Back in the '80s, several British 'cottage industry' companies made integrated amps for purist customers, but this is surely the most 'mysterious'. How will it sound today?
In hi-fi as in life, the 1980s was a transformative time. From speaker stands and audiophile speaker cable, to mini monitors and expensive, minimalist integrated amps – the 'go for it' decade of Filofaxes, red braces and VW Golf GTis showed us what was to come.
Barry Fox takes the stress out of connecting your hi-fi to the Internet
My shiny new hi-fi has all the usual knobs, buttons and meters on the front, and all the usual analogue and digital input and output sockets on the rear. But there's also what looks like an overgrown telephone socket on the back, labelled 'Ethernet'.
I'm assuming that this is for service engineers or connecting the component to a PC, which I don't want to do. I just want to continue listening to my music from high quality sources, through my trusty big box speakers, without getting into the hassle of computing.
After his split from Walter Becker in 1981, the New Jersey-born vocalist and composer struck out on his own with The Nightfly, one of the first albums to be recorded digitally. The result was a treat for audiophile ears and platinum sales both here and in the US
Having established himself in the 1970s as half of the acclaimed thinking person's rock duo Steely Dan, Donald Fagen became a solo performer in 1981 when his partnership with Walter Becker fell apart.