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Looking for fresh finds for your music playlist? Johnny Sharp brings you 20 trailblazing sets from standout solo artists as he showcases the emerging talents taking centre stage

The term ‘game-changing’ is widely overused, but it’s fully justified in the case of Naim’s original Naim Uniti. Launched in 2009, it was in the vanguard of CD/streaming/amplifier products, a concept now more widely adopted in the past decade and a half. And in the 15 years since the original Naim Uniti appeared, the company has continuously developed the technology inside the series, not to mention spinning it off into component network players and its Mu-so network speaker systems.

Although ostensibly a band album, Television’s 1977 debut owes much to the vision of frontman Tom Verlaine. Steve Sutherland tunes in as the 180g reissue drops

There’s a quote attributed to Brian Eno that says: ‘The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band’. Television’s Marquee Moon is a bit like that. Very few people bought it and although it was such a complex curate’s egg that I doubt many bands formed because of it, the album is famous for being one of the most written-about, talked-about and lauded albums of all time.

Debuted at the UK Hi-Fi Show Live 24, Audio Research’s new flagship monoblocks are not quite its most powerful ever, but are the first to feature the mighty KT170 output tubes

The latest arrival from US high-end brand Audio Research Corp., the Reference 330M monoblock amplifier (£92,000 per pair) may not quite be the most powerful amp the company has ever built, but by any standards a rated output of 330W – into 4ohm or 8ohm speaker loads – is going some for an amplifier using tube technology. Indeed, it will come as something of an eye-opener for those still subscribing to the belief that for the purity of the valve sound – or whatever else you consider to be the sonic traits of the genre – you must settle for low output power, and start looking for speakers of appropriately high sensitivity.