Investigation

Here's a story I wish I didn't have to tell. Unfortunately, not to tell it would mean ignoring the alarming truth that recorded music is no longer – at least commercially – always the most important element in the recorded music industry.

Vintage hi-fi, like many collecting and preservation hobbies, is subject to the '30-year rule'. This states that today's top collectables are those products that were new about 30 years ago. The reasoning is that when you are young you covet certain items as objects of desire, yet lack the means to buy them. As life progresses, you (hopefully) become wealthier and look again at what it was that caught your imagination when young.

The hype cycle is well under way. 5G is coming, starting slowly this year and rolling out through 2020 and beyond. But who cares? It's nothing to do with hi-fi and music, is it? Just the Fifth and latest generation of phone technology, which – yawn, yawn – works faster and better than the Third and Fourth Generations that have previously been heralded as the be all and end all of mobile phoning and lo-fi MP3 streaming.

The old saw that schooldays are the happiest of your life, jumpers for goalposts an' all, has its parallels in hi-fi. Ask many an enthusiast of a certain age, and they'll go a bit misty-eyed at the thought of their first 'proper' system, bought with a mixture of summer job earnings and that first student grant – yes, once upon a time you got given money to study.

Jean-Michel Jarre likes what he hears. And it's not only the sound of his new album, which he is playing to an eager audience packed into the Audiofast room at the Audio Video show in Warsaw, but the very audio system on which it is being played.

'My new album is a good test for loudspeakers,' he says smiling, 'because I know that it has lots of different frequencies. This means that it's hard to hear the whole effect on some hi-fi systems, but this one is highly capable.'

My shiny new hi-fi has all the usual knobs, buttons and meters on the front, and all the usual analogue and digital input and output sockets on the rear. But there's also what looks like an overgrown telephone socket on the back, labelled 'Ethernet'.

I'm assuming that this is for service engineers or connecting the component to a PC, which I don't want to do. I just want to continue listening to my music from high quality sources, through my trusty big box speakers, without getting into the hassle of computing.

It was 15 years since I had interviewed Ken Bunting, in charge of Quad's service department, but back then it was to pick his brains about the company's history. Early this May, I had the privilege of repeating the interrogation, on the occasion of Ken's retirement. Off to the wilds of Cambridge, where I found him on his last day, in a busy-as-ever service area with everything from Quad ESL63s to valve units being repaired – contrary to any rumours or worries that the company had abandoned its legendary back-up division.