Jason Kennedy’s first exposure to the differences between audio components came in his early twenties when he heard a vintage system with a Decca London cartridge on a Garrard 301 turntable, Leak Stereo 20 tube amp and Quad ESL 57 loudspeakers. Despite or maybe because of its vintage this was a mind blowing system, one […]
My earliest recollection of ‘hi-fi’ is kneeling in front of my father’s stereo as a three year old in 1989. I would perch beside his Goodmans Magnum SL loudspeakers for hours, utterly spellbound by the sounds issueing forth. Music was a mainstay in our house and played a key role in my youth by providing […]
Sound and the transmission of sound has fascinated me since I was small. It was never what was on the wireless or the TV (then just three channels of terrestrial telly) but how it arrived in our front room, or the car that fascinated me – and how and why sometimes the voices seemed much […]
Music has been an integral part of my life virtually since I was born. My father was a very keen amateur violinist (initially) before ‘graduating’ to the viola. As a result he had, for the time, a good mono set-up which set the benchmark for me in terms of sound quality in a home music […]
When I was growing up in the 1970s, my parents had a small collection of singles and LPs they had bought in the previous decade. But the Dansette-style record player we had had long given up the ghost. And so I could only wonder what secrets all these dumb black pancakes kept from me. I’d […]
Kevin Fiske was first a newspaper reporter and then, for 30 years, a partner in a technology communications consultancy specialising in business software, grid-scale electricity storage and telecommunications. He has been in love with live music since the age of eight when he attended a concert at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon. For Kevin, audio […]
I was introduced to music and playing records at the age of three. I still remember my dad going up to the loft and throwing down these strange little black discs. Before I knew it, there was this little box in the corner of my bedroom, which turned out to be a Dansette Musique record […]
Could it have been hearing Rimsky Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol through the primary school radio, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture thundering from the home radiogram, or big-band played on my great uncle’s hi fi via Quad ‘57 electrostatic speakers. Was it hearing the left channel through the TV and the right through the radio for one of the […]
My career as a hi-fi reviewer was born from my love of music, and when I discovered how I could hear more and more from my treasured vinyl collection as I improved my system, I was hooked on my quest for as good a sound as I could get. It all started when I sent […]
As a teenager in the late sixties I became totally immersed in the music of that era, much of which I still enjoy today. Like many of my generation, buying a decent music replay system was high on the priority list when I started work, just behind buying a home and a car. I am […]
I’m a musical nomad with passion for syncopation and harmonies who has stayed in the hi-fi industry to satisfy my insatiable addiction to music. I currently work for Acoustic Energy but have spent time with Hi-Fi Experience, Harman and ECS over the years. I’m still in the industry because it’s the best place to find […]
My addiction to music and audio equipment music really started when I was about 12 years old and someone gave me a record player with two cartridges, a mono and a stereo one. He had no idea how to connect it in stereo, that I had to figure out for myself. After a fair share […]
Music was my first love. Both my parents were music lovers and in our community they were among the first to own a stereo system. My earliest audio related memory is watching my father’s Garrard Model RC80 Automatic Record Changer with up to ten 78 rpm records on it. I must have been around ten […]
Born and raised in rural Lancashire, I went on to train as an architect in Manchester in the mid 1960s. My childhood was steeped in recorded and live music, mainly classical, played at home on piano by members of my family, or on a wind-up gramophone. For a music enthusiast the best aspects of living […]