LATEST ADDITIONS

This month we review: The Beatles, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Joni Mitchell, and Van Halen

No, I don’t know what ‘Meracus’ means, and I stopped playing around with anagrams after I reached ‘rum case’. How about ‘US Cream’? No way: Meracus is so decidedly, unabashedly a German company that it couldn’t possibly apply. If you’ve ever studied a hi-fi magazine from the Fatherland or visited the Frankfurt or Berlin audio shows, you’ll know what I mean: staggering build quality, weird shapes, bold colours, lots of glass, wholly unique operational procedures. And the £4000 Meracus Imago is almost deliberately ‘unexportable’, because the customer has to be on some Teutonic wavelength to get to grips with it. Study the photos. You’ve never seen another CD transport like it, right?

Steve Harris on why modern versions of classic amplifiers sensibly make use of new technologies, leaving reborn turntables as the best place to get your genuinely authentic vintage fix

Health and safety concerns? Soldering irons a switch-off? Jim Lesurf wonders why the BBC’s massively successful Repair Shop series appears uninterested in restoring electronics