Advantages: Absolutely fantastic coffee is possible (better than any chain store). Disadvantages: Quite difficult to master, and not especially forgiving.
When a company sells a product that hasn't changed for nearly a century, and still commands one of the highest prices on the market, there is a reason. In the case of the Professional, a very good reason. LaPavoni have built their reputation on the performance of their lever driven espresso machines, which haven't changed significantly since their introduction in 1961. The Professional is the big brother to the Europiccola, and your extra £200 doubles the capacity of the boiler and adds an arguably unnecessary pressure guide to the sight level on the side of the boiler. The name Professional is somewhat misleading, as the machine is designed and intended for the domestic market.
The Professional's baby brother, the Europiccola is more widely available and as it is often seen second-hand is almost certainly a better buy than ...
Advantages: Robust engineering, excellent performance, beautiful styling Disadvantages: Heavy, hard to keep clean, very expensive
Have you ever wondered why coffee in the coffee shop is better than coffee at home? Coffee shops use freshly ground and roasted coffee, and machines that can extract the full flavour from that coffee. If you want to replicate this quality of coffee at home, you need a machine that's up to the task. LaPavoni produced the Europiccola in 1961 and, some tweaking aside, they haven't changed the design significantly since then. The machine consists of a boiling chamber sitting on a base, with a glass level on one side and some curvaceous pipe-work on the other side. It truly is a thing of beauty, available (in ascending order of price) in chrome and black, straight chrome, chrome with wooden trim, gold, or gold with wooden trim. Go to www.lapavoni.com (domestic line, lever machines) to convince yourself that this is no ordinary machine ...
Advantages: TOO MANY TO LIST!!! Disadvantages: BELLOWS CAN BE A BIT STIFF WHEN NEW.
The Roland fr-3s is the little brother to the fr-7 V-accordion, yet it is no small fry having a full 120 bass section, with seven registers and keyboard of 37 treble keys with ten registers and a dazzling array of features and sounds, it is lightweight and fully portable due to the built-in speakers and battery option. (It takes ten AA size battery's if you would want to use this function, and lasts up to two and a half hours depending on the batteries used.) Although I do generally plug mine into the mains.
The electronic wizardry in this instrument means you can select from ten different accordion types, each with its own associated registers and to the ear is indistinguishable from its acoustic cousins, and as if that was not enough, it boasts several orchestral sounds including violin, steel guitar and choir. The fr-3s also has ...
