Duncan Bell is lost in the ’70s

The Bristol Show is Britain’s premier hi-fi hootenanny. It could use a little updating…

Large, majestic herds of 50-something geezers roamed from room to room listening to music

As a kind of tech dilettante – a pontificator on all things, specialist in none, if you will – I get to go to a wider range of events than most.

This month, it was The Bristol Show. Or, to give it its full title, Sound & Vision: The Bristol Show. Or, to give it its

real title: The Bristol Show For Men Who Like Hi-Fi And Have A Paunch, Often An Ill-Advised Beard, And Are Mainly Bald.

They couldn’t find a poster printer that could make that fit onto a sheet of A3, so they use ‘The Bristol Show’.

Now, I like sneering at middle-aged, white blokes as much as the next hipster, but fact is, it’s a cool event.

You remember Life On Mars, the TV show where a modern-day guy bangs his head and wakes up in the 1970s, with everyone wearing brown clothes, drinking brown ale and eating Spaghetti Hoops? It’s exactly like that.

Normally, tech-related shindigs are industry-only and full of thrusting young wankers – sorry, ‘bloggers’ – in backpacks, running around taking photos of phones and yabbering on about start-ups and Slack.

This was more leisurely. Large, majestic herds of 50-something geezers roamed from room to room listening to music, played through reasonably expensive audio systems – like buffalo ambling between watering holes, only, instead of water for sustenance, there was, largely, Daft Punk’s Random

AccessMemories in high-res audio.

Hotel hi-fi

The reason they’re forced to roam from room to room is that the show is held in a hotel. Specifically, the Marriott Hotel, Bristol – although they’ve missed a trick, in my opinion, by not renaming it the Steve Marriott Hotel for the event (he’s a famous musician from the 1960s, kids).

The Marriott is a spectacularly brutalist, concrete construction. It’s like a Stalinist gulag, only with room service.

All the hi-fi brands rent rooms, so there’s at least some level of soundproofing. It’s quite egalitarian, too, so you might have Sony or Technics in a room next to someone who makes amplifiers out of teak and what appear to be the valves from a Lancaster bomber’s radio.

On the ground floor, there’s a more open area, like your standard trade show, with headphones, DACs and the like. In the basement, there are large demo rooms where the more showy brands can ponce about with their £75,000 home-cinema rigs.

But it’s those three upper floors of rooms that are the real meat of The Bristol Show. It’s here that the largely bald, middle-aged men with paunches and bad beards come to indulge their passion. This gives it the faint air of an audiophile brothel, with men entering dimly lit rooms, followed by the sound of heavy breathing and occasional exhalations of enjoyment, just audible over the sound of Daft Punk.

As the day goes on, the mood becomes meditative, intense and, from lunchtime onwards, somewhat tipsy. The quality of the hi-fi stuff on show seems, at least to my less-thangolden ears, to be almost uniformly excellent. If you’ve largely bought in to the idea of elegantly designed, wireless, one-box solutions for audio, The Bristol Show might give you pause for thought.

Yes, many of the products on show are as massive and overbearingly ugly as the Marriott itself, but the sounds they produce are magical. Especially if you REALLY like Daft Punk’s last LP.

I don’t want to overstate the homogeneity of the audience, though. For, as the afternoon wears amiably on, I do manage to complete The Bristol Show Anti-Stereotype Bingo Card.

Granted, I’ve been at after-hours gay clubs and seen more of a gender mix, but look: there’s a woman! And gosh, some young people. And, oh my word, I just spied a non-Caucasian. That’s a bingo!

At most tech events, talk is cutting, bitchy and obsessed with what’s buzzy and new. Here, the talk is warmly appreciative of more old-fashioned virtues: great sound, craftsmanship and lunchtime/afternoon drinking.

Judging by the age of the crowd, I’d say The Bristol Show has a shelf life. Many of these guys have been coming for years and most haven’t managed to convince their sons, and certainly not their daughters, to join them.

Still, with human longevity being what it is nowadays, I’d say it’s got a good 20 years left in it, and I’m glad of that. As much as it makes clear how far ‘tech’ has progressed since that word just meant TVs and stereos, The Bristol Show also reveals some of what it’s lost along the way. It’s a unique event in a great city; if you get the chance, go.