I’m not saying anything new, and in a way, I brought this on myself. Buying used is a risk. You spend less and accept that, in order to save money. And sometimes also because new items of that quality don’t exist or you don’t like them. I do this with cars. When I’m really forced to replace it, I go for a used one. I don’t like today’s cars, and the costs are so high that used cars are a whole different story. I do the same with guitar effects: you can easily resell them for the same price, so you can try out various ones without losing anything. With guitars, a used instrument is even better—one with a history—it actually sounds better precisely because it’s used. But with hi-fi, I’ve been burned. It’s worked out well for me many times, but I knew the risk was higher with CD players…
High Fidelity
Nait Fever
New year – New amplifier. At the end of 2025, something strange happened. I was doing some research for a CD player that would match my system. Asking for advice from the usual excellent TNT-Audio, I was given three magic names: Naim, Rega, Cyrus. Something clicked in my head. These names brought back memories of when, at the end of 1991, I bought the speakers that, at all costs, I wanted to base my system on: TDL Studio 0.5. At the first store I visited, they immediately made it clear to me that my modest amplifier, although good, would not be able to drive them; and so those same three magical names came up…
Choosing a CD player today
The Compact Disc is a format that is becoming extinct. Streaming is the mode of the moment; for a few euros a month, we have all the music (or almost all) we could ever imagine. Just connect your computer or cell phone to a good DAC and you have a convenient and inexpensive digital source. If you have a good CD collection, the ideal solution is to extract the tracks onto your computer, catalog them, and listen to them whenever you want thanks to a good DAC (which some modern amplifiers also have built in). So what is the point of spending money on a CD player today? For those who appreciate having a physical medium, the CD remains a source that can sound really good. Prices are very low, even though CDs are actually coming back into fashion and could become more expensive. But there’s more…
I still play vinyl – should I also play poly?
The HiFi section of this site is called I Still Play Vinyl. But “vinyls”, turntables, tonearms and cartridges have now reached such absurd prices that it has become uneconomical. Perhaps I should update the title (or add to it) with I Still Play Poly(carbonate).
For a long time, the Compact Disc, a format considered almost dead, experienced a decline in sales and consequently in prices, making optical discs a good deal again! And I remember well when people complained about the price of CDs! Now they are coming back into fashion and prices will surely rise again.
But am I even capable of appreciating the differences between various phono cartridges?
Here I go again. I had already written an article about the same excitement, on the wave of enthusiasm after the purchase of a new Grado Prestige Blue 3. I was delighted to be back listening to records with a Grado cartridge, not least because I love their philosophy of doing business and their history; their cartridges are still hand-assembled in a Brooklyn workshop using 50-70s instruments and watchmaker’s tools. The reality is that I came to resell the Blue 3 because, sadly, I just didn’t like the sound of it. Did I set it up wrong? But my Shure M97HE sounds great. Had something changed in my taste? Was my memory of a nice Grado sound linked to the use of the prestigious 8MZ stylus that I then stupidly damaged? Or am I unable to discern?
Liquid or solid music?
I have always been an advocate that digital, although very convenient for so many things, forces us to rush and enjoy the product or art form only superficially. I have always maintained on this blog that my insistence on using analog tools when I can is due to a need to rediscover other, more human rhythms from time to time. So putting on a vinyl record to listen to music allows for greater depth, a more complete enjoyment of the artwork (if only because it is impossible for us to jump from one track to another for example, or to extract a “playlist with a different order from how the artist conceived it). But buying new records is becoming very expensive, and when I think that in order to buy an album I would have to spend 2 or 3 months of subscription to a streaming service, even I start thinking. Is it worth it in 2023 to insist on analog? Especially if you are not sailing in gold?