Review: Mark Craven

Promising digital audio bliss without the fuss, this second-gen flagship server from the music management maestro combines beefed-up processing with all-new casework

At the UK Hi-Fi Show Live in Sept ’24, during a chat with an industry colleague, our discussion moved on to Roon. His opinion was, ‘you either love it, or you haven’t used it yet’. Such is the passion for this music management system among those who have invested in it. And now Roon is offering the ultimate investment, in the shape of its £3899 Nucleus Titan server.

Marantz returns to the premium hi-fi sector with a trio of heavyweight flagship models including an SACD player/DAC, integrated amplifier and network-attached preamplifier

At the tail end of 2020, when Marantz released its Model 30 amplifier [HFN Jan ’21], the name paid homage to the brand’s Model 1 preamp of 1954 while the chassis styling nodded at past Marantz designs from hi-fi’s ‘golden age’. However, this was not a case of the New York-born (but now Japan/California-based) company jumping headfirst into the so-called ‘nostalgia economy’ with a retro/vintage-inspired product, more the first step in a complete overhaul of its brand image. Since then, there have been various additions to the new-look Model catalogue, but all have sat below the Model 30. Until now...

Leveraging its 30 years of innovative speaker design, the Orion features Rockport’s ‘next generation’ cabinet

Named after the Maine town where it started in 1984, although now based down the coast in South Thomaston, Rockport Technologies has been known by audiophiles since the 1990s as a manufacturer of high-end – and heavyweight – loudspeakers. The Orion floorstander tested here is no exception, weighing 163kg per piece and selling for £165,000. Suffice to say, it’s a far cry from the early sub/sat systems of chief designer Andy Payor...

Inspired by its long-running Studio series, born in the 1980s, this modern-day D’Appolito standmount also illustrates Monitor Audio’s long-term use of metal-coned drivers

As anyone who tried to buy tickets for Oasis’s 2025 reunion tour will have discovered, nostalgia is big business. The hi-fi industry knows it too, and in recent years has been scouring the 1970s for speaker and amplifier designs to either leverage into new models or directly resurrect. Monitor Audio, however, has now jumped a decade ahead, launching a new speaker ‘inspired by the 1980s’. Seeing as Hollywood has been tapping into that decade with revisits to the Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun and Ghostbusters franchises, the British manufacturer might be onto something.