Rachel Johnson’s

I thought readers would appreciate an update on our home audio struggles and how ‘digital’ has destroyed listening to music domestically.

I made the fatal mistake of investing in a Brennan – a black gizmo into which you load all your CDS manually for days and it then chooses tracks in a random ‘shuffle’ order to play. The good news there is that I have found the tiny remote; so I can at least push ‘next’ when yet another Macy Gray track comes on.

The really bad news concerns Somerset. I boasted in this space that, at least on Exmoor, we have a bombproof system of an old Technics turntable, wired to Mission speakers, to play our precious collection of scratched LPS, dating back to our school days at Bryanston and Eton: Hendrix, Armatrading, the Stones etc. But then it broke. Disaster.

I decided to replace it all as my husband’s birthday-and-christmas present. In Peter Jones, I pointed to a deck. ‘How about that one?’ I asked. ‘That’s got an internal speaker,’ she said. He then whispered, ‘So not very good.’ I pointed to another. ‘That’s a Bluetooth turntable,’ she said. ‘But can it play actual records?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘You need to link it to some wireless Bluetooth speakers, and then you can play your records, and your itunes, Spotify, and whatever.’

She assured me it did not depend on our internet but would all work via Bluetooth. This sounded ideal, as our internet is weaker than old British Rail coffee. I shelled out for two Bose Soundtouch speakers – which she promised I could link so we could have two speakers playing the same music in the same room – and the Bluetooth Ion turntable, and had them sent 200 miles west. That was the easy part.

As I write, it has been at least 24 hours since my husband started setting up the system. The speakers were child’s play – take out of box, plug in power, press Bluetooth button, wait for beep, connect, Bob’s your uncle. So long as you only wanted one to work. But we wanted two. That was the whole point of the exercise. But if you want to ‘pair’ them, you have to download an app and use Wifi to get them linked. Wifi is a distant dream in this valley. Streaming is something the Exe river does, below the farmhouse – not data. As soon as the speakers sniffed out the distant Wifi, they snubbed Bluetooth.

We have deleted the Soundtouch apps, in the hope that Bluetooth functionality can be restored, and that maybe, one day, we can play my husband’s limited music downloaded onto his phone (he has around seven albums on his itunes, mainly obscure jazz) on perhaps one speaker – but only if, and this is a big if, he can get his phone to link to one of the two speakers, which will only talk to one iphone at a time (his).

In other words, it’s a complete shambles. On the plus side, the sound that comes out of this one Bose speaker – if you can get it to emit any sound at all – is clear as a bell. We haven’t even dared to embark on setting up the turntable yet.