Old and New (2014.048)

Listening to music has changed in recent years, and not for the better. Whilst downloads have made music far easier to get hold of, it's come at a frankly unacceptable cost in terms of sound quality.

Poorly chosen "defaults" in the early days of MP3 players flattered their small storage with overly high catalogue sizes, all at the expense of sound quality. Bunging a cheap set of apparently-trendy white headphones into the box both ensured adoption and masked some of the horrors of the file compression.

Those of us who wanted the convenience of mass-portable music without the compromises in quality delved deep into menu settings to increase quality, and hang the disk space. Streaming music from online sources took a very long time to catch up, and have only recently (with Spotify's "extreme" quality setting) become usable for those who care how their sound sounds.

This is the electronic end of the hifi in the study. A Sonos Connect pulls music from a server in the garage and/or the internet. The Cambridge Audio box does digital to analogue conversion for the computers, and it's all amplified by a two-box Quad system that I inherited from my grandmother after she paid a little too much attention to a silver-tongued dealer.

It's probably a bit extreme for a room that's approximately 6 square metres. But music matters.