This is a bunch of ramblings about audio hardware I own. It’s not here to impress anyone, as I don’t have expensive hardware and I don’t care about impressing people. I bought cheap kit with a view to getting the maximum pleasure from music at a reasonable price. I’m writing this to help those who want to do the same.
I budgeted for £500. I spent £450. I was pragmatic yet took a couple of risks. Decide for yourself if you want to follow a similar route.
I listen to a very wide range of music, from heavy rock (Soundgarden, Manic Street Preachers (before they were crap)) to complex ambient (Black Dog, Orbital) to classical and folk (Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, Bert Jansch, John Renbourne.)
I also record my own stuff, so transparency is important, not just musicality.
My listening room is my office, which is tiny (about 10'/10'). It’s pretty dead, acoustically speaking. There’s no room to move speakers away from walls or use the generally accepted speaker positioning where you are a few metres away from them.
I don’t like headphones. I find myself annoyed by having them on, no matter how comfortable they are. I need to hear the sounds from the rest of the world, like my phone and doorbell (I work from home.) Having said that, I need to be able to use headphones when recording, so a headphone socket on an amp is important.
Many years ago, my friend bought some hi-fi kit and had no use for his old mini system. I had a ghetto blaster type thing (cassette only.) He needed a clock radio, so I traded him mine for his mini system (which also did the clock radio thing, but was a waste of space when he already had hi-fi stuff.)
The mini system was made by Panasonic and pretty high end as such things go. It didn’t sound too bad when played quietly and did a reasonable job of going loud, but was not hi-fi in anyone’s terms.
Before I heard what my friend’s (cheap) hi-fi kit was capable of, I’d never heard such quality. I had assumed that the whole hi-fi thing was just an excuse for rich people to buy expensive looking things to decorate their homes and impress their rich friends with.
I was wrong. I’m often wrong, but don’t mind admitting it. I was very impressed with the way my friend’s hi-fi kit made cymbals sound crisp and clear, made vocals sound natural, as if you were standing in front of the singer, and made bass tight and punchy.
My mini system did none of these things, but it played music and woke me up in the morning, so it had to be enough until I could one day afford better kit.
Over the years, the mini system died off piece by piece. First one cassette deck started chewing tapes, then the other. Lastly the CD player packed up - it would start playing faster than it should in the middle of tracks. Very annoying.
At this point, I had resorted to playing CDs by putting them in my computer’s CDROM drive and running a cable from the soundcard to the midi system. Surprisingly, the sound was (to my ears) identical to that from the midi system’s own CD player, i.e. not brilliant, but good enough for a while.
The sound from my computer’s soundcard’s DAC is pretty bad. Plus my computer makes noise while it’s running. I’ve invested in all the sound reducing components I can find and it’s still too loud. So I want a CD player too, so I can turn the computer off and listen to music without background noise creeping up on me during quieter sections.
Some time ago (now a long time ago), I found I had a bit of ‘spare’ cash, i.e. I wasn’t living hand to mouth and I had been working hard, so felt I deserved to treat myself to something to make my days a little more pleasant.
The plan was to get very good (to my ears) kit, which would only sound better with a major upgrade (lots more cash.) Of course, I also wanted to do this as cheaply as possible.
I was tempted to just go down to the local hi-fi shop and ask them for £500 worth of kit, spreading the money in the most logical way, however I thought I could do better than that if I bought at least some of the kit second hand.
Buying second hand hi-fi kit is a risky business. The worst things to buy second hand are probably speakers. Lots of people are unable to resist the temptation to blast their music at the limits of what their amp can handle, clipping the output and damaging the speakers. You can’t know if the speakers are bad until you hear them.
Having said this, electronic components do age. The ones found in hi-fi equipment are usually high spec components designed to provide performance which is as close as possible to some response that the designer was counting on.
The places where you find important electronic components are your amplifier, the DAC of your CD player and the crossover of your speakers. They all need to be working as close to originally specified as possible, or you’re going to be hearing a quite different (perhaps worse) sound from that which the designer intended.
Whatever the reason, I had a good listen to a pair of Celestion 120s (circa 1970, I believe) and really wasn’t happy with them. They were supposed to be good at the time they came out. They certainly beat the speakers of my midi system, but the bass was too flabby (slow) for me (at low or high volume) and the treble simply didn’t sparkle.
I would perhaps have blamed the crossover, but I was more inclined to blame the cones themselves. New speakers (made in the last 5-10 years) use vastly improved technology to their ancestors. We’re now capable of making much better magnets and manufacturers have also started using materials other than paper for cones.
I decided that I could probably buy some of my kit from an online auction site, if I was careful. This is a not insubstantial risk, but if you are smart and careful, I think it’s fairly safe. Only if you are compulsive, careless and, yes, stupid, will you put yourself at great risk of being ripped off or simply not getting what you want.
I felt that I wanted to hear speakers before I bought them. You might ask why I didn’t want to hear the other parts of the kit, too. Well, the answers to this are that I don’t like the sound of some speakers and I didn’t want to risk getting a pair that had been overdriven.
I’m happy with an amp that’s fairly transparent and powerful. Note that when I say powerful, I am concerned with how fast it can move speaker cones, not how loud it can make the music. As for the CD player, so long as it can play all my CDs without skipping and has a transparent-ish DAC, I’m happy.
I spent a long time trawling the auction site, looking for amps and CD players within my price range, with sellers who had excellent feedback and who had given good, full descriptions of the equipment. Each time I found something that seemed suitable, I spent more time trawling the available online reviews, seeking opinions from so-called ‘experts’ but mainly those of end users, taking care to ignore reviews from those without clue.
I ended up buying a Rotel RA-820AX via an online auction. This amp is about 20 years old, but is in almost perfect condition. I say almost perfect, because I don’t doubt that the electronics will have suffered slightly with age. I didn’t worry about that too much, because the amp was a high quality piece of kit to start with, so slight degrading wasn’t (hopefully) going to ruin it. It turns out the risk of buying blind was worth it, as the amp is brilliant. It’s detailed, transparent in the right places (meaning it’s ‘musical’ in hi-fi speak) and has a headphone socket.
I spent quite a long time researching speakers, trawling through dozens of online magazine and user reviews. I wasn’t just looking at these particular speakers, of course. I was comparing all the speakers around my price range. After doing my research, I decided that there were two possibilities, the Wharfedale Diamond 8.1s or 8.2s and the Mordaunt-Short MS902.
I listened to both types of speakers (the Wharfedales 8.2s and MS902s - I couldn’t find any Wharfedale 8.1s,) plus some more expensive ones by different manufacturers. The Wharfedale 8.2s sounded fabulous. They seemed to be perfectly tuned and did brilliantly with all the different types of music I tried them with. The MS902s sounded crap. It was like listening through ear plugs. The more expensive ones (B&W and some other brand) weren’t as musical as the Wharfedales. I didn’t see what the extra £50-100 bought me aside from a more elite sounding brand name.
So I walked home with the Wharfedales, connected them to the amp, clicked a few buttons and played some music from my computer’s sound card. Nice. Impressive. Not as impressive as when I was listening in the shop, with their cheap (£80) Technics CD player and expensive (£400) Arcam amp, but still fantastic, nonetheless.
My only gripe with the Wharfedales is their crappy fronts. They have some kind of moulded plastic fascia, which looks horrible, plus the grills are far too flimsy and difficult to mount.
I’m sure many people think the Wharfedales are pretty, having as they do a striking yellow, woven, bass/mid range driver (I think B&W did this first, so I guess Wharfedale copied it.) Personally, I think they’re ugly. The plastic front looks tacky, the logo looks tacky, the wood effect on the back and sides looks tacky. Thankfully I only want to listen to them, not look at them.
Hey, speaker manufacturers ! How much would you have to raise your prices in order to sell cabinets made from real wood ? I don’t mean ‘real wood veneer.’ That’s no good. I want real wood. It doesn’t have to be finest endangered species. Buy it from one of those forests where they replant the trees after felling them.
After a week of listening to CDs through my computer, I was getting quite annoyed by the lack of transparency, the slow bass and the missing treble sparkle which I had heard in shop one, mentioned above.
It was time to buy a real CD player. My plan was to buy something cheap with digital output, and if I didn’t like it, buy an external DAC.
I spent some time looking at reviews again, and decided on the Technics SL-PG4, which was the same one I’d heard in shop one. When I got to the shop, however, they said they didn’t have any in stock and wouldn’t sell me the one on the shelf (I have no idea why they won’t do that - I am slightly suspicious that there’s something nefarious going on.)
The assistant tried persuading me to take the Philips CD 723, which was the same price. I decided to trust her recommendation, after all they let you bring stuff back within 2 weeks if you don’t like it, and took it home. It also had a (coaxial) digital output, so the DAC plan was still available.
The CD 723 sounded ok to me, but I felt there was some kind of signal shaping going on in the output stage. The bass was too loud. It wasn’t booming - the speakers coped with it fine, but it was simply too loud. Also the midrange seemed to be too quiet. I could have ‘fixed’ this with the tone controls on my amp, but I was also a little concerned about the detail level.
It may sound as if I hated the CD 723, but actually I liked it a lot. I just didn’t like it enough. It was much better than the sound from my computer’s sound card, but still not up to my expectations.
While trawling through the online auction site again, I found a really nice DAC that hadn’t been up for long and had the option for buying it without bidding, if you took the price it was offered at. I did a lot of research, looking for people’s opinions, and came to the conclusion that assuming it was in good condition, it could just be the final link in the chain for me.
It seems luck was smiling and all that jazz, as the DAC was in perfect condition. The CD player was then just a transport, and a fine job it did too. It really was the DAC in the CD player that was messing up the sound.
While browsing the auction site, I found a nice (though fairly old) Rotel CD player for sale. I didn’t have any real reason to buy it, as my Philips player (coupled with the Audio Alchemy DAC) sounded perfect to me, but I knew someone who doesn’t own a CD player, so I thought perhaps I’d get the Rotel and give the Philips away. I would have given the Rotel away, but I don’t like giving people second-hand things. It doesn’t feel right.
The Rotel arrived in perfect condition and sounds exactly the same as the Philips. Bear in mind that I’m sending the digital output straight out of the box, so there’s not a huge amount that the CD player(s) have to do, just have a stable transport (both do,) handle the error correction (both seem to) and provide a digital output with as little jitter as possible. I have no idea if either of them do that, or if it matters.
I don’t know if jitter is even a real problem. It may just be something that hi-fi nerds worry about because they need excuses to buy more expensive equipment. Perhaps one day someone will prove to me that reducing jitter makes an audible difference. For now, I can’t hear it, so I don’t care.
So, I have an ugly Rotel CD player (yes, Rotel kit is ugly, but I don’t care) with a missing button, but it sounds great to me.
I didn’t believe that cable quality made a significant difference to sound quality until I swapped my bell wire speaker cables for some thicker ones. The bass was instantly much tighter and there was more of it. Bearing this in mind, I bought not the most expensive cables around, just slightly more expensive than the cheapest.
CD->DAC is a single piece of coax with male RCA connectors on either end. Mine is by Cable Talk. It’s sold as an S-Video cable (I think) and cost me £10.
DAC->amp is a dual coax with male RCA connectors on either end. I bought the second-cheapest in the shop, made by Cambridge Audio. It was £20.
Speaker cable is about the second cheapest in the shop again, Gale XL-189. I didn’t bother with biwire, because I’ve heard the difference on someone else’s system and, well, there wasn’t one. 10m of the stuff cost me £10.
I now have a system which is as close to perfection as I could hope for. It may be true that I could shuffle a tiny bit closer to perfection by spending more money, but I think I’d have to spend a couple of thousand £ to get anything significant. I definitely don’t want to spend any more than have done, so I won’t. This is it. This is where it ends. Until something wears out, I’m not buying new kit or upgrading existing.
I’m happy to have a three box electronics setup. When something eventually dies, I can replace it much more cheaply than I could if I had a mini system.
Kit list:
| Rotel RA-820AX integrated amplifier | £100 | second hand |
| Rotel RCD-965BX compact disc player | £45 | second hand |
| Audio Alchemy DDE v1.0 DAC | £100 | second hand |
| Wharfedale Diamond 8.2 speakers | £150 | new |
| Cables (CD->DAC, DAC->amp, amp->speakers) | £40 | new |
| Delivery costs: | £15 | |
| Total | £450 |
Final observation: I have heard similar priced hi-fi setups, have used similar priced equipment myself (on loan from friends whilst on holiday,) yet I have never heard music sound so good. I believe the hours of research I did and the risks I took paid off. I did my homework first. I don’t mind taking risks, because I always stack the deck in my favour first. I’d advise you to do the same.