8 things you need to read about hi-fi audio before you start listening to advice

ROKSAN Radius 7: Chosen here for its looks as many of us tend to associate good sound with words like “crystal clear”, “transparent”, “clean”, “revealing” etc.

Credits: I know, I know… they usually go to the very end. But, what you will read here I owe it to my Uni flatmate Joel Benford, my teacher of (2nd year) analogue electornics (and designer of QUAD’s first Integrated Amplifier) Prof. Bob Wilson and the sales people at Audio-T Manchester who spent hours teaching me the basics, although they knew that I was a student and I could only afford “just” 1,000 pounds worth of equipment — yet they tought me, using equipment that costed over 200,000 pounds just to gain a sense of proportion before I make my choice. To those I owe a lot for this journey that also allowed me to better value music works themselves!

History:

I started with hi-fi audio as a student of Electronics Engineering at the University of Manchester in the UK. Many know the University due to its association with Alan Turing or due to -his present day incarnation — Steve Furber — the designer of the ARM architecture. Yet its achievement in Analogue Electronics is equally impressive, not least because the first stored program computer (which was analog) in the world was created at Manchester.

One of my fellow flat mates — Joel Benford — was a guy who had left the City at 30 to study Engineering (!) and he had brought with him a ROKSAN turntable…