Review: Andrew Everard

Though perhaps not so well-known in some hi-fi circles, Australian brand Burson Audio has built itself quite a following among head-fi’ers – those devotees of headphone listening – thanks to an impressive range of amplifiers dedicated to that cause. Its models range from the £849 Playmate 3 up to the Conductor Voyager we have here, at £3900 in standard guise.

It’s tempting to imagine a Frankenstein-like cry of ‘At last our creature is complete!’ emanating from the Cambridge HQ of dCS. The arrival of the company’s Varèse CD/SACD transport, retailing for £32,500, should come as no surprise to followers of the company’s flagship digital solution [HFN Feb ’25]. Bringing the complete Varèse ‘stack’ to a total of six units – the User Interface, Core, Master Clock and dual Mono DACs – the eagerly anticipated Transport also lifts the all-up price just north of £260,000.

The announcement in the summer of 2024 of new products from Audio Research Corp. (ARC) was not only the company’s largest-ever simultaneous release, but also, it said, ‘a fresh start [signalling] a promising future’, and ‘a renewed commitment to inclusivity and accessibility in the world of high-fidelity sound’. With the pre/power pair here priced north of £21,000, one might take that latter claim with a pinch of salt, although with the brand’s Reference Series pitched comfortably higher [HFN Apr ’25], these things are relative.

This month we review and test releases from: François Couturier & Dominique Pifarély, Yuval Cohen Quartet, Ute Lemper, Jo-Yu Chen, and Stanley Cowell