Hifi magazines featuring Hifi World

 Nothing really lasts forever even if slices of it remain unchanged.

I've always been interested in sound and music ever since I was originally a little boy and one thing growing up in a household of Dad who was into electrical engineering was having access to his magazines.

He also liked reproduced music so from the early 1970's onwards I had a free run of his magazines that covered the then burgening interest in high fidelity stereophonic sound as like many we moved from a restrictive stereo radiogram, an all one wooden piece of furniture with stereo record player , radio and built in speakers to the exciting world of hifi seperates and speakers with real distance between left and right.

That, better quality seperates, with a turntable, stereo amplifier  and speakers later joined by radio and 8 track tape player allowed us to hear more of our favourite recordings but like most things you are interested in, seeing if you can do better comes in so he got magazines like Popular Hifi and Hifi News that reviewed the latest equipment and records.

They also reported on short lived developments such as quadraphonic sound in the home, Elcassette the jumbo sized mash up of cassette handling and open reel tape and the battle between DCC, the digital compact cassette and Sony's radical rival, the MiniDisc.

As time went buy I started to buy my own magazines and some of the old ones went and newer; more lively presented ones started.

One I loved from the very start beginning in early 1991 was Hifi World which was edited by Noel Keywood.

Unusually it did not just feature the latest and greatest new turntables, compact disc players and so on but did have features on older equipment comparing them with more recent models because not all that glistens is gold.

Coupled with this it did look at tubed (british term: valved) amplifiers which had been declared obsolete by the very early 1970's but had started to creep back in during the mid 1980's as people realized they tended to have a richer, more warmer sound.

That was the very opposite of early compact disc, I might add.

They also went back to where this Hifi thing began in the 1950's by launching kits based own bespoke designs offering the functions you wanted and higher quality per pound than mainstream mass produced equipment.

I bought and built a tubed power amplifier in 1994 from them that when assembled looked just like a shop bought model for a lot less than they went for.

They also were the first to do features on computer based audio with portable digital players for Mp3 and Lossless Flac files and "needledropping" -copying your records to files to play anywhere and "ripping" copying your own cds to play on the go.

That inspired me to get a series of Fiio portable players that offered excellent sound for the money and even the ability to hook up to the main hifi for playing High Defination better than cd quality downloads.

That was the September 2022 issue showing among other things a new turntable as records close to extinction in 1992 had bounced back in thirty years with considerable sales even among youngsters who grew up with cd only owning parents.

Sadly shortly after that issue came of the printing press, missing the chance for a official Goodbye Issue, it was forced to close as the publishing group went bankrupt having been seriously disrupted by covid as many sales came from airports, train stations and news stands even though in 2019 before all this crazy stuff started it was very profitable.

There were many memorable issues of this publication that I'll miss but one that was the August 2014 issue that previewed the all analogue sourced re-issue of the Beatles mono albums on vinyl, which were and still are acclaimed as the very model of how to do a vinyl re-issue series properly.

R.I.P Hifi World.