Mark Craven

Where once there were numerous ‘format wars’, music and film enthusiasts benefit from a settled landscape of home media technology where everyone’s a winner, says Mark Craven

Out of the hard rock swamps of the early 1970s rose a new form of guitar music that wanted to turn everything up to 11. Mark Craven searches for the origins of heavy metal

While music historians debate when and where exactly the heavy metal genre began – some cite songs from the 1960s and even the 1950s – what is inarguable is that by the early 1980s the name was well established. And what did it mean? A particular breed of guitar music where the tempos were faster and the solos were longer, accompanied by lyrics that touched on more than the usual rock ’n’ roll tropes. Singing about sex and drugs had become, for the most part, passé.

Having surveyed the variety of products, big and small, at the recent UK Hi-Fi Show Live at Ascot, Mark Craven is pleased to see that audio brands aren’t all trying to back the same winner

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