steve got in touch to see if we could, if at all possible, get the speaker fixed in time for his father’s 100th birthday! As luck would have it, the Special 25 speakers came with a 25 year warranty, personally signed by the long serving then President of Dynaudio, Wilfried Ehrenholz.

The original certificate of warranty from dynaudio

Steve duly dropped the speaker off for us to test and we confirmed that it was indeed the driver that was fault. 

We contacted Bill Livingston, the head of Dynaudio UK about obtaining spares, only to be told that none were left at the factory, but as a manufacturer that are serious about honouring their warranties and given the fact that they build all their own drive units in-house; the conversation went along the lines of “No problem, we can build you new drive units, we keep all the original design drawings and specifications, just give us a couple of weeks and we will make a new pair!”

We felt that this was outstanding customer service and a testament to Dynaudio.

Sure enough, two weeks later the brand new mid/bass drivers arrived…

After some careful servicing from yours truly, the driver has now been replaced and the loudspeaker thoroughly soak tested. And it is sounding fantastic, if we do say so ourselves!

Because Steve isn’t local, and only one speaker was brought in to us, we have given him the option of keeping hold of the other drive unit as a spare or we’ll happily fit it in the other speaker, whichever he, or his father prefers.

The story continues…

This is Jimmy (and his son Steve), collecting his Special Forty’s from audio t oxford

Following on from our initial blog, we have since replaced the other drive unit so that both match. While they were here, we took the opportunity to sit and have a play with the speakers and got to chat to Jimmy…

It turns out that Jimmy was an RAF pilot that fought in the Second World War! He flew Spitfires and even survived a crash landing. In 1944, he had to bale out of a burning P40 Kittyhawk. He reagailed that the metal was so hot that he couldn’t move the canopy (the transparent enclosure over the cockpit). He thought he was a goner and prayed for help only to suddenly find himself out of the aeroplane (landing covered in molten metal) and became a POW for the remainder of the war. 

He had amazing anecdotes, like a German soldier repairing his clothes for him; which he described as “…a real Christian act when you consider that 45 minutes beforehand he had been strafing them”. Being a prisoner he suffered some real hardships of cold and hunger but some of the guards showed real kindness.

He ended his career flying the interceptor aircraft, English Electric Lightning. Being somewhat of an military aviation geek myself, I could literally have talked to him for hours. Jimmy has a short book written about his exploits. I might just have to track it down for myself.

We would like to take this opportunity to wish Jimmy a very happy 100th birthday!

Thanks for reading.

Jon & Rob - Audio T Oxford. 

If you have any questions about any of the equipment featured in this article, or any other Hi-Fi or home cinema enquiries, be sure to Contact Us.

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Dispelling the myth around affordable speakers with the DALI Oberon - King of the Fair(l)y Priced Speakers.

/ Audio T Enfield/

As many of you will know by now, I thoroughly enjoy experimenting with a variety of Hi-Fi gear to gauge what equipment will produce the most detail from my favourite music. From CD players and turntables, to amplifiers and speakers, it’s an ongoing investigation that, let’s face it, may never end as most brands are almost constantly releasing new and upgraded models. Working at Audio T has really opened my eyes to expansive world of Hi-Fi and the amount of brands and models available.

Hopefully, this article will dispel the myth that you have to break the bank in order to own a great set of Hi-Fi speakers as we’ll be exploring the subject by looking at a beautiful pair of floor standing speakers that perform well beyond their price point – the DALI Oberon 5.

A COLOUR FOR EVERY INTERIOR

The DALI Oberon 5 come in a range of finishes – Light Oak, White, Dark Walnut, and Black Ash. Mountain Grey grilles are supplied with the lighter finishes and Shadow Black grilles with the darker; Marshmallow White is also available at an extra cost. Standing at 83cm high, 16cm wide and 28cm deep, their striking beauty frequently catches the attention of customers when they enter the store, giving us many great opportunities to tell the customers how well they perform. Most of the time they intrigue customers enough to sit down and have a listen in our demonstration room, and are often pleasantly surprised by how beautiful these speakers sound and perform considering their fairly reasonable price mark. In fact, most customers can’t believe their luck when they discover these incredible floorstanders.

We currently have a Light Oak pair on display in store, and they are regularly used as a “go-to” for demonstrating moderately priced CD players, turntables, etc. The Oberon 5 produce crisp detail that isn’t harsh or overwhelming to the ears, making them a good all-rounder for any source.

The Dali Oberon 5s in Light Oak

One of the first things I noticed about the Oberon 5 was how light they felt when setting them up. There is often a misconception that heavy speakers make for a better sound, but this isn’t always the case… Developments in materials and manufacturing over the decades has meant that speaker cabinets can be less weighty and their drivers often have lighter neodymium magnets which allows the cone to move faster through their higher magnetic properties, giving the speaker a more detailed sound. It wasn’t until I really took the time to listen to them critically that I appreciated that although they may feel light in weight, they are full-bodied in sound.

It was at this point I realised that I hadn’t even thought of their monetary value. So when I confirmed the price, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing given the experience I just had from them. “Surely they must be more expensive, they sound excellent!”. Some might think that because of their modest price-point that they are of lesser quality, but in fact, the award winning Oberon series are DALI’s intermediate range, sitting above the entry level Spektors. After I learned all of this, the DALI Oberon 5 became something I often recommended and demonstrated to customers who came in to store with a certain price bracket in mind.

“These superb floorstanders are right up there with the best”
— What Hi-Fi? Magazine

TIME TO LISTEN

So for today’s listening session, I hooked the speakers up with the Rega Planar 3, AT-VM95ML cartridge and the Arcam SA20 amplifier. I popped on the Michael Jackson 1987 record “Bad” and away it spun. The beauty of vinyl is the way it re-produces the precision and detail of original recordings, which is complimented by the Oberon 5s. For me, there’s nothing like the needle hitting the record and that moment of analogue silence just before the music kicks in.

I didn’t need to listen for long to be truly moved by what I was hearing. The bass was tight, the drums were crisp and you could hear the sound of guitar strings being plucked as well as the notes they were producing. Aside from the detail, the music had so much presence and soul. Being an avid audiophile, when listening to music I want it to sound as close to the recording session as possible, and these speakers did just that. The ambience created by the DALI Oberon 5 is unparalleled for its price-point, not to mention the fact that they are very easy on the eye!

CONCLUSION

It’s safe to say from the tone of this article that I’ve been a fan from the beginning, but it’s important to summarise that all the key features of these speakers truly dispel the myth around affordable speakers, and you can get great quality at an affordable price.

Impressed by what you’ve read? Or need a little more convincing? Either way, Contact Us to book a FREE demonstration!

Thanks for reading!

Elena, John & Jason – Audio T Enfield

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DALI can be found at the following Audio T stores:

From Italy Sonus Faber to Fine Sounds UK - Sonetto I Speakers

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A few months back we wrote a blog to introduce the new Sonus Faber ranges, distributed by Fine Sounds UK. This month we thought we would delve a little deeper into Sonus Faber, and take a closer look at the the Sonetto I bookshelf speakers.

Sonus Faber Sonetto1 (white)

Hand-sewn leather top

The Sonus Faber Sonetto 1 is a very pretty loudspeaker with some some fantastic finishes available to compliment your home décor. Gloss Black, Wenge, Wood or Satin White as featured here are the available finishes. These slick cabinet colours are teamed with a hand-sewn leather top, a designed feature filtered down form the Olympica range.

All of the Sonetto range incorporates the Lute shaped cabinet that is not only pleasing to the eye but sonically important. This shape ensures that there are no parallel surfaces in the internal construction, offering perfect control over the internal resonances.

Lute shape cabinet

Bespoke Accessories

Sonetto stand

To complete the stylish look of the Sonetto I, Sonus Faber have created a bespoke pair of Sonetto Stands, manufactured from extruded aluminium to give it the rigidity needed for the performance expected from such a standmount loudspeaker. A nice touch to give piece of mind is the bolt on system for the top plate to the base of the speaker. The Soft velour on the base of the speaker and the top of the stand give a perfect seat for placement before bolting down. A nice extra is the cut out in the back of the stand upright for cable management.

Performance

Now let’s take a look at the sonic performance of the Sonetto I. Sonus Faber talk of the "voice" of its loudspeaker ranges and this voice is provided by the combination of cabinet construction, silk dome tweeter and natural fibre midwoofer and the front reflex port.

The silk dome tweeter is constructed with D.A.D (damped apex dome) technology and the mid-woofer with its natural fibre air dried diaphragm delivers high end performance at an affordable price. This technology has filtered down from their flagship Reference and Olympica ranges to achieve such high sonic presentation.

Tweeter

Tweeter

Midwoofer

If asked, we would describe the Sonetto range as incredibly smooth without lacking punch or detail. The bass is defined, tight and tuneful and the treble is smooth, sweet and not fatiguing. The midrange offers detail in vocals that other loudspeakers at this price struggle to achieve. I think I could put my feet up and listen to these speakers all day and I wouldn’t get tired.

We have found the Sonetto I easy to place in most rooms. If space is tight it is surprising how well they perform close to the wall due to the shape of cabinet and the front mounted bass reflex port .

The System

For the purpose of this demonstration we used a system consisting of -

Made in Italy

Demo tracks we've enjoyed on the Sonetto 1 include

  • Pearl Jam - Yield - Vinyl

  • Jessie Ware - Mirage (Don't Stop) - Tidal Streaming

  • Little Simz - Point and Kill - Qobuz Hi-Res Audio

Pearl Jam’s , Yield, is an album recorded in the 90s and when played on vinyl can be a little on the loose side in the bass, but the Sonetto I has no problem in controlling this and offers an immersive experience. Jessie Ware - Mirage offers a disco style with some pace. The vocal reproduction on these speakers is superb, along with the presence and timing of the modulated rhythm guitar. If you are looking to improve your stereo hi-fi or expand on your home cinema the Sonus Faber Sonetto I is a must to audition and are exceptional contenders in their price range.

Thanks for reading.

Nick, Kerrin & Matt - Audio T Cardiff

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Sonus faber can be found at the following Audio-T stores

A Hi-Fi Widow's Search For The True 'Audiofilly'

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The day the new iPhone6 went on sale, a photo depicting the scene outside Apple’s Covent Garden store made the rounds on social media. Its caption: “There is literally not a single woman in this iPhone6 queue”. I remember thinking at the time, that’s nothing compared to the wall-to-wall ‘Y-fronts’ you get at a Bristol Show. I’d say it’s an eye-opener for any female who’s never had a close encounter of the nerd kind before.

But as the next show approaches, I do wonder why it is so male-dominated. You do see women there if you stare hard enough in a Where’s Wally? kind of way, although it’s often a wife or girlfriend wearing a far-away expression which comes from hours spent traipsing around hi-fi shops with their blokes.

It’s not that we girls don’t love music. A quick Google search suggests we buy CDs, attend concerts and listen to music in roughly equal measures. And considering women are supposed to have a better hearing range than men, you’d think we’d be the ones scrabbling, Dawn of the Dead style, through the doors of the Bristol Marriott on Sound and Vision weekend.

Hi-fi has featured strongly throughout my life, from the years I flat-shared with a fellow student who blew almost his entire grant on a top range system, to the two decades I’ve been married to an audiophile. Yet when my husband goes all geek on me about his latest Audio T purchase, my general response (after wondering whether we need to take out a second mortgage to pay for it), is still: “Er. It doesn’t sound all that different from your old one.”


 

‘Holy grail’
While it would be easy to put it down to the differences in the sexes, I don’t count myself as a typical girly-girl. I have a degree in chemistry, I know my way around a bass guitar rig pretty well and shoes and handbags leave me cold.

But I feel sure there are true ‘audiofillies’ out there, women whose knees go weak at the roundness of a sub-woofer and who can reel off its specs as efficiently as any male enthusiast. And in my quest to find one, I meet Serena Lesley. Serena has spent serious money building the sound she wants.

“Open, but forgiving,” she says. “Relaxed and not too much detail, or else it’s too spiky and brittle.” It’s like hearing a fine wine being described.Serena doesn’t have a technical or musical background. Her understanding has been racked up by trial and error, reading and learning from reviews, acquiring a knowledge which has taught her how to make tweaks for the best sound using blobs of blu tack or halved squash balls under the hardware.

“You understand from experience the importance of everything that your music needs to go through before it hits your ears,” she says, “and your 'holy grail' is a completely transparent-sounding interconnect, though you know that they're like unicorns, so you end up with one which colours the sound in a way which compliments your room, your stands and your separates and which allows you to feel more, rather than less, connected to the music.” Her explanations sound fascinating, well-informed and rather poetic and I’m beginning to understand why she devotes so much energy to her hi-fi.

“It’s a quality of life thing,” Serena tells me. “It inspires emotion, evokes memory, changes your mood. You can’t get this kind of emotional response from the clock radio in your bedroom.” And there’s another peculiarity. We women are meant, by nature, to be emotional creatures, so why aren’t we spending more time, money and effort building systems of our own?


‘Marketed differently’

"Serena has spent serious money building the sound she wants."Serena admits she’s never met another female audiophile quite like herself, but she believes there are many more women who appreciate good hi-fi than is evident.

“Perhaps if the perception of hi-fi as a hobby becomes less gender-specific, less driven by the technicalities and is marketed slightly differently, then society will stop assuming that it is generally not a 'female' interest,” she says. “And the women who love listening to high-quality music reproduction in their homes will become more visible, driving further female interest in this area.

“After all, the driving force of hi-fi as a passion is to get closer to the art which is music. Badly-reproduced art cannot inspire emotion, cannot draw you in, cannot fill you with wonder, cannot fully communicate what the artist means to convey. Good hi-fi brings you that experience as fully as is possible. And there's absolutely nothing gender-specific about that.”

Experts have been telling us for years that we’re wired up differently. There’s plenty of documentation and debate about the fundamental differences between the genders, some of it informative, some quite laughable (Anyone remember John Gray’s Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus?)

I can’t deny that my husband disappears into his listening cave from time to time just to sit and enjoy his music, while I’m more likely to treat my tranny as audial wallpaper while multi-tasking at several other things.

Perhaps ‘WAGS’ like me are a lost cause, but I think there are many other women out there who merely need to be ‘shown a starting point from which to grow an interest’, as Serena puts it.

And let’s face it, from the retailer’s point of view, we are a huge untapped market, so maybe marketeers need to take a deeper look into our psyche, find out how to hook us, press our buttons without getting too tech-ey about the buttons themselves. Maybe then, we’ll see many more women enthusing about the finer points of a high-end amp or speaker and eventually, a greater gender balance at future Bristol Shows.


Guest Author Journalist & Blogger: Clare Banks 

Roxy Music said that Love is the Drug, but we say Music is….

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Give life back to music, is the first track from Daft Punk's latest album, Random Access Memories and this title sums up in a nutshell what good Hi-Fi can do to your music collection.

This is even more obvious when you listen to the studio master of the recording on a music streaming service such as Qobuz. or a direct high resolution download (HRD) from Linn Records, Bowers & Wilkins Society of Sound or Naim Label.

What does Hi-Fi or High Fidelity really mean these days? Well we believe it has always been to faithfully reproduce the likeness of the original sound, whether it be music, speech or noises using electronic home audio equipment, namely a combination of: amplifiers (digital or valve) sources: CD Players, Streamers, Record Players; Digital to Analogue Converters (DAC's) and loudspeakers: passive or *active (*amplifier built in) stand mount monitors or floorstanding.

While Hi-Fi alone won't usually improve the quality of a substandard recording - garbage in garbage out! - however, when good quality recordings are played using Hi-Fi equipment, it brings the listener closer to the music and more faithfully presents the music as the artist and producer intended it to sound when it was recorded, mixed and mastered.

On The Stage Stock Photo By George Stojkovic
Regardless of the format, CD, vinyl, tape, digital file, we know that hearing more of the music is a thrilling experience. Being able to hear vocals more clearly, individual instruments being played (separation) and the sound they make (timbre) revealing greater insight and depth into a recording can add hugely to the enjoyment and will often induce goosebumps! Listening to music is known to release serotonin, the brain's feel good drug, and as music lovers this is our drug of choice!

You see, at Audio T we are all first and foremost music enthusiasts. Two-channel stereo Hi-Fi is just a means of getting the most enjoyment from our hobby. Audiophiles, music lovers or music junkies, whatever the moniker, we get our highs from music!

Psychedelic Guitar Stock Photo By dan
If you are a music lover old or new, why not bring some of your music along - we're always interested in listening and learning about new artists and hearing their music replayed on some great sounding quality Hi-Fi. This is what we do and love. Locate your nearest store here.

We can guarantee that you will always remember the first time you hear your favourite music played on quality Hi-Fi, simply because it sounds better and it reveals more of the music! 

As Andrew Everard the Audio Editor for Gramophone says: "In the end it's all about the music", and we wholeheartedly agree with that!

Quick Quiz - Can you name the artists from these track and album?

1. Listen to the Music 
2. Pop Music
3. Thank you for the Music
4. Hyper Music
5. Lost in Music 
6. Play that Funky Music White Boy
7. Music for the Masses