Phil Laments the Passing of a Special Species.

I won’t forget the first time I ever heard music in stereo. It was the beginning of my love affair with audio. Slowly, I scraped together enough money to buy various bits of kit and assembled my hi-fi. Every spare penny, as they say…

These were the golden days of hi-fi. It was generally agreed that the best speakers in the world were British and that only the Japanese made good cassette decks. But everything else was up for heated debate. We knew all the brands, bought the magazines, and argued for hours about the relative merits of vinyl versus cassette, and valve versus transistor.

Today, many voice over artists (and I’m one of them) will spend hours debating which is the best mike, the best pre-amp, and the best recording software until the cows come home, chasing that last 1% of quality… because we care passionately about what we do. But do we care too much?

At the domestic level, no-one seems very concerned. Sales of component hi-fi are on the floor, and even the more modest music centres have been consigned to the dustbin long ago. How did that happen?

My guess is that we traded quality for portability, a process that began with the Sony Walkman cassette player and continued with mp3 devices. In fairness, the sound from even quite modest mp3 players is really very good, but it surely isn’t hi-fi as we used to know it. On the other hand, before the digital revolution, you couldn’t take your entire music collection with you on holiday…

In consumer electronics, the quality focus seems to have shifted to television; unless you own a TV the size of a barn door, people think you’re a bit weird. Even ten-year-olds can tell you about plasma versus LCD versus LED.

Just don’t bother asking them if the speakers are any good… because they won’t be.

Recently, I bought a pair of B&W speakers, second hand and plugged them into the audio output of our TV. Although they are ugly big black boxes, intruding into the feminine chic of our living space, the audio experience is stunning – there is so much more detail and depth in the output than I’d realised, particularly in the soundtracks of modern movies.

Maybe, when screen size and quality reach their limits, and the industry needs a new selling point, hi-fi sound will make a return. So don’t write off the hi-fi nerds yet – we’re all lurking, biding our time, waiting for the opportunity to bore you to death about Fletcher-Munson curves, Fourier analysis, and why valve amps are still the best. You have been warned – one day, the Geeks shall inherit the earth, the live and the neutral.