Vinyl Spring

I had that particular pleasure yesterday of being closely questioned about our current product directions by a very careful and thorough gentleman who had last bought serious Hi Fi thirty years ago. It was a busy Saturday and he was very concerned about wether he should be buying an amplifier with built in digital to analogue conversion capability in order to take advantage of contemporary "digital" music.

I was attempting to explain the current trends of disintermediation and the difficulty of fixing oneself in hardware to a particular digital music format.We are exposed to such a volatile set of storage and streaming and connection protocols that it is very difficult to guaruntee that the DAC that I may be puveying today will actually work with material that might be available in two years time.

I strongly exhort people to maintain a hardware secularity of digital from the analogue realm. To not buy the feature laden bells and whistles single box that claims to cater for all immediate eventualities but rather to get a solid stereo amplifier that meets the needs of the loudspeakers and then ally it to a sophisticated separate box such as an NAD M51 or a PS Audio Clearwave DAC at a later stage.

Part of my rendition was to point out to the gentleman how strongly the new buyer of audio in our local demographic is embedding themselves with analogue records and indeed that we are experiencing a "Vinyl Spring" with that same group of highly educated young consumers who have been bought up to believe that such replay devices were things of their father's living rooms.

While I was talking a typical "just out of university on the first step of their professional career" young man came in through our loudspeaker forest and I pointed him out to my companion. The young man was clearly Generation "i" through his deportment and dress and no doubt makes an excellent living through professional services offered by the intermediary of a computer screen synergised with whole spectrum personal contact.

Just as I had offered him to my own companion as a visual example of that ilk of consumer that is smart and agile and is revolting against the arrogance and qualitative inadequacy of the digital domain of music purveyance, the young man on cue approached one of our chaps and said "I'd like to buy a record player please. Can you show me what you have in stock?".

Such immediate gratification of one's stance comes rarely in consumer electronics. Suffice to end that my new friend has ordered an excellent NAD analogue stereo amplifier with the optional built in phono stage being the NAD C375 with the PP375 add in. This particular large hearted setereo amp actually also has the unique capacity for an add-in DAC should that become the norm. However in this case we would be looking to the class leading NAD M51 as a potential new component for the future.