Streaming music wirelessly via Bluetooth is excellent. Pretty much all smartphones these days not only hold a hefty chunk of our music collection, they also have Bluetooth connectivity that enables music to be streamed to a compatible stereo.

It's so much easier than plugging in the phone via a cable - especially if someone were to ring you mid-song and you have to dash to unhook the phone before you miss the call. Bluetooth's high bandwidth serves to stream music almost without any noticeable loss of quality, over a greater range.

This all sounds great, but what if you have already spent hundreds of pounds on a stereo system that doesn't have Bluetooth? Sure you could buy a standalone Bluetooth-compatible speaker system, but most of them won't hold a candle to your favoured hi-fi.

This is where the Logitech Wireless Speaker Adaptor for Bluetooth Audio Devices comes in, and it works really well. Essentially all you need to do is plug this into your sound system via either phono or headphone jack and you've turned your hi-fi into a Bluetooth-enabled device.

Verdict

This is a great tool for turning your Bluetooth tablet into a handheld music jukebox, or playing music straight from your mobile phone. It's easy to set up, works well and adds some great new functionality to your existing music setup. What more could you ask for?

Apparently the USA-made Spin-Clean record washing system has been around since 1975, so it's clearly a case of better late than never, with Henley Designs having just signed up as UK distributor.

Supplied in an appealingly small and light box (vacuum-type record cleaners are large and heavy), it's basically a plastic bath in which you quite literally wash LPs. A pair of velvet pads apply light pressure to opposite sides of the disc, while you rotate it by hand through the cleaning fluid.

The clever feature, which we really liked, is that disc immersion depth is set by a pair of rollers, which can be put in position to cater to 12-inch, 10-inch or 7-inch discs – this saves the bother of fitting a centre spindle and clamp, as is done with the Knosti disc cleaner, a conceptually similar device.

Spin-Clean supplies a small bottle of cleaning fluid with the kit, which is claimed to be good for up to 700 discs – a four-times-larger top-up bottle costs £20 so running costs are minimal.

This fluid is some sort of detergent, added to water (tap, or ideally distilled) and lifts dirt which simply settles at the bottom of the bath. Records are dried after cleaning with the supplied lint-free drying cloths.

It's simple and quick to use and results are excellent, among the best we've encountered from any LP cleaner. The fluid is safe on all discs except cut lacquers (including 78s) and really the only drawback is the need for manual drying.

Most cleaners for LP are dedicated to that medium, ditto those for CD. The Milty Permaclean kit is eminently suitable for both, which in itself is something of a selling point.

It's actually as simple as simple can be, consisting of a small aerosol can of solvent and a double-sided velvet pad. Spray some solvent on one side of a disc, then wipe it off complete with grease and grime. It takes a few seconds and while the last few traces of solvent evaporate you can move on to the other side.

The same procedure works perfectly well on CDs, DVDs and so on, single-sided of course. The use of chemical solvents on LPs is always a cause for nervousness, but Milty claims that extensive tests have shown this one to have no effect on vinyl and we're happy to concur that we found none in our tests.

Another possible drawback is dragging large particles of dirt round the grooves of an LP and causing more damage, but again we couldn't persuade ourselves that the soft velvet pad was doing anything of the kind.

Indeed we found this a very quick and effective way of cleaning all kinds of discs. Fingerprinted CDs were returned to their original status as confirmed by a precision error-checking test and LPs came up nicely noise-free, on a par with those cleaned on a professional machine. The velvet pad can be brushed clean when dry and the aerosol treats up to 40 LPs.

It's usually painfully obvious if the stylus on your LP player is dirty – the sound distorts at climaxes and generally sounds grainy.

In fact, the situation is even worse than that: mistracking due to dirt on the stylus or the disc tends to cause permanent disc damage, because the ultra-hard diamond is now no longer smoothly tracing the groove but is bashing into it periodically, potentially knocking tiny bits of vinyl out of the groove-wall surface and indeed even damaging the stylus itself due to increased local heating.

Cleanliness is therefore essential if precious discs are to be maintained in good condition.

As always, anything is better than nothing, but with the stylus and cantilever assembly being so very fragile, some improvised methods of cleaning can be downright dangerous. A very soft brush with a few drops of suitable solvent has always been an excellent tool for the job and that's what you get here.

You can't just use any old solvent, though, as some have been accused of attacking the flexible suspension that retains the cantilever and this one has been specially formulated to have no such effect.

At the same time, it is sufficiently potent to shift deposits from the stylus and using a powerful magnifier we were able to see that it leaves the diamond clean after just a quick wipe. The bottle of fluid is tiny, but the amount used in each application is really minimal.

It's generally appreciated that dirty contacts can cause intermittent sound or crackles, but even before things get to that dire stage there can be subtle degradations in sound caused by slightly corroded electrical contacts.

Caig has long been a trusted name in contact treatment and we wouldn't be without a can of DeoxIT D5 spray, which has served on all kinds of contacts from audio to bicycle lights.

This kit includes the product in both aerosol and dropper-tube version, plus DeoxIT Gold and DeoxIT FaderLube, both similarly packaged. FaderLube is for the insides of volume controls etc. and may require some dismantling to be useful, so it's less applicable for most home audiophiles, but the others are a great boon.

Various applicators as provided, as well as polishing-off cloths and even some pre-moistened wipes, which are easily replaced by a bit of kitchen towel and a brief burst of spray.

One criticism is that the instructions don't make it entirely clear what's best for what, but basically DeoxIT removes corrosion, while DeoxIT Gold protects against further contamination.

Mini-jack plugs seem particularly prone to failure due to contamination and many a time DeoxIT has got connections to portable audio kit reestablished. It's not strictly cost-effective, compared with full-size cans, but this kit will last for years.

Dynamique is a new name in British cables. Handmade on the Sussex coast, the company caught our eye due to its insistence on carefully specifying its cables and constructing them all by hand. The range is sizeable and silver seems to be the favourite conductor material, with Teflon (PTFE) the dielectric (insulator) of choice.

If the budget doesn't stretch to silver, as in the case of the Cyclone speaker cable tested here, then silver-plated copper will suffice.

Our other test subject, the Tempest interconnect, has an interesting feature: of its four conductors (two each 'hot' and 'cold'), two are pure silver and two silver-plated copper. It's not obvious what this might achieve, but the use of four conductors is sensible enough, giving a 'star-quad' geometry which is notably immune to hum pickup and provides a degree of screening (there's no screen as such).

Banana plugs

Both cables feature a resonance damper, claimed to damp mechanical vibrations in the cable which could, says Dynamique, affect sound. It has to be said that likely effects in practice would be many dB below normal signal level and we're unconvinced in principle. That doesn't mean, however, that it has no contribution to make!

Terminations on both cables are well done, with gold-plated Furukawa banana plugs on the speaker cable and Eichmann Bullet plugs on the interconnect.

Cable character

We tried these cables in various situations: running the Tempest between a phono stage and line preamp; downstream of a couple of CD players and then from preamp to power amp. The Cyclone drove our habitual ATC and Bowers & Wilkins speakers from various amps.

Despite this plethora of demanding partnering equipment, we didn't find much evidence of real character for either cable; they are both rather characterless; that is, they don't impose themselves on the music. Unless you are of the mindset that likes to regard cables as tuning devices, that's very much a point in their favour; neutrality being a hi-fi Holy Grail.

Near faultless

There are certain observations which are legitimate to make about these cables. First, they are near-faultlessly neutral in the midband. We found the Tempest interconnect just a touch more assured in the bass then the Cyclone; the latter seeming ever-so-slightly self-effacing in the lowest octave and lacking a little impact and precision.

In the treble, by contrast, the Cyclone seemed the more detailed, while the Tempest didn't quite give the sort of insight we've heard from favourite interconnects.

Dynamic Dynamique!

Both cables present precise and stable images, with very good depth definition, which is often a particular weakness of cables. And with the brand's name in mind, we were delighted to hear excellent dynamics on offer; swinging from loud to soft effortlessly without compression or exaggeration.

The only reservation we ended up with concerns value. Handmade cables aren't the cheapest and we can think of established models in each category which compete strongly at the price. All the same, they are both well worth an audition.

The NuForce DAC9 isn't the only DAC to include a headphone output, but it makes more of a point of it than most, and fair enough, adding as it does a dedicated volume control and both flavours of headphone jack, 6.3mm (quarter-inch) and 3.5mm.

The latter, incidentally, also functions as an input, an optical digital input to be precise, in similar manner to some computer sound cards and portable audio devices.

The total input count runs to six, with a further (TOSLINK) optical socket at the rear, alongside AES/ EBU, USB and three electrical S/PDIF sockets, two phono and one BNC; one of the phonos is effectively the same input at the BNC so you can only connect one or the other.

Selection between the inputs is achieved at the front of the unit by a touch-panel, which we found occasionally reluctant to accept commands. The remote control is less fussy and is invaluable in adjusting line-output volume, which changes in 0.5dB steps.

From the front panel, it is necessary to touch and release for each step, waiting more than a second before the next step can be made.

It's just as well that output level is adjustable, though, because at maximum output the DAC9 produces four volts, enough to overload the inputs of a few amplifiers we've seen.

NuForce mentions in its promotional literature that neither sample-rate conversion nor negative feedback is used in the DAC9, which strikes us as a little perverse as the DAC chip (like all current examples of its breed) uses internal sample-rate conversion to implement digital filtering and the analogue circuits include op-amps, which are never used without feedback. They are all high-quality parts, as are the drivers for the balanced output and the analogue volume-control chip.

The power supply employs a very large toroidal transformer. 96kHz digital sources are accepted at the USB input, which is upgradeable to even high sample rates by swapping an internal module.

Sound quality

Comments on this DAC varied between listeners, their reactions depending on personal priorities. It seems that if you value an ultra-clean, high-resolution sound this may not be the best option around, but it has very good drive and dynamics, and possibly the best timing.

The listener who liked it least pointed to a degree of 'grunge' in its sound as his main reservation, but despite that there is still some good detail to be heard.

Midrange is generally neutral, though we came to suspect that the comments about 'grunge' may actually reflect a small degree of subjective upper-midrange lift, which does seem to dirty the sound a little on many recordings.

This is all quite minor stuff, though and while it's easy to be critical in comparisons like this we felt the sound over the longer term is more than acceptable. It would be unkind to close without commending the headphone output, which is particularly revealing and proved worthy of the finest cans we plugged in to it.

There's seldom much about Moon products that stands out a mile externally – which is not to deny them their smart and individual appearance.

The Moon 300D has a largely typical specification, with two coaxial and one optical S/PDIF inputs and a USB socket, while analogue output is available both balanced and unbalanced.

Differences are more apparent inside the unit, where Moon has carefully separated analogue and digital parts of the equation. A digital circuit board, largely populated with surface-mounted components, receives the digital input, applies digital filtering and converts it to analogue, forwarding the output to an analogue board beneath.

Here, components are all through-hole parts, remarkably few of them for a balanced-output circuit, with passive components evidently having been carefully selected for their specific application.

The power supply is unusually generous too, with a large bank of smoothing capacitors. Most of the integrated circuits that look after functions like digital input reception and D-A conversion are familiar parts, including the USB input chip, which limits operation to 48kHz.

A footnote about this on Moon's website hints that the company doesn't much rate USB as a digital audio interface and suggests that the serious computer audiophile should use an aftermarket soundcard with S/PDIF output, a perfectly valid point.

Sound quality

It wasn't quite plain sailing for the 300D as far as our blind-listening panel was concerned: the odd note of criticism sneaked in, but the general tenor of comments was once again favourable.

They were in agreement that treble is a little more present than bass – we're choosing words carefully here because different listeners expressed that in different ways. One found the treble clearer than most, well defined and more precise than the bass. Another thought the bass was fine but found the treble on the bright side, even (in one track) 'splashy'.

This kind of difference of opinion is not uncommon in a case like this of subtle tonal imbalance and merely illustrates why no one product can provide all the answers. The trouble is, though, that even in a blind test like this such things can colour a listener's judgement.

It's no surprise that the listener who disliked the treble found fault also with detail and imaging, but the others were much more complimentary about these aspects, especially detail. It's the kind of detail which doesn't rip a piece apart into its constituent strands, but allows the listener to hear what's going on at the top, in the middle and into the bass.

The deepest bass is, perhaps, a little general here, with good extension but slightly less precision than some can muster. Dynamics were well liked too. Our large-scale orchestral track benefitted particularly from this, with quiet passages having a degree of definition and solidity to them that's not often heard.

It's easy to overlook low-level performance of audio equipment, or take it for granted, but the 300D really does achieve quite an unusual level of performance with both detail and imaging consistent from loud to soft and back. With pace, rhythm and timing also good, though never over-emphasised, it's an easy DAC to like.

Lavry is a pro-audio company which shows little (if indeed any) sign of interest in the audiophile world, but that doesn't stop the audiophile world being interested in Lavry. The company's DA10 DAC became something of a cult success and the DA11 builds on that success by adding a couple more features.

The most immediately useful of those for most Hi-Fi Choice readers, we suspect, will be the USB input. It's actually good for 96kHz sampling, though it may not work that way straight out of the box and Lavry's recommendations for computer set up are worth following. (Indeed, we'd recommend a little such care to any greater-than-48kHz USB set up.)

The unit is remote-control compatible, though it doesn't come with one: again, Lavry provides instructions for setting up programmable remotes. And then there's the 'Playback Image Control', which allows for widening and narrowing, asymmetrically if desired, of stereo images.

You get one each of the usual flavours of digital input, including AES/EBU on an XLR socket, while analogue is put out only on XLR connectors, but XLR-phono adaptors are provided and you can configure the output to drive these correctly, unbalanced.

Like other settings, including source and volume (adjustable in rather coarse steps), this is done from the front panel via centre-biased toggle switches, which frankly is an arcane process which we hated from start to finish.

Internal circuitry uses familiar parts of good quality and a switch-mode power supply.

Sound quality

A little bit like the Electrocompaniet PD1, this DAC is relatively undemonstrative, but still manages to pack a punch when it needs to.

In fact, it can really be quite dramatic at climaxes, a characteristic which makes it a good match to highly dynamic classical music recordings.At the same time, it retains a believably solid sound and image when the music is quiet.

Our listeners did feel, however, that a trace of detail was lost by the DA11. This seemed to be equally true in different styles of music and was also consistent across the USB and S/PDIF inputs. It's not a serious loss and didn't stop anyone enjoying the bigger picture, something this DAC is indeed good at preserving. All the same, the ability to hear a little deeper inside a mix could be useful and welcome now and then.

Tonally the balance is excellent, with good extension at both ends of the spectrum and no sign of favouritism across the midrange. A remarkably clean treble will certainly endear this DAC to many listeners and it proved quite impossible to fluster it with even the busiest and brightest of recordings.

General musical flow was specifically praised and its handling of dynamics on both short and long timescales is assured and lifelike.

Lots to like, then, but the detail proved a minor, though persistent, niggle. The texture of a multi-layered piece of music is not as clear as one might wish and images seem to lose a little depth, a frequent companion to mild detail loss.

Cyrus currently offers two Digital to Analogue Converters, the DAC X+ we have here and the DAC XP+ (the latter also includes a preamplifier).

You might think this one has some preamp functionality, given the presence of what looks remarkably like a volume control on the front, but the rotary knob is actually used for set up functions, including the rather appealing option to name the inputs to something relevant.

And if you hanker after a built-in preamp later, you can always return your DAC X+ to the Cyrus factory for an upgrade to XP+ status. Cyrus has always been good at this upgrade thing, of course.

One of its most successful optional extras is the PSX-R power supply, a stonking great transformer in a Cyrus box, alongside some very high-performance supply regulation circuits. The transformer built into the X+ is followed by several regulators and these supply juice to a pair of DAC boards, each one sporting a good-quality DAC chip and a handful of op-amps plus decent quality plastic-film capacitors.

There's actually quite a lot of analogue circuitry, not least because of the requirement to drive balanced outputs, two sets of which grace the rear of the unit.

As for inputs, there are six in total, all S/PDIF – two optical and four electrical. There's also an optical digital output which simply relays the chosen source for recording or multichannel decoding purposes.

The lack of a USB input slightly dates this unit, though one can pick up USB-S/PDIF convertors for well under £100.

Sound quality

An arguably more serious indictment of this DAC's age (it's one of the longest-serving here) came in terms of comments on its sound. Criticism wasn't strong, but our blind listeners would have liked some more detail and insight, especially in musical lines below the top one.

As one listener pointed out, there seems to be a consistent dullness in voices and instruments, making the music quite forthright, but ultimately less engaging. Conversely, brighter-sounding melody instruments seem even more cutting than usual – hard-played lead guitar, for example, which developed a degree of 'fizz' in our Led Zeppelin track.

To some extent this is ameliorated by a strong and well-placed bass, but the balance does seem a little treble-heavy on average. In fact, the business about dullness of accompaniment is a complex one.

When, as happens from time to time, the melody is in a low-ish register it still seems to be unduly prominent, so clearly the issue is not simply tonal imbalance. Rather, it's the lack of detail that's the crucial issue, with foreground material grabbing more than its fair share of attention. The background doesn't so much recede as lose the listener's focus – one is less aware of it and interesting little details slip by unnoticed. A similar thing happens with stereo imaging.

On the positive side, we found this DAC to be quite unfussy about digital sources. Overall, though, it just doesn't quite have the resolution we'd hope to find in an upmarket digital-to-analogue convertor.