October 2025

A Stream Of New Hi-Fi Products To Enjoy
Plus a bit of reminiscing as extremely affordable audio offers good performance.
Editorial By Alan Sircom

  As we lean into the last months of 2025, hi-fi+ approaches two landmarks; our annual Awards issue and our 250th edition. The naysayers still claim the end of the audio business and printed media are only days away from imminent demise. We're still going 26 years and coming up for 250 issues later, and the steady stream of new audio products continue to amaze. Maybe those reports are greatly exaggerated!

It's easy to catastrophise and confuse 'change' with 'collapse'. No one would deny the audio world has changed greatly since 1999. But that change is more often than not for the better. Yes, the roadmap for CD-based sources looks to take the format through some very arid places. But, equally, we're seeing the blossoming of really great sounding streaming products at all levels.

The 'at all levels' part shouldn't be understated. We're seeing a flourishing of extremely affordable audio, offering good performance while still at low prices. However, we all tend to look to entry-level products, think back to when we were buying at that level and are myopically shocked at inflation in the audio world.

I paid a little over £300 for my first 'real' audio system back in the 1980s. I also paid a little over £300 for my first, albeit second-hand, car at around the same time.

A modern one-source audio system of similar performance today, made of the cheapest separates I could buy, would likely set me back closer to about £650. Also today, a modern equivalent to that rust-bucket Harvest Gold-coloured Mini would cost at least £1,000 in a similar state.

If we are staying with like for like, my Olympus OM-1n single-lens reflex camera cost me a little over £200 when I bought it in the early 1980s. The contemporary equivalent OM System OM-1 Mk II digital mirrorless camera costs £2,200.

Looking at those comparisons, things are better for the entry-level all round. Ignoring photography (where the entry-level today is a smartphone), that £650 system or £1,000 second-hand car is likely better made and performing, as well as more reliable and longer-lasting than its predecessor of 40+ years ago.

Back in the early 1980s, I was a production controller in a small-turned parts factory, producing little brass injectors for carburettors that went into British Leyland cars. We were producing them by the thousand using second-generation CNC automatic lathes built in the 1960s and 1970s, and producing them to the sort of tolerances that would be past 'unacceptable' and into 'dangerous' today. That was often the quality of mechanical and electronic components in the 1980s.

Nostalgia aside, many of those classic products are best left in the past.

Alan Sircom, Editor hi-fi+

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