Mel Martin

Magnetar UDP800 Universal Disc Player Review

>A company new to our shores, Magnetar, is offering the UDP800 universal disc player which should delight fans of the now discontinued Oppo players and audio and videophiles with shelves full of completely obsolete music and video format discs like DVD-Audio or Kodak Picture CD. But besides playing the older formats, the UDP800 is up to date with 4K-UltraHD playback, Dolby Vision, and HDR 10+, and it can play media files with H265 and H264 support.

LSA VT-150 80 WPC Power Amplifier Review

It seems tube amps, power amps, and headphone amps are back in the ‘almost’ mainstream. I haven’t heard a high-quality tube power amp in many years, but my ears feasted on this new amp from LSA, an 80 watts per channel behemoth that puts out glorious-sounding music for not a lot of money. In fact, it’s competitive in price with high-quality solid-state designs.

Focal Bathys Wireless Hi-Fi ANC Headphones Review

With all the headphones out these days is there anything truly new? I think there are with these new headphones from Focal called the Bathys. It’s a wireless headphone, so nothing new there, but it can also be a wired headphone. OK, nothing new there either. We’ve had wired headphones since the 1940s at least. It also sports noise reduction, but there are plenty of headphones with noise reduction too.