Shoppers at HMV can pick up an affordable turntable to go with their new LPs, but the retailer appears less interested in CD hardware. Barry Fox wonders if DVD players can fill the gap
Vinyl sales keep on climbing. They topped £177 million in the UK in 2023 – seven times higher than ten years ago. The figures come from ERA (which by linguistic contortion is short for the Digital Entertainment and Retail Association). ERA chief executive officer Kim Bayley couples the vinyl climb with ‘the remarkable return of HMV, now back in its Oxford Street home’.
What’s the best method for turning your analogue LPs into a digital stream? Barry Fox seeks the solution as he digs into a confusing world of dongles, A/D converters and open source software
Experts will tell you it’s easy to make a digital copy of a music stream, or LP, to play in a car or carry around. You ‘just’ suck analogue music out of your hi-fi, feed it into a computer and then ‘just’ send it to a memory device or burn to a blank CD. Yes, but it’s only easy when you already know exactly how. I’ve recently got my hands dirty finding out the easiest ‘how’ for people who want to listen to music, not burrow down computer rabbit holes.
Most computers no longer come with a disc burner. But they do come with USB sockets and for £20 you can buy a portable optical burner that literally just plugs into a USB socket. Software (or an ‘app’ in modern parlance) is needed to copy music to a blank CD or USB memory stick that plays at the press of a button.
Barry Fox brings you his pick of the books that offer insights into audio
There are enough books about rock and pop music to capsize a cruise liner. So for this third part in my series on good books that connect music to hi-fi I have picked a few of the lesser-known reads. Arguably the best starting point for pop industry insight is George Martin's 1979 biography, All You Need Is Ears in which Martin shares his jaundiced views on the Apple organisation (unrelated to Apple computers, of course), which The Beatles set up in the mid '60s.
Barry Fox on books with insights into the personalities behind the podium
Before my local bank branch closed, someone in head office came up with a cunning plan. Shut half the counters and pipe in classical music to soothe the nerves of customers seething at the longer wait for service. Played just loud enough to be recognisable, but too whispery to be enjoyable – like the tizzy spill from someone else's headphones – the noise just simply annoyed.
Barry Fox on the music books that bring insights into audio
Polymath Humphrey Lyttelton not only played as he pleased, he wrote as he pleased in many excellent books on music, once appealingly disparaging sound engineers he suffered on tour as 'Marconis'. The reason? They couldn't stop fiddling with the controls, so destroying the natural balance of his live band and adding electronic distortion.
The latest wireless tech could be a boon for audio, as Barry Fox explains
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.
Barry Fox takes the stress out of connecting your hi-fi to the Internet
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.
Out of sight, out of mind and very much at risk... Barry Fox explores the preservation of digital music files and why you should take action now
The recent movie Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, nearly never got made. Which would have been a pity because it tells the intriguing story of how the glamorous film actress (legal name Hedy Kiesler Markey) and her husband, composer George Antheil, filed for a US patent in 1941 on the frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum communication technology that underpins modern wireless networking, including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
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