Loudspeakers

The revived Sphinx Audio Engineering brand has joined Siltech, which Rynveld acquired in 1992, almost a decade after the latter cable company was founded in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. As part of the same ‘stable’, and with the same research-driven approach Siltech applies to its audio cabling, Sphinx as we see it now is the result of innovative – some would say unconventional – thinking behind the scenes [see boxout].

Time was, however, that while Sphinx hi-fi products still strayed from convention, they were certainly more affordable. The Dutch brand was never especially well-known in the UK but its (then) £500 outboard Phono Equaliser [pictured above] did feature in a group test a quarter of a century ago [HFN Apr ’00]. This was a very versatile unit, offering switchable MC gain and MM/MC loading plus the ability to take on legacy 78rpm discs with an optional 4kHz low-pass filter, conceived to suppress shellac surface noise. PM