None of these are all-in-one’s with amplifiers. That is a different category - NAD33, Devialet, AVM etc.
WhatHiFi is an international magazine, I assume it has local flavours. Unlike the USA, local UK and EU markets are quite small so manufacturers look mostly for overseas sales.
Ironically, I think Cambridge Audio was the first company to separate the transport and DAC, in 1985.
While WhatHiFi is available outside of Britain, it leans provincial.
In the UK since the 1970s there has been a strong affection for small integrated units.
There are loads of UK standalone DACs, Chord is probably top of the pile brand. ranging from the $600 Mojo to the $9,000 Dave.
The two main audiophile brands, Naim and Linn, both went into streaming big-time around 2007 and mostly, if not entirely, they make combined streaming/DACs.
Auralic have been very popular here. I’ve had two of them. They are mostly standalone streamers, but my son still uses my Aries Mini and he uses the internal DAC.
The Cambridge Audio units are very successful because they win all the awards and CA is the sister company of our only large audio retail chain, so its a sort of in-house brand. That retail chain is also big on Bluesound.
Then there is the dCS Bridge. A big seller.
When I was interested, Melco, Aurender and Innuos were often referred to, along with Roon Nucleus.
There are so many brands from Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, we are just spoilt for choice. I used Primare for 12 years and they make a lovely little streamer for £450, about $600.
The fully integrated units like Hegel from Norway and AVM from Germany are powerful and expensive. I think the cost of European real estate is an important factoring European design preferences are very different from the USA.
Then you have the Swiss brands - quite a few - lots of aluminium and sharp edges.
I admit I mainly thought of separated amps. In my memory, with the Cyrus history and others, GB always represented the integrated approach, although Quad offered separated amps quite early.
Quad’s first ever product, the QA/12P, from 1949, was a valve integrated amplifier. It was mainly for commercial use. Quad made separates, much of the time, but they were designed as a system to be connected with the proprietary Quadlink balanced cable.
The Cyrus One was one of several iconic small integrated amplifiers made in the early 1980s, the most famous being the Naim Nait. Many of these are still in use. My son uses a 1985 Inca Tech Claymore, notable for its superb mm/mc phono amplifier.
Cyrus was an off-shoot of Mission, in Huntingdon, the same little town as Quad, they are still there together with the other IAG brands, dCS etc.
Huntingdon is most famous as the birthplace of Oliver Cromwell. He was also the town’s member of Parliament and leader of the only Republic we ever had, for about 9 years. His son was installed after his death. It was a short, bloody affair and he couldn’t keep it.
A fount of knowledge! Surprised there is no mention of the ‘grey man’ in your thumbnail history lesson of Huntingdon!
Remember Grey Man, not least because he was replaced as MP by a chap called Jonathan who I knew many years ago. Knew his wife Rebecca better (before they were married), attractive girl, tall and blonde, and her mum ran who was a tennis pro and ran one of the the local tennis clubs. She was obviously attracted by his charms (he was a very nice guy), not the fact that his family are self-made gazillionaires. His dad was a big Tory donor and I presume effectively bought one of the safest seats in the country. A few others entered Parliament, Robert Halfon was a local friend, a truly amazing guy who had massive health issues that almost spurred him on, and was at school with Ed Vaizey. All are Tory boys of one sort or another, don’t know why.
Sharp eye! But no, that is the PST we are using for testing.
I couldn’t see the drive mechanism from the video so I thought it might be the Octave player! Thanks James
Nope, but good eye. No, it’s the SACD transport
I just bought some earbuds. First time actually spent money on such things.
they work by Bluetooth from my phone, so the obvious thing was to use Qobuz, but then I wanted to listen to music that sits on my server and is not on Qobuz.
Roon has the feature that allows you to play on the local device, so I now have a zone called Samsung and when I play to it from Roon on the Android app the music goes to the earbuds. Yippee.
This may be old hat to some, but I was rather pleased. So it would be a rather nice feature of the mobile Octave app to be able to play to the local device.
will the new octave music player support roon?
It’s a Roon competitor.
I was without Roon for three days so I used Qobuz via Audirvana. I’m back on Roon playing the same albums and I’m not connecting with the music as much.
Why can’t Roon figure out a way to be best in class sound?
Audirvana is running on a 10 yr old Mac and controlling via iPad. Such a clunky experience but the sound!!!
Interesting observation…
@Dirk @stevensegal
i have recently started using Twitter. i “follow” a variety of right leaning and left leaning political types (the right outraged on their many social and broadcast platforms about being “deplatformed”, and the left outraged about, well just about everything else).
the Grey Man’s erstwhile clandestine squeeze Ms. Curry has been the most entertaining of the lot, by a long way 
What are you using as your Roon core? Where do you store your music files?
That music can play hard to get sometimes.
We Dutch do miss you Brits, come back and join us again! Please.
Core: Roon R.O.C.K.
Files are on a NAS; half of my listening is Qobuz.
