Thursday November 30, 2006 Small is beautiful
I love big speakers. Nothing else delivers the visceral quality of music like a full bandwidth speaker playing at high level, nothing else punches you in the sternum and resonates the furniture in such gripping fashion. However, fortunately, size has no...
Dylan's (not so) Modern Times
So Bob Dylan can't stand the sound of modern records. The audio quality of CDs is "atrocious", he says and today's recording techniques leave you merely with "static" instead of 'real' music. He even thinks digital technology is ruining his own records. Of...
Keith Jarrett - The Carnegie Hall Concert
I don’t get to review titles of a regular CD persuasion in HFC so I thought I’d mention Keith Jarrett’s Carnegie Hall Concert two disc set that has just been released. This is one of the best sounding digital recordings I’ve heard, regardless of format. I’ve...
Friday November 10, 2006 Victory!
People power really can work, folks! On July 6 this year, malign forces working in dark places within the BBC's digital radio laboratory downgraded the bitrate of BBC Radio Three, from 192kbps to 160kbps. The reason for the cut in quality was 'bandwidth',...
Sweet Talking
Some would claim that music is the international language, others that it is the Queen’s English. But this would be to ignore the creative literary delights that are to be found in instruction manuals, adverts and on fabulous products everywhere. As well as...
Friday September 01, 2006 Class In Pocket
Shut down your iPod for the evening, cue the Hovis advert and relax with a steaming cuppa. Cast your mind back to the days before hard drives an inch square existed, to a time when you couldn't carry a pointlessly large number of songs around in a sliver of...
Tuesday August 22, 2006 Power korrupts...
Last night I discovered that sometimes with hi-fi, the most straightforward approach is the best. The mighty Linn Artikulat 350A loudspeaker (reviewed in The Collection this year – issue 282) had returned along with an LP12 turntable and all the trimmings...
Are you an audioholic?
One of the problems associated with hi-fi, a problem which affects many true audiophiles at one time or another, is audioholism. This debilitating condition can strike at any age, but seems to be particularly prevalent in middle-aged men with an excess of...
Wednesday August 02, 2006 Own a slice of hi-fi history
It's silly season, of course. But anyone really into Arcam should race over to eBay at a hefty one mile per hour and place their bid on Ernie - Arcam's delivery truck. Okay, Ernie only delivered components from the factory to the warehouse, but the former milk...
Wednesday July 26, 2006 Quadral speakers return to UK
German loudspeaker manufacturer Quadral has returned to the UK after a short absence. Axcelle, better known as the distributor of Wireworld cables, now distributes the brand. Quadral’s portfolio lists 53 different models across nine separate ranges, as well...
Tuesday July 25, 2006 Unpaid consultancy
One of the duties of an off-duty reviewer is to perform unpaid consultancy, that is listening to a new product and giving an opinion before it goes ‘live’. The important part of this is that it really is unpaid, for obvious reasons. Any commercial involvement...
Rock on, Tommy!
Steve Coogan's latest character, Tommy Saxondale, may not be in the same league as his mighty Alan Partridge, but is well worth watching. The brilliantly observed roadie-turned-rat-catcher with anger management issues and a Mach One Mustang would have to be a...
Monday July 24, 2006 What are you listening to?
A quick straw poll of the editorial team here at Hi-Fi Choice nets a very catholic list of musical influences. Everything from pre-modern madrigals to penned-last-week alt.country, from hardcore Chicago blues to even-harder-core German Techno. And almost...
Friday July 21, 2006 The safety dance
I blew a fuse yesterday. The event had nothing to do with the hi-fi system at all, but it reminded me how rare this sort of fuse-blowing is these days. Ahh, the old days… when men were men and hi-fi could kill. I remember those days, when plugging in a new...
Drug-fuelled madness
It’s astonishing just how little biochemical tweaking of the psyche can alter your perception of music. Of course, musos have extolled the dubious virtues of dodgy recreational pharmaceuticals for decades, but I keep my bloodstream polluted with entirely legal...
