The 2007 Hi-Fi+ Writers Competition

After wading through an astonishing number of entries (especially surprising given the effort involved) the field was narrowed to a top-twenty and then a top-six contenders. At this point the entries were passed to John Bamford at Meridian (representative of the sponsoring company and himself an ex-journo and editor at Hi-Fi Answers and Hi-Fi Choice). There then took place a round-table discussion on the merits of our various contenders, with JB given the casting vote. Below you’ll see his chosen winner, but next issue if space allows I’ll be printing a few honorable runners-up, so if you want to know just how close you got… Meanwhile, Mr Mason will doubtless be enjoying his Meridian F80. Ed.

Roy Gregory
Editor, Hi-Fi+ Magazine

The 2007 hi-fi+ Writer competition winner

You never foget the first time... by John Mason

Everyone’s stolen at least one thing in their lives.

Whether that be sweets when you were young or the odd envelope from work when you should have known better. Me? I once stole a ticket. Not to access Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but for something almost as magical - my first visit to a hi-fi show.

During the early nineties, I became interested in technology. Being a poor teenager with little money to spend on magazines about it, but I was lucky and my local libraries had a good selection. I could often be found in there reading them. On one visit felt luckier still as I noticed a ticket attached to a magazine. It offered free admission to a hi-fi show. Intrigued but not really sure what a hi-fi show was, I decided I’d like to visit and find out. Believing the ticket would likely remain unused, I felt I should have it. With a sly tearing motion that could not have looked more suspicious if I had stood up on my chair and loudly announced “I’m taking this”, I eventually ripped it out and slipped it in my pocket. I felt pleased but nervous as if the library police were about to bust me like an internationally sought after criminal.

Fast forward to a few weeks later and upon arriving at the hotel near Heathrow, I handed over my ticket and entered the show. Little did I realise that once inside I would become hooked and not want to leave.

I went into the first demonstration room I came across and it was there that I experienced it. High-fidelity sound! I had never heard music sounding so good before. It blew my mind. Sure I had owned various cheap stereos passed down to me over the years. But this was much higher quality. I stood transfixed by the tune coming from the speakers, like a deer caught in headlights. The three-dimensional realism was impressive but more notable was the sheer clarity of the cymbals being hit. For the first time I was not only hearing, but also feeling something that I had only read about before.

That system left a lasting impression on me and I can still picture those speakers today. But I didn’t recognise the manufacturer. In fact I couldn’t identify most of the brands at the show. I soon realised that the best hi-fi separates weren’t necessarily made by mass market corporations. Instead, hi-fi seemed to be like a members only society featuring obscure companies (many of which were, surprisingly, British), a dictionary’s worth of terminology and possibly secret handshakes too. But it was a club that I knew I wanted to join.

As I moved from room to room through the hotel, I felt like a naughty son who had just found his dad‘s Playboy collection. Each door I stepped through was like turning the page over to reveal another naked lady while trying to discover what turned me on. Blonde or brunette? Floor-standing or bookshelf? It was aural pornography… and I liked it.

As the day progressed I started to learn more things about audio. When growing up, I had skipped vinyl and instead chosen cassette (hey, it was acceptable in the eighties!), whilst all the time aspiring to own an elusive CD player. This was my first real introduction to the record and upon listening I felt it produced a smoother sound that was easier to listen to. It sounded even smother when played through a valve amplifier -another novel concept for me and my newfangled transistor ways. I began to understand and appreciate the value of upgrading cables and of placing equipment on sturdy supports. Throughout the day I started to actively listen out for the different sound characteristics so often mentioned in reviews.

Since then I’ve visited the show each September, including the short period when it moved to Hammersmith then finally returned to Heathrow. I’ve been there during the continuous name changes and have collected all the entry stickers to prove it. Some of the most memorable time I’ve enjoyed at the shows has including Barry Fox’s fascinating lectures regarding the state of the industry plus the demonstration of a vastly expensive set up from PMC/Bryston which produced the best sound I‘ve ever heard. Over the years I have been treated to an eclectic selection of music that I might have not thought of listening to or even heard of. I’ve appreciated many of the characters from the industry, such as the cheeky chap who worked for Arcam, the slightly crazy (but undeniably passionate) guy from Nordost and all the journalists and spokespeople that I have spotted. You could call me an audiophile groupie!

The shows have often provided me with my first look at new products and introductions to fresh innovations such as multi-channel audio, high-end car stereos and the increased popularity of integrating video equipment with hi-fi. Sadly increased popularity it seems can’t be associated with the show itself, as there isn’t one this year, nor are there plans for it to continue. Thankfully the organisers of a rival show just across the road will continue to run their event, carrying on a tradition that has been gracing the area for decades (and shall hopefully continue to do so).

Some might say it was dishonest to take the ticket that got me into that show in the first place. But now hi-fi has captivated my interest and has stolen a piece of me. Until my lottery numbers roll around and I can take permanent refuge in my mansion with that PMC/Bryston system, then I shall continue to attend and enjoy hi-fi shows.

When the day of that first show drew to a close, I left with my new-found fascination, a little knowledge and a certainty that I would return again.

Which I did; The very next day; Complete with my favourite CDs.
Plus another free ticket.
Which I had stolen from a different library.

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SPEAKERS CORNER by Paul Messenger

We are constantly being told by the know-nothing mass media that we are moving into an era where our traditional forms of music software will be replaced by internet downloading. Forgive my scepticism, but twenty years ago those same pundits promised us that vinyl would be dead by 1990, and look what happened to that prediction.

Our relationship with our music is a complex affair. Sure, downloading is quick, convenient, potentially inexpensive, and is already establishing itself as a popular alternative to traditional media. And as internet access rates and computer storage capacities go on rising, higher resolution downloads with less or no compression will become increasingly viable and hopefully available. But the simple fact that these don’t involve a real physical object will, in my opinion, always alienate enough customers to ensure that the ‘harder forms of software’, such as vinyl and CD, will continue to co-exist.

Let’s take a moment to consider the attributes of the various music storage media. Despite being relatively bulky and susceptible to damage, vinyl has survived for more than half a century. That in itself is a uniquely impressive achievement, which gives great confidence to anyone who believes a record collection is for life, not just the next few months. Add in the observations that it still potentially offers the best sound quality, and comes in a physically attractive format with its own ‘poster’ on the front, and it’s difficult to see any alternative format taking its place, except of course on convenience grounds.

The first successful attempt to do this was of course Philips’ Compact Cassette, born in the mid-1960s and making a serious bid for stardom a decade later, when vinyl was going through a particularly rough patch. One of the cleverest features of the cassette was that it was the same size as a pack of playing cards, whose ease of handling had evolved as a biological match for the human body through millennia. Compact, record-capable, portable and inherently free from surface noise (aided and abetted by Mr Dolby’s clever noise reduction system), there was a time when the cassette looked like a serious contender. But where is it now? Mass duplication was always a problem, and pre-recorded examples never matched up to the quality obtainable with real-time home recording. Unlike vinyl, longevity wasn’t a cassette trait, and it seemed to disappear almost before CD got going, apart from some residual in-car use. Somehow it never even got close to vinyl’s long-term collectability, more pretender than contender.

Although the little 120mm Compact Disc became an immediate style icon, sales didn’t really get going properly until the late 1980s, due to high initial prices of both software and hardware. Silent backgrounds were particularly appreciated by classical music listeners, and convenience features like remote control, track skipping and a playing time of more than an hour all served to make it the prime music carrier throughout the 1990s, while the addition of record capability has helped it keep up with the game in the current decade. Fears that the data on CDs would eventually start to deteriorate seem to have abated, but the packaging has always proved troublesome – I don’t know anyone who actually likes the wretched ‘jewel case’; the card-based alternatives don’t seem much better; and the sleeve notes are always much too small for easy reading.

That sales of regular music CDs have been declining in the last couple of years is well documented, but they’re doing so from a historic high, and the picture is a very muddy one, due to the parallel growth in ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ downloading, and of copying.

There still seems every reason to believe that the 120mm optical disc has the potential to provide long term archive storage for music albums in CD form, and movies as DVDs. But there remains the lurking worry that the medium is still evolving, which inevitably leads to concerns over long term stability, less perhaps of the disc format than of the hi-tech replay hardware involved. For example, many of the multipurpose chips being developed today are primarily low voltage/consumption types, developed very much with the massive mobile phone sector in mind, and are therefore likely to be less suited to high quality audio applications than previous generations of chips.

Long-term stability is really the core strength of the vinyl disc. It did go through a number of changes in the early days, with variations in the equalisation curves adopted by different record companies, as well as some alternative disc sizes and rotation speeds, as well as the major shift from mono to stereo. But those uncertainties are long past, and apart from the occasional 12-inch 45rpm single, vinyl today has a format stability and permanence unmatched by other media.

It’s pretty obvious that hi-res downloading represents one of the futures for hi-fi, not only because of the technological determinants of increasing internet speeds and computer memory capacities, but probably more significantly because it will become cheaper to deliver (though not necessarily purchase), while the cost of ‘hard’ software will continue to rise. (We’ve already seen bulky, heavy vinyl become significantly more costly than the CD equivalent, reversing the situation that existed back in the 1980s.)

Many of us will doubtless be happy enough to settle for ‘virtual’ downloaded software, storing it on our computers or servers. But the computer on which I’m writing this might be the first I’ve used for music storage, but it’s my fifth computer in eighteen years, and three at least are long gone. It may well be that my music files will happily transfer to the sixth, seventh and so on to the tenth in fifteen or twenty years time, but I certainly don’t feel as confident about their future as I do about my forty year old vinyl discs.

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