I finished Part 4 of my Canon Audio story with the company; a slightly awkward fusion of Japanese multi-national and UK specialist speaker manufacturer, riding relatively high and commercially growing on the twin waves of home-cinema and commercial custom installed sound. The company’s prospects were also helped significantly by a growing export business through the […]
Welcome to Part 4 of my short history of Canon Audio. If you’ve no clue what the hell I’m on about, I’d suggest a quick look at the three previous Canon Audio posts. I described in Part 3 the design and development of the Canon S-30. The S-30 was significant not only because it gave […]
It was quite a while ago now that I blogged about a pair of Bowers & Wilkins DM550 speakers that I’d found and bought on eBay (the blog post is here). After checking the speakers were working correctly, which, apart from a minor tweeter pair match issue, they were, my plan was to upgrade them with […]
I concluded Part 1 of my Canon Audio story by promising to begin Part 2 with a description of the third product launched by the fledgling UK specialist speaker company crossed with a Japanese camera multi-national. That third product was the S-30, a compact, stand/wall mount hi-fi speaker intended to offer most of the S-50s […]
Finnish monitor company Genelec has long practiced an uncompromising, engineering led approach to electro-acoustic design. And while that approach has undoubtedly resulted in many immensely impressive technical achievements, for some folk in the music recording and mix community, Genelec monitors are sometimes said to be lacking a certain something. Those for example who rely on […]
I’ve had quite a few people over the years ask me about the history of Canon Audio, the short-lived specialist speaker off-shoot of the giant Japanese camera and printer company. So I decided that, rather than repeatedly answering similar questions, I’d write a few blog posts recounting the story. I worked at Canon Audio in […]
I’ve been loaned an interesting and inexpensive pair of small passive hi-fi speakers recently and I’ve spent some time using them in the context of both casual listening and for more music production oriented monitoring. They’re worth I think a few paragraphs of description and analysis. The speaker in question is the Q-Acoustics Concept 20. […]
My ‘Running-In – Please Pass‘ post (that became a Sound On Sound magazine feature ) generated a degree of feedback and it prompted me to track down a much longer feature on the same subject that I wrote for Hi-Fi Plus magazine back in 2003. For the feature, I, and electro-acoustic measurement specialist Phil Knight, borrowed […]
The Neumann KH310A active nearfield monitor has long been a favourite among the editorial staff and my co-contributors at Sound On Sound magazine. It’s well respected in the wider pro-audio world too. However, although I’ve experienced the KH310A away from home on a couple of occasions, I’ve never had the opportunity to use a pair […]
Following a recent Sound On Sound nearfield monitor review, of a product, it’s true to say, I didn’t find entirely convincing, I was criticised by a contributor on a pro audio forum who felt that my opinion of the monitor was probably skewed by my being, “too lazy to run them in properly”. Now, as a writer of reviews it would be somewhat rich of me to get upset by somebody expressing an opinion, but I can’t deny I bristled a little.
Music and Miscellany 