A BLAST FROM THE PAST
Back in the Eighties, Technics was the BMW of home hifi. It wasn’t quite in the same league as hand-crafted gear such as Naim and Linn, but it told the world you were serious about music – and not that badly off, thanks very much. When my dad bought Technics separates, I thought, ‘We’ve really joined the middle classes now.’ So the return of the brand caused a quiver of excitement among hi-fi fans of a certain age – is this the return to the days when stereos came in several boxes, not one, and when they actually sounded good?
The problem is that in the ensuing decades, hi-fi separates have gone from being a status symbol to being a niche interest, like vintage cars and Morris dancing.
The new Technics separates are wilfully retro – there’s no record deck (shame), but there’s a CD player, piped through an amp with a proper, old-style dial on the front and big power switches – there’s a perceptible lag before it all lights up.
When you get it going, the sound is big, sharp and bold, a timewarp back to the days when a decent hi-fi would keep you pinned in your chair way past your bedtime.
The problem is getting there. Over the past decades, we’ve all grown soft. Hi-fi separates (you forget this) don’t give an inch. I was over the moon when I was on my knees putting a frayed end of copper wire into a speaker for the first time in a dog’s age.
I was brought back down to earth with a bump when I realised that the music player wasn’t going to surrender easily, either. It’s a Network Audio player – built to stream music from PCs – but it needed an ethernet cable in its rear end or the haughty beast wasn’t going to speak to me at all. In keeping with the defiantly uncooperative old-school feel, it prefers wired connections to wi-fi. To begin with, I had to switch to the player’s built-in DAB and FM player instead. It’s a pretty grim day when the only thing you can play on a new £2,000 hi-fi is Radio 4.
Even once you’ve got the app running, it’s so old-school it feels like you’re operating an air-con system, not a hi-fi. There is a certain masochistic pleasure to all this – but whether youngsters will agree is open to question...