TALKING TECH

Hi-fi 2.0: in a digital age, all you need is love of music (and maybe half a million quid)

Duncan Bell says that big hi-fi is back now that it’s embraced the digital streaming future, rather than desperately sticking to being just for analogue purists.

Do you remember when hi-fi was a massive deal, back in the ’70s and ’80s? I don’t. But I do recall it still being in fairly rude health in the early ’90s.

Back then, going to Richer Sounds to spend your entire student loan cheque on an amplifier from Rotel, speakers from Mission and a CD player from Marantz was still an important part of a young man’s accession to adulthood.

Now, the idea of buying a box to play music, a box to amplify music, two more boxes to hear it out of, plus a bunch of connecting wires that somehow cost £500 has gone out of fashion. Like ripped jeans, hi-fi has been flushed down history’s dumper.

“Aha!” you say. “But I’ve been to London this year and seen LOADS of young men wearing ripped jeans!”

To which I knowingly smirk and say, “Yes, that is the point I am over-elaborately making. Do you see?”

Hi, fidelity, hi

I think hi-fi did run into a very serious problem when MP3 and digital in general became the norm.

The idea of a compressed music format was anathema to ‘audiophiles’ so they ignored the obvious up side of MP3 and other digital formats. “Who wants massive portability, convenience and instant access to all music ever?” they asked. Then they waited for the rest of the world to realise that this new-fangled MP3 music sounded crap.

The problem with that was that the rest of the world decided it sounded perfectly good enough, thanks. Just as they had for decades listening to AM and then FM radio, the democratising analogue ancestors of MP3.

But now, hi-fi, like ripped jeans and pony tails, is back, back, back. Part of that is the same retro frenzy that’s rehabilitated dubious fashions from the same era. But a bigger reason is hi-fi learning to stop worrying and love the digital.

That manifests itself in two ways. One is comparatively high-end, one-box solutions such as Naim’s Mu-so or Bowers & Wilkins’ Zeppelin. These take the music on your phone and give it a bit of digital and analogue polish. Feed in decent bitrate digital files and you get very pleasing results indeed, but with the same convenience as a £100 Bluetooth speaker.

Something like a Mu-so is the new student loan system from Richer Sounds, complete with a line in for your ‘vinyl turntable’ (record players, as we used to call them).

The other is to take a time-honoured hi-fi path and make everything fantastical, no-holds-barred and, if necessary as a side effect of that, really, amazingly, eye-wateringly expensive.

A case in point: this month I went to Scotland to see a £120,000 amplifier. The size of two beer fridges (you need an amp for each channel), weighing 140kg and packed with capacitors the size of cans of Tennent’s Super, the Moon 888 certainly quelled any old clichés about Scots being mean. Okay, to be strictly accurate, this monster amp is actually Canadian, but it’s distributed through Edinburgh’s Renaissance Audio.

Since an amp can’t do much on its own, it was plugged into a further 350 (or so) grand’s worth of Moon’s wireless digital audio-processing tech, and speakers the size of The Fast and the

Furious stars. What was great about this was that the event made the amp’s expense seem just like a natural side effect of Moon’s demented quest for audio perfection.

Most launches of products costing six-figure sums I’ve attended have layered on the luxe with a golden trowel, but this involved staying in a Travel Lodge on a ring road, and haggis.

It wasn’t a rarified, ‘audiophile’ affair, either. Yes, it was exclusively populated by middle-aged white men, but some of us weren’t from the hi-fi press, enjoyment was actively encouraged and at no point were damnable ‘hi-fi’ musical atrocities such as Norah Jones, or the acoustic version of Hotel California inflicted on us.

Did this half-million-quid stereo sound good? I’m going to stick my neck out and say, “Yes. Yes it did.”

Did it justify its cost? For those of us without the luxury of the time, space and cash to just sit back and listen to it forever, of course not. How could it?

But whatever. I’m glad that hi-fi is back, taking the mobile, digital way the world now listens to music, and pumping it up to 11 (and 120 grand).

Hi-fi is taking the way the digital world works and pumping it up to 11 (and 120 grand)