Lab: Paul Miller

B&O’s Beogram 1000 was one of those turntables that seemed to be everywhere in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Combining simplicity with careful design, for many years it was one of the most popular high-quality decks on the market. As ubiquitous as a Garrard SP 25 [HFN Jun ’25] or a Pioneer PL-12D [HFN Jun ’25], the inexpensive Beogram 1000 made great sound available to listeners of all levels of experience.

Hailing from Treviso in northeast Italy, Unison Research is a brand with an obvious love of tubes, to the point that you half expect to find a hot bottle or two incorporated in its Malibran and Max loudspeakers. Its CD players, the Unico CD Uno and Due [HFN May ’16], have tube-based output stages, while the solid-state amps in the same series have tube-based inputs. But the company is best known for its all-tube amplifiers, of which there are 15 spread across integrated, pre and power ranges.

Underestimate the new generation of Chinese hi-fi manufacturers at your peril, because we’ve come a long way from cheap knockoffs of famous products, inexpensive music players and the like. Just as in the electric car industry, where Chinese companies are showing they have the skills and technology to match the very best, so it is in hi-fi, where brands including Eversolo [HFN May ’25] and FiiO – whose latest product, the £829 K17, we have here – are proving they can develop and innovate.

A rose by any other name is still a HiFi Rose? Well yes, it can appear that way: since it first arrived on the hi-fi scene, the Korean company has launched a head-spinning barrage of products, all of which can, at first glance, look rather similar. However, what’s been going on is a policy of expanding the appeal of the range upwards, downwards and outwards – the last, for example, by adding its own lineup of amplifiers – and introducing a programme of upgrades along the way..