Review: Ken Kessler

Ken Kessler admires the luxurious design of a top-loading CD player with upgrade potential. But will its performance also leave him spellbound?

Are you the hands-on type who finds most power amps a bit boring because all they have is an on/off switch? Manley Laboratories’ Neo-Classic SE/PP 300B monoblock (£13,699 per pair) is the opposite: it lets you fine-tune the sound by fine-tuning the applied feedback.

This just may be the most self-fulfilling review I’ve ever written. DS Audio has unleashed a valve energiser and equaliser, the TB-100, for its optical cartridges. Up to this point, every one of its cartridges has been launched with a matching solid-state energiser of relative or comparable price, but the TB-100 has been released on its own. Because every DS Audio cartridge will work with any of the energisers regardless of price, this time it’s all about the tubes.

Those wizards of trickledown tech are at it again: DS Audio’s new entry-level model, the DS-E3, gives you a taste of the Masters series at less than a tenth of the price!

It’s hard to name a cartridge brand as prolific as DS Audio. It seems every time you turn around there’s a new model. Following a flurry of entries at the extreme top-end, including the Grand Master EX [HFN Oct ’23], DS Audio has returned with a new optical cartridge at entry level, an absolute cracker called the DS-E3 – and with no price increase over the DS-E1 [HFN May ’19] it replaces.