savoy014

A warmest congratulations to Swee and Ryan on the official opening of their new showroom ! X Audio Pte Ltd recently took over the adjoining shop space to their current unit. This is a much larger space and has the requisite floor area to nicely showcase larger speakers such as the Vivid Giya G2.  The decor is pleasantly done, with a good amount of attention paid to acoustic treatment. Swee mentioned to me that he is not yet done on that front, so we can look forward to even better sound in the future. Let's have the pictures do the talking this time. Various equipment stand at attention - ready to greet visitors.    Accuphase P-4200 power amplifier. Vivid Giya G4 in Austin Yellow. Swee and Ryan (L-R) of X Audio Pte Ltd. Sharp eyes would have noticed the Accuphase amplifiers in some of the pictures. X Audio has been appointed an authorised reseller of Accuphase. It's fantastic  to have another place to listen to these Japanese beauties.  X Audio has grown considerably in stature

Introduction The Sony TA-A1ES (I will refer to this as the "A1ES") integrated amplifier arrived at my doorstep together with the HAP-Z1ES. There has not been much news or reviews of the A1ES which in my opinion, is a great pity - this is really something quite special. A trickle of products in recent years suggests that Sony is quite serious about re-entering the high end audio arena, and judging from the quality of products I've evaluated (the A1ES included), they are certainly on-track. Description The A1ES is a compact unit, measuring 430 mm x 130 mm x 420 mm (W x H x D). The dimensions are quite deceptive, and lifting it out of the box required a fair amount of effort - I found out later that the unit weighs 17 kg. This is a wide bandwith design (10 Hz to 100 KHz), with 60 watts per channel on tap. Some noteworthy design features include a discrete component preamp circuit, a smart bias system, and a separate headamp circuit also utilising discrete components. To main