What Hi-Fi?

As a music obsessive, I was thrilled to get an interview at What Hi-Fi?, until I read the magazine. It’s full of quotes I didn’t understand:

“This system attacks tracks with a playful excitement”; “It balances refinement, insight and attack perfectly and has the composure to make instrumental strands easy to follow”; “the HRT Music Streamer II gives the music more room to breathe, sounding bigger and more powerful as a result.”

What does any of this mean? I really don’t think my ears are sensitive enough to pick up these things. I have no experience with high-end soundsystems. The only CD player I’ve ever owned is a £100 Panasonic Power Blaster I got when I was about ten.

Though my Panasonic sounds great to me, reading the magazine makes me feel like I need to buy some £1,500 kit which can create a ‘holographic stereo image’.

Thus, slightly intimidated, I go to their offices in Teddington for the interview. There are delays on the trains, but these speed me up, as I catch services which were meant to have left before I arrived.

When I meet the editor, my first question is obviously ‘what CD player do you have?’ I forget the details almost immediately. It sounds expensive.

The editor seems a really nice guy, and doesn’t ask me any tricky questions. It feels more like a chat than an interview:

“So, have you been applying for many other jobs?”

“Yeah, actually I’ve got an interview tomorrow at Poultry World.”

“That reminds me of the time I narrowly avoided having to do a week’s work experience for European Plastics Monthly.”

Apparently, European Plastics Monthly has been rebranded.
Clearly, it worked.

He asks what kind of music I like, and I ask him the same. He listens to anything from Bach chamber pieces to modern electro. The magazine’s writers all seem to have a broad taste:

“The B&Ws are just as happy churning out Tom Waits’ I DON’T WANNA GROW UP as they are unpicking Dimitri Shostakovich’s SYMPHONY NUMBER 3 ‘1^ST OF MAY’”; “The A26’s insight into recordings as diverse as Tchaikovsky’s 1812 OVERTURE and Adele’s 21 is impressive at this price level”... etc

After the interview, the editor gives me a guided tour of the test rooms. We walk into the Hi-Fi room, and a Beatles album is playing. Apparently, it takes about 50 hours of playing to ‘break in’ a CD player, so they just leave them running.

Doin Thangs: a good test of any Hi-Fi

I ask the editor whether the recording quality of 60s music is good enough to properly test high-end kit. He says it often is. The best quality recordings come from one person alone in a room, playing into a single microphone, recording straight onto tape. Some 80s music is much worse for sound quality, because they used a lot of compression for instruments, he says, giving Madonna as an example. I have an alternative theory about why Madonna records sound so bad, but keep it to myself.

Before the interview, the editor asked me to write a review in the What Hi-Fi? style, and bring it with me. Here’s what I wrote:

Review: Panasonic RX-DS27, £100 (now out of production), *****

This is a brilliant no-nonsense CD system. Other than volume and track number, the only thing you can change is the EQ. This has five settings, none of which, in my experience, sounds better than the first: ‘EQ-OFF’.

The main reason you should have bought one of when they were still being made is because they’re built to last. Mine is still going strong, even though I once dropped it onto a hard wooden floor, putting a big dent in the mesh of the right-hand speaker. True, the tape deck broke a few years ago, but if you still listen to tapes, why are you reading this magazine?

As for the sound quality, it’s never struggled with anything I’ve run through it. The RX-DS27 conveys the full horror of Captain Beefheart’s growling, dischordant rock, and handles Brian Eno’s ambient works equally well. It doesn’t try and clean up recordings; if there’s hiss on the record, you get hiss through the speakers. This might be praised as authentic or dismissed as annoying, according to your taste. Overall, though, the sound is excellent for this price.

The CD tray has an ingenious fold-out design; handily, you don’t need to turn it on to get CDs out. As an added bonus, it avoids the modern trend of trying to be ‘friendly’. My sister’s CD player (Sony 3MT-EP313) says ‘hello’ when you turn it on and ‘see you’ when you turn it off. I have human friends, and don’t need companionship from my CD player. In fact, the idea that it was even partly sentient would make me feel guilty about leaving it in the house alone all day. Thankfully, the RX-DS27 has never tried to communicate with me. Highly recommended.

I'm a plastic bag and I'm talking to you

I didn’t get the job, but I got a very nicely worded rejection letter, which was almost apologetic. Fair play.