With the clocks poised to move forward this weekend and Easter just around the corner, this has to be one of the happiest times of year, right? If ever there was a time to simply avoid watching news reports . . . !

The end of March marks the end of Signals’ financial year and it’s been OK too. A whisker up on 2025 in terms of sales at a point where we are running into some minor supply delays. Were we able to supply all the items currently on order, it would be even more positive. It’s no secret that trading conditions are sub optimal, so this is hardly a bad result.

My promise of edging off into retirement is progressing at a glacial pace. Taking my lead from a similarly aged school friend who has a rather more substantial shipping business, I plan on reducing to working three days a week in April when I reach the age of Seventy.

Substantial changes are being made to the company share structure so that Kevin and Mick can have some meaningful ‘skin in the game’. Andy is already a full director and his circumstances will be improved too. This is turning out to be a surprisingly expensive process, both in financial terms and for me learning to accept change. It would be oh so much simpler if I hated the job and the team we’ve built!

What has been interesting over the past year has been the resurgence of Naim business with New Classic, particularly at 300 series level, hitting the spot for more and more people. I’ve read so many negative comments on social media about it not being as ‘musical’ as the old stuff whilst simultaneously we have buyers migrating because they are finding New Classic to be so much more engaging.

The recent news is that visual image specialist, Barco, has acquired both Naim and Focal. As people within Naim have pointed out, the fact that Barco is a high end well financed manufacturer looking for the right quality of audio to supplement their business is rather more positive than yet another investor looking to turn a quick profit. What evolves from this will be interesting to see.

 

New : Accuphase C-3900S preamplifier

What an interesting world Accuphase have created. Come hell or high water, they stick quite resolutely to a five year upgrade cycle on all their products. The time has now come for a revision for the top of the line C-3900 preamp.

As a state of the art product, the fear is that they’ll hit the developmental brick wall and simply rearrange things a little. The C-3900S looks nigh on identical to its predecessor and clearly shares the sonic DNA. The more we play it, though, the more the progress made over its forebear shows up.

At this level, you expect magic and the new 3900S delivers even more of it with a bigger, cleaner, airier sonic picture and even greater sense of dynamics, timing, realism and musical engagement. It really is exceedingly good.

In the past couple of months, we’ve had our own demonstration C-3900 to sell, along with one traded-in (blind) against the new model. Pretty much all of the stand-alone Accuphase preamps that we’ve sold have the option board phono stages fitted. By the time you get to C-3900 level there is no plug in option and it’s anticipated that you’ll use the expensive stand-alone C-57 phono stage.

The upshot is that we did not have a particularly rich seam of potential buyers for a used C-3900. Frustratingly the C-3900S is exactly the same price as the outgoing version. In fact, at £29000, it’s £1000 cheaper than when we bought our first C-3900 almost 5 years ago. This price is of course a secret. The weak Yen is the reason for this curious state of affairs.

For one of the pre-owned C-3900 buyers, a man who initially felt that he needed a more powerful and ‘grippy’ power amp than his A-48, a quick swap from C-2150 to 3900 opened his eyes to the relevance of a really seriously good preamp. The lack of an ‘affordable’ in-house phono stage option was met with a GoldNote PH-10. The upgrade power supply for this now looks to be a likely addition.

Now is a splendid time to invest in high end Accuphase kit and, if you can run to, say, a C-3900, A-80 and maybe DP770, you will be in heaven for, ooh, let’s say five more years!

GoldNote PH5.2

Talking about GoldNote, in the short time we’ve been stocking these Italian  products, we’ve seen an encouraging level of success. So far, it has mainly been the PH-10, a £1700 phono stage that has sold with and without the matching £1200 upgrade PSU.

An unusual feature of the PH-10 is its ability to tune three different inputs to a fairly extreme degree and this feature carries over to the new more modestly priced PH 5.2. We now have the 5.2 in stock but, beyond saying that it seems very capable, we’ve not yet had an opportunity to analyse it in depth..

With the Vertere Phono 1 MM / MC stage also on our shelves, the inevitable question asked is which one is better. The conveniently diplomatic true answer is ‘both’. In home demonstrations each have beaten the other in various systems. The fact that it was not even a close run thing shows the merit of actually listening and comparing.

Rega open day draws to a close

Friday 27th March and Kevin has just finished interrogating Rega’s Ashton Wagner for the second session of our Rega open day.

Perhaps foolishly, we purposely kept the loudspeaker choice comparatively modest. Ashton is a very modest and unassuming guy and interesting to chat to. He brought along Olly Hall, another Rega engineer who has joined Rega in the last six months. The non-hierarchical structure fostered by Roy Gandy seems to be a very positive working environment and Rega’s high level of growth, driven by highly attractive and capable products is testament to this.

It was very interesting to hear that the new Brio Mk7 has fundamentally the same internal design and components as the Mk6. Layout changes made to accommodate the in-built DAC within a restricted case size have actually proved beneficial.

I think it’s fair to say that a good day was had by all. Oh, and the new Planar 6 RS does to the standard Planar 6 what the 3RS does to the Planar 3. It’s a steal at £2000.

The new Aos MC phono stage is now in stock. Yes, it’s very good, being essentially a striped down version of the Aura. An MM only version is expected to follow, which is just as well since the Nd series of Moving Magnet cartridges is proving to be so good!

(slightly) loony deal on Luna

For the month of April, existing owners of Vertere DC1, DC2 or challenger power supplies can buy the new Luna power supply for £1000 instead of £1200.

If you would like a comparative demonstration, we have the means here. Hint: it’s a no brainer!

New Gaia Neo

The new Gaia Neo isolation feet for loudspeakers are now here. Sonically, they offer a modest improvement over the standard Gaias but they are significantly easier to set up and, as a result, you will most probably get better results.

Both Neo and Standard are in stock. Click on the image above to reach our on-line shop.