Opinion

This past winter I visited a new audio dealer, a fellow I'll call 'Colin'. He's a high-end hobbyist working from his home - a time-honoured practice and an increasingly prevalent one in the Internet age. His large demo room was festooned with recent examples of quality gear from multiple brands, but most conspicuous were the many brightly coloured cables connecting them - the work, he said, of a friend who had spent years researching the behaviours of such cables.

On the 20th of August, there will be an empty space - spiritual, if not physical - at the centre of the Royal Albert Hall. At time of writing, the replacement for Sir Andrew Davis had not been announced, but whoever takes on the task, I hope they keep the programme unchanged. Rather than fulsome speeches of tribute, this would be the most humble act to perform in his memory.

They are the darlings of the home cinema world, but subwoofers aren’t only about bringing a T-Rex into your living room, says Mark Craven – your music system might welcome one, too

Early this past summer, I enjoyed dinner with an audiophile friend. While he puttered in the kitchen, I perused his hi-fi publications. Among them was a 2024 equipment guide, an incomplete but aspirational compendium of products currently on the market, and in a couple of cases, no longer produced but still in plentiful supply. The listings included hundreds of items - phono cartridges from US$99 to $20,000 each, and amplifiers and loudspeakers from a few hundred up to the purchase price of an exotic high-performance automobile.

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.