No going back

In 1991, happiness was a dorm bed and a bottle of Polychem

One of the hallmarks of the lockdown was (or ‘is’, depending on your location and what happens between when I’m writing this and when you’re reading it) a gradual realisation that some things — like restaurant takeaways, working from home, washing our hands — might be new ways of doing things that will stick with us beyond the confines of COVID-19. This has always been the way of the world: the discovery of something better is often such a one-way trip, part of the evolution of our individual lives towards greater efficiency or greater enjoyment. But this crisis has shoved a whole tray of new things before us, with changes we’d never have made — or been allowed to make — without such an enormous push from government and plain old necessity.

More often such changes are the product of growing up and becoming marginally more affluent. Drinking habits, for example — as a backpacker I drank remarkably few beers when travelling, because up Paharganj in New Delhi a beer would set you back about the same number of rupees as a dorm bed, and I chose to extend my trip by many months rather than chug back a six-pack of Bangalore Kingfisher of an evening. Not that I went tee-total all those years. Instead I would seek out the cheapest possible alcohol — so in Delhi I would queue outside a government grog shop to get an amazingly cheap bottle of something labelled as vodka, though distilled by a company worryingly called Polychem*, then I’d fill an old water bottle with fresh pineapple juice from the bazaar, and that would see me nicely through a few days while remaining tight to my budget of US$30-40 a week.

Students will recognise this attitude of efficient income use, drinking their wine boxes or $2 bottles of cleanskin until they reach the age where they have to buy $10 bottles to take to dinner parties, and then eventually realising that cheap wine boxes give you headaches and actually taste like meths, so that for evermore they’re stuck spending $10, then $15, then $20 to get a bottle of red that doesn’t offend their own palates, let alone those of their new friends who seem to have been long quaffing Orlando’s St Hugo since daddy has a nice cellar.

Is hi-fi like this? Well yes, a bit, in terms of the upgrade path. It didn’t happen for me, fortunate enough to have been raised from birth in a lounge with a pair of BBC-loaned Spendor speakers and having, even before becoming a teenager, two Garrard turntables with DJ-backspinnable stylii and a sizable pair of Wharfedale kit speakers in the bedroom. But if you’re currently living with a Bluetooth speaker in your lounge and thinking how remarkable it can sound, well, I’m afraid you’re actually currently on the audio equivalent of Polychem vodka. You’ve got an exciting road ahead.

The first step is to get out of mono and into stereo. Stereo was first revealed to the public in 1881, and was, according to legend, first demonstrated in Australia by a goatee-bearded Alex Encel back in 1958. But it seems to be slipping away from us in the mass audio market today, with more and more wireless speakers being either mono or at best extremely localised in a single box. Our massive multiroom round-up this issue is full of these. They can sound very agreeable, but then so did a radiogram in 1950. Few of them achieve proper high fidelity — how could they? Fidelity demands being true to the source, whether that’s the live performance (old-school high fidelity) or true to the studio in which they were recorded (more realistic modern high fidelity). And while every good recording studio will have some shitty speakers through which to play a mix to check it’ll sound OK for people with shitty speakers, that ain’t — as the expression goes — “what the artist intended”.

So go stereo, and go separates, and if you go multichannel, make sure you’re still maintaining a musical stereo performance at the heart of it, unless you’re an all-movies no-music enthusiast (that’s fine, Sound+Image is very much here for you too).

And I promise, once you’ve lived with real hi-fi, it’s like red wine, or dorm beds, or working from home. There’s just no going back.

Cheers,

Jez Ford, Editor, Sound+Image