First of all, let me get off my chest one or two pet hates! I really dislike the expressions "audiophiles" and "Hi Fi" and I will only use these terms in a pejorative way. I know they are used frequently in "our hobby" but I dislike the expressions, and I will explain why…

A few newspaper articles about yours truly that date all the way back to 1998. You can see the hi-fi bug had bitten hard! Viewable as Adobe Acrobat PDF files.

Sadly, nowadays, that question is often asked by "audiophiles" and indeed by manufacturers and retailers. Someone the other day told me that they thought there are about one million audiophiles, in the world and that is not a lot of people. Think about all the manufacturers, retailers, people employed in the industry generally chasing a client base of only one million people.

I have recently had the opportunity to visit 4 audio manufacturers "factories". I put the word factories in quotations because to call these premises factories is probably a little misleading. It was amazing to me to discover that such lovely equipment, produced in such an artisan and individual way, is actually produced in a space much much smaller than you would imagine, they hardly qualify as a factory at all. My first visit was to Living Voice, the well-known speaker manufacturer.

The thing about music is it’s so wonderful it almost seems a shame not to have some of the other senses engaged. What better adds to a leisurely afternoon or the ambience of an evening with a musical flow than some fine wine, a little charcuterie and some decent cheese?

The last time I wrote for this web site I mentioned the pleasure of listening to music on hard drive. I want to now go from the sublime to the ridiculous and turn back the clock some 50 years and join in the debate (which has been extensive) extolling the virtue of idler drive turntables.

I have never thought I would say it but music stored on hard drive seems to have many of the advantages (not all the advantages however) of vinyl. Or to put it in another way, some of the "nastys" associated with CD seems to be removed when music is stored and played back from hard drive.