Audio Amplification Meets Product Development in audioXpress July 2024

audioXpress July 2024 is all about Audio Amplifiers. Jan Didden visits ICEpower. Ward Maas interviews Jan-Willem Winters from Hypex. Oliver Masciarotte reviews the WiiM Amp. Thomas Lund explains why Loudness Normalization is so important. Richard Honeycutt explores the new Orange Valve Tester MKII. Brewster LaMacchia explains all that has evolved in Ten Years and Three Generations of A2B. Ethan Winer details how to build a truly unique Speech Compressor. And so much more...

Orange Amplification, globally regarded as one the best British guitar and bass amplifier manufacturers for both design and build, continues to grow the consumer arm of the brand. Half merchandising and half lifestyle product that expands on the brand's recognition, the Orange Pyramid system is a compact hifi system delivering powerful sound and convenient connectivity that the company says is "pleasing to the ear," with a "warm clean sound."

British guitar amplification brand has unveiled the Orange Valve Tester MKII which supersedes the Orange VT1000, introduces originally as the world's first automatic digital valve tester pioneered, developed and patented by Orange. The new Orange Valve Tester MKII enables a wide range of tests with speed, simplicity and accuracy, setting a new standard in valve/tube-testing technology for roadies, musicians, hi-fi enthusiasts and service professionals alike.

When in 2017 Orange Amplification introduced its own headphones at the Musikmesse and Prolight+Sound show in Frankfurt, the strategy was right on target. They helped leverage the brand's reputation as product extensions that reinforce the emotional connection with users. While generating a new revenue opportunity, in this case by expanding the already existing and extremely successful merchandise catalog. Three years later, Orange Amps renews the strategy with the new Crest Edition wireless headphones.

Transducer company Lavoce Italiana is kicking-off another edition of the NAMM Show with the announcement that iconic guitar amp brand Orange Amplifiers have selected the Lavoce WSF121.70G 12” guitar speaker for their most vintage guitar amplifier ever, the new TremLord 30 combo. Officially launching at NAMM 2019, and pitched by Orange as ‘The Amp We Never Made – Until Today’, the TremLord 30 is a 30W 1x12 all valve guitar combo, with built-in valve driven tremolo and reverb, engineered as a fifties inspired amp for the modern player.

This year we thought our readers would like to know which of the topics and stories published online in 2017 were the most popular for our community. We looked at the most-read articles of 2017 in audioXpress.com (which also includes selected articles from Voice Coil magazine), and we created this Top 10 list of news stories and online articles. Here are the results!

Once in a while, British guitar amp specialists - increasingly turning also into a lifestyle brand - surprise the industry with some unusual products. We've seen Orange introducing headphones, the VT1000 valve/tube tester and even an automatic bias adjustment kit, the DIVO OV4. But now, Orange truly surprised us, with the introduction of its new Dual Discrete Op-Amp, which has been specifically designed for audio use. Orange simply says, "it is one of the most musically sounding of its kind on the market today."