© Ernest Ruiz. 2003

On may 24th, 2003 some audiophiles from differents spanish cities visited the shop Audiofilo (audiophile in spanish) and its propietor-manager Bernardo Fuentes, who manage the shop since many years ago. Audiofilo is the spanish importer-distributor for many hi-fi brands such some of the ones we'll see later in this article. I arranged with Bernardo the visit to his shop because I was very interested in seeing some of the products he has. He is in the hi-fi bussines from many years and he continues to mantain in Valencia a very good shop for all the spanish audiophiles.

As I've said I had a special interest in knowing the products that Bernardo has, becasuse some of them are very interesting to me. Many of them are well known among the audiophile community allover the world, but it is diffclt to see them all together in a single shop. My main interest were the products by Shanling, specially their amazing CD, SACD players and valve amplifiers, but also the products by LC Audio, Heart Audio and also those by Stax and Audio Note.

This time, instead of doing and audition I have done only a visit to see some of these products in order to show them to you. As I said before some of them are very well known in what I call "developed audiopohile countries" (Spain is not in this category, except for some valuable efforts from people like Bernardo), but even that I think that it is very good to talk more about them. So, in this case, you won't find comments about how these products sound, only comments, explnations and pictures of what I saw.

For me, the most interesting group of products at Audiofilo was the Shanling range. Shanling is a chinese factory located in Shenzhen (the chinese Silicon Valley) that makes hi-fi and consumer electronics of very good quality. My interest for this kind of products comes from some experiencies I have had with other chinese products. I mean the first produtcs than were introduced in Spain during the end of the 90s (specially tube amplifiers). These were, in general terms, low quality products, that used low quality components, that looked awful and sounded, let's say it with "finese", not very good. So, when I began to read articles about the Shanling products (specially their CD player) at the end of 2001 or beginning of 2002, I felt very curious about it, because all of them where very good. In addition, Bernardo sent me some pics of the CD and I was amazed with its look. After that, many articles have been published by audio magazines and also the conclusioin of almost all of them have been very good. After seeing all these products I have to agrre with all these articles.

The Shanling CD-T100 is a CD player that uses tubes in its ouput stage for audio and headphones. It is a very good designed CD that looks great. Some of its specefications are: Crystal Semiconductors CS8420 chip with a sampling frequency of 96KHz, HDCD decoding with PMD-200 chip working at 24bit/96KHz, 4 PCM1704 D/A in parallel, Burr-Brown 2604 Op-Amps, etc, etc. As I said the CD looks great and after seeing it from inside I have to say that it is a real high end player. Another reason for my journey to Audiofilo, related with the Shanling products, was to know if the european and american audio manufacturers have to worry about chinese products. If the products are like the Shanling, the answer is a big YES. During many years, chinese industries have been making hi-fi products for european and american companies that wanted good quality and lower costs. And so, the chinese have learnt how to built good quality products. Now thay have the know-how and so we're beginning to see in our markets high qualkity products like this. I think that the situation it is a quite similar to the lived in the 60s and 70s with the japanese industries that began making copies and...well now we know some nice companies from the country of the rising sun, don't we?

Shanling knows very well what it's being playing in the hi-fi arena and so the company has presented more products that we also saw at Audiofilo. First a CD/SACD player, the SCD-T200, with a aspect very similar to the CD-T100, that also impressed us very much. In addition, Shanling has some nice tube amplifier like the SP80 monophonic power amplifiers. They deliver 50 watts from a pair EL34 tubes in push-pull configuration. The Shanling range has more equipment, including, CD players, AV amplifiers, DVD players, etc. You can see the whole range at the Shanling website.

As you can see with these images we're looking at serious high fidelity. Consider these equipment if you have to update your hi-fi system.

The second group of products I was interested in was the products from LC Audio. This company makes electronic parts to be used in CD player. Their range includes high performance clocks with ultra-low jitter and hiigh quality op-amps modules. Both are designed to replace the clocks and op-amps used by CD manufacturers in order, according LC Audio, to improve the quality of the CD player and, of course, of the music they play. There're clocks and op-amps modules for many CD players that can be seen at LC Audio web site. I can't listen to any of the CD with improved clock or op-amps, because my visit was not focused on comparisons.

The third group of products I wanted to see were Heart CD players. Heart is a dutch company is devoted to the modification of Marantz CD players (models CD4000, CD5000 and CD6000). These modifications include changing the original output stage with a tube output stage, new power supply units, change of clocks, etc,etc. Many articles have been written about the quality of these products in specialized magazines.

As I said before in this visit to Audiofilo also we also saw some of the products from te Audio Note range, mainly DACs and also some of the wonderful Stax electrostatic headphones, like the one you see in the pic below, the Stax Omega, the reference model from Stax .

To end this article I would like to thank Bernardo Fuentes for his work and to allow us to do this wondeful visit to his shop to see such interesting products.