Opinion

It was the word homotonal that caught my eye. Surely no one writes like that in 2024, I wondered to myself. I read on. ‘Similar to Plato’s ideas of the imprint of moral virtues onto the human soul through music…’ – eh? Bear in mind I was reading a booklet note to accompany a new album of Mozart’s piano sonatas. I flipped the page to look for the author’s credit. No name given.

Last month I touched upon the economics of audio – in particular, the unlikely possibility of getting back a substantial fraction of the money put into high-performance equipment. Long ago, the rule of thumb was that suggested list prices for high-end products were generally five times factory cost. That was when multi-tiered distribution was still the rule – manufacturers delivered goods to distributors, who in turn offered them to dealers. Distributors provided marketing assistance, employing sales reps who called on dealers, did demonstrations, and could intervene in the case of defective products.

When you’ve got a million records, some of them might have to go. In January the BBC began a series of online auctions to dispose of unwanted vinyl from its fabled record library. In a tweet, Omega Auctions said it had spent a productive few days clearing out thousands of LPs from the BBC’s archive. You wonder whether this was just another job to them, or whether they thought they’d died and gone to heaven.

I was recently delighted and excited to hear that a new edition of Stephen Spicer’s book on the history of Leak – Firsts In High Fidelity – has been released. The original edition appeared as a large-format paperback in the year 2000, and it’s a fascinating account of the story of the people involved, the company, and its products.

Experts will tell you it’s easy to make a digital copy of a music stream, or LP, to play in a car or carry around. You ‘just’ suck analogue music out of your hi-fi, feed it into a computer and then ‘just’ send it to a memory device or burn to a blank CD. Yes, but it’s only easy when you already know exactly how. I’ve recently got my hands dirty finding out the easiest ‘how’ for people who want to listen to music, not burrow down computer rabbit holes. Most computers no longer come with a disc burner. But they do come with USB sockets and for £20 you can buy a portable optical burner that literally just plugs into a USB socket. Software (or an ‘app’ in modern parlance) is needed to copy music to a blank CD or USB memory stick that plays at the press of a button.